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SONIA
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
BY
STEPHEN McKENNA
[Illustration: Logo]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
A VERY GALLANT LADY
"_The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart
of fools is in the house of mirth._"
ECCLESIASTES VII. 4
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES 11
II. THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN 59
III. BERTRAND OAKLEIGH 123
IV. SONIA DAINTON 187
V. LORING 229
VI. THE YEARS OF CARNIVAL 292
VII. THE FIVE DAYS 325
VIII. DEAD YESTERDAY 359
IX. THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHWOMAN 395
X. AMID THE BLAZE OF NOON 420
XI. WATCHING FOR THE DAWN 442
XII. UNBORN TO-MORROW 462
SONIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
SONIA
CHAPTER I
THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES
"I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves, and
my shears,
All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
Only I cut on the timber, only I carved on the stone:
'After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known!'"
RUDYARD KIPLING, "The Palace."
At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at
Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic.
When I made his acquaintance some thirty years later he had
satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of
Kingship. At his death, three months ago, I understand that his notes on
the precursors of Charlemagne were almost as complete as he desired. "It
is so difficult to know where to start, Mr. Oakleigh," he used to say,
as I picked my steps through the litter of notebooks that cumbered his
tables, chairs and floor.
_Magnis componere parva._ I am sensible of a like difficulty in
attempting to sketch for the benefit of an eight-weeks-old godson the
outlines of a world that was clattering into ruins during the twelve
months anterior to his birth. Even were I desirous of writing a social
history of England for the last thirty years, I should be placing myself
in competition with men more able and better equipped than I am to
describe the politics, the diplomacy, the economics, the art and the
social habits of the past generation. It is wiser to attempt nothing so
comprehensive, but to limit myself to those facets of English life which
I have been compelled--_nolens volens_--to study. Others will come after
me to tell the story in its entirety; the utmost I attempt to record is
circumscribed, personal reminiscence.
If, therefore, this book ever find favour in the eyes for which it was
written, it will be because I have set narrow limits to my task and
confined myself resolutely to those limits. For thirty years I have
lived among what the world has agreed loosely to call "the Governing
Classes." The title may already be obsolescent; sentence of proscription
may, as I write, have been passed on those who bear it. At the lowest
computation those classes will soon have changed beyond recognition in
personnel, function, power and philosophy. This book may then perhaps
have something of historical value in portraying a group of men and
women who were at the same time my personal friends and representative
of those Governing Classes in politics, journalism, commerce and
society. I have drawn them as I saw them, without attempting to select
or label predominant types. And if there be blank spaces on my canvas,
it is to be remembered that I only set out to paint that social group
with which I happened to be brought in contact.
Charles Templeton's difficulty in determining his initial date is in
smaller degree my difficulty. I could give long introductory accounts of
David O'Rane's wanderings before he reached England, or of Jim Loring's
boyhood in Scotland, or the early phases of the Dainton fortunes. To do
so, however, would involve a sacrifice of the unities of time and place;
and when the work was done I should be left with the feeling that it
would have been better done at first hand by O'Rane himself, or Lady
Loring, or Sir Roger Dainton. It is equally difficult to know where the
final line is to be drawn. Nearly a year has already passed since the
events recorded in the last chapter, yet that same chapter brings no
sort of finality to the career of O'Rane, and, should another hand care
to use them, the materials for another volume are rapidly accumulating.
I place my first chapter in the late summer of 1898, my last in August
1915. Neither date has been arbitrarily chosen.
I
In 1898 the month of September found me a guest of Roger Dainton at
Crowley Court in the County of Hampshire.
In the guide-books the house is described as a "stately Elizabethan
mansion," but at the time of which I am writing it was still a labyrinth
of drainage cuttings and a maze of scaffolding and ladders. Suddenly
enriched by the early purchase of tied-houses, the Daintons had that
year moved five miles away from Melton town, school and brewery. Even in
those early days I suppose Mrs. Dainton was not without social
aspirations, and when her husband was elected Unionist member for the
Melton Division of Hampshire, she seized the opportunity of moving at
one step into a house where her position was unassailable and away from
a source of income that was ever her secret embarrassment.
Roger Dainton, affluent, careless and indolent, accepted the changed
life with placid resignation. The syndicate shoot was left behind with
the humdrum Melton Club and the infinitely small society that clustered
in the precincts of the cathedral. Mrs. Dainton, big, bustling and
indefatigably capable, fought her way door by door into South Hampshire
society, while her husband shot statedly with Lord Pebbleridge at
Bishop's Cross, yawned through the long mornings on the Bench, and, when
Parliament was not sitting, lounged through his grounds in a shooting
jacket with perennially torn pocket, his teeth gripping a black,
gurgling briar that defied Mrs. Dainton's utmost efforts to smarten his
appearance.
The atmosphere of the rambling old house was well suited to schoolboy
holidays, for we rose and retired when we pleased, ate continuously, and
were never required to dress for dinner. The so-called library,
admirably adapted to stump cricket on wet days, contained nothing more
arid than "The Sportsman," "Country Life," and bound volumes of "The
Badminton Magazine," while Mrs. Dainton's spasmodic efforts to discuss
the contents of her last Mudie box met with prompt and effective
discouragement. The society, in a word, was healthily barbarian, from
our host, aged forty-three, to his over-indulged only daughter, Sonia,
aged eleven. Since the days when Tom Dainton and I were fellow-fags, it
had been part of my annual programme to say good-bye to my mother and
sister a week before the opening of the Melton term, cross from Kingston
to Holyhead, call on Bertrand Oakleigh, my guardian, in London, and
proceed to Crowley Court for the last week of the summer holidays. It
was an unwritten law of our meetings that none but true Meltonians
should be invited, and, though the party grew gradually in size, the
rule was never relaxed.
In 1898 six of us sat down to dinner with our host and hostess on the
first night of our visit. Sutcliffe, the captain of the school, sat on
Mrs. Dainton's right hand--a small-boned, spectacled boy with upstanding
red hair and beak-shaped nose, who was soon to be buried in Cambridge
with a Trinity Fellowship rolled against the mouth of the tomb. On the
other side sat Jim Loring, the Head of Matheson's, as ever not more than
half awake, his sleepy grey eyes and loosely-knit big frame testifying
that for years past he had overgrown his strength and would require some
years more of untroubled leisure before he could overcome his natural
lethargy. He had reached the school as "Loring," and though an uncle had
died in the interval and his father was now the Marquess Loring, no one
troubled to remember that he was in consequence Earl of Chepstow,--or
indeed anything but "old Jim Loring,"--imperturbable, dreamy, detached
and humourous, with quaint mediaeval ideals and a worldly knowledge
somewhat in advance of his years. To me he occasionally unbent, but the
rest of the microcosm--his parents and masters included--found him as
enigmatic and unenthusiastic as he was placid and good-looking. "There
is nothing he cannot or will do"--as Villiers, the master of the Under
Sixth, had written in momentary exasperation some terms before.
At the other end of the table I sat on one side of Dainton with
Draycott, the house captain of football, opposite me--a blue-eyed,
fair-haired boy with a confounding knowledge of early Italian painting
and a remarkable pride in his personal appearance. The two remaining
chairs were occupied by Tom and Sam Dainton. Tom was at this time of
Herculean build, with arms and shoulders of a giant--a taciturn boy with
a deep voice, and no idea in his head apart from cricket, of which he
was now captain. He and I had stumbled into the friendship of
propinquity, and there had never been any reason for dropping it, though
I cannot flatter myself he found my company more enlivening than I found
his. On the opposite side of the table sat Sam, as yet a Meltonian only
in embryo, though we expected him to be of the elect in a week's time.
The one member of the family not present was Sonia, the only daughter,
who, in consideration of her eleventh birthday, had been allowed to stay
up till a quarter to eight, but no later. I suppose the child got her
looks from her mother, though by this time Mrs. Dainton was verging on
stoutness, with a mottled skin and hair beginning to seem dry and
lustreless. Sonia, with her velvety brown eyes, her white skin and her
dark hair certainly owed nothing to her father, who was one of the most
commonplace men I have ever met, whether in mind or appearance. Of
medium height, with a weatherbeaten face and mouse-coloured hair, he was
growing fleshy--with that uneven distribution of flesh that assails so
many men of his age-and suggesting to an observer that eating and
exercise were now moving in inverse ratio. I liked him then--as I like
him still--but in looking back over seventeen years I find my regard
mingled with a certain pathos; he was so ineffectual, so immature and of
so uncritical a mind: above all, he was so grateful to anyone who would
be polite to him in his own house.
The Entrance Examination at Melton took place the day before term, and
in the afternoon Mrs. Dainton suggested that some of us should drive
over to the school, inquire how Sam had fared and bring him back to
Crowley Court for dinner. As the others were playing tennis, Sonia and
I climbed into the high four-wheeled dogcart and were slowly driven by
her father up the five-mile hill that separated us from the town.
Melton is one of those places that never change. In a hundred years'
time I have no doubt it will present the same appearance of warm, grey,
placid beauty as on that September afternoon, when we emerged from the
Forest to find the school standing out against the setting sun like a
group of temples on a modern Acropolis. Leaving the dogcart at the
"Raven," we covered the last half mile on foot, and, while Dainton
called on the Head, I took Sonia to Big Gateway and led her on a tour of
inspection round the school. After seventeen years and for all its
familiarity I can recall the beauty of the scene in its unwonted holiday
desolation. Standing in the Gateway with our faces to the north, we had
College to our right and the Head's house to our left; on the eastern,
western and northern sides of the Great Court lay the nine
boarding-houses, and through the middle of Matheson's, in line with Big
Gateway, ran the Norman tunnel leading to Cloisters, Chapel and Great
School.
It was Sonia's first opportunity of seeing over Melton, and she begged
me to miss nothing. We crossed the worn flags of Great Court to the
waterless fountain in the middle, lingered to admire the Virginia
creeper swathing the crumbling grey walls as a mantle of scarlet silk,
and passed through the iron-studded oak door of Matheson's. She
inspected our row of studies and looked out through the closely barred
windows to the practice ground of Little End, where the groundman and
two assistants were erecting goal posts. For a while we wandered round
Hall examining the carved tables and forms, the giant chimney-piece from
which new boys had to sing their melancholy songs on the first Saturday
of term, the great silver shields that the house had held in unbroken
tenure for nine years, and the consciously muscular Cup Team groups that
adorned the walls in two lines above the lockers.
Leaving Matheson's we strolled through Cloisters, and I pointed out the
bachelor masters' quarters on one side and on the other the famous
"Fighting Green," in which no fights had taken place within human
memory. We put our heads inside Chapel, crossed into Great School and
walked its length to the dais where stood Ockley's Chair, Bishop Adam's
Birch Table and the carved seats of the Monitorial Council running in a
half-circle like the places of the priests in the Theatre of Dionysus. I
was still descanting on the dignity of that same Council, of which I had
lately become a member, when a bell rang faintly in the distance, and we
had to retrace our steps to meet the Entrance Examination candidates,
who were pouring out of School Library and scattering in search of their
anxious parents or guardians.
Sam Dainton headed the stream of inky-fingered twelve-year-olds, only
pausing in his precipitant course down School Steps to roll his
examination paper into a hard ball and thrust it inside the collar of a
smaller, unknown and--so far as I could see--entirely inoffensive
fellow-candidate.
"How did you get on?" asked Sonia.
"Oh, I dunno," Sam answered modestly; and then to me, "I say, Oakleigh,
who were Abana and Pharpar?"
I made some discreet reference to the rivers of Damascus.
"Golly!" he moaned, with a face of woe. "I said they were the jewels in
the breastplate of the High Priest. Never mind. Can't be helped. The
chap in front of me said they were Eli's two sons, but that's rot, 'cos
_they_ were Gog and Magog. I got _that_ right. Did you come over alone?"
"Your father's here," I said. "He's bribing Burgess not to read your
papers. We'd better get back to Big Gateway."
We were half-way across Great Court when one of the Head's library
windows opened, and Burgess, with his quaint, mannered courtesy, asked
permission to have a word with me if I could spare him the time. I
entered what was then, and probably is still, the untidiest room in
England. Since the death of his wife ten years before, Burgess had
ruled, or been ruled, with the aid of a capable housekeeper whose tenure
of office depended on her undertaking never to touch a book or paper in
the gloomy, low-ceilinged library. From that bargain she can never have
departed. Overflowing the shelves and tables, piled up in the embrasures
of the windows, littered carelessly in fireplace or wastepaper basket,
lay ten years' accumulation of reports, complaints, presentation copies,
text-books, magazines and daily papers.
"Some day it must all be swept and garnished, laddie," he would say when
the last of twelve unsmokable pipes had disappeared behind the coal box.
"But I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world....
Never take to smoking, laddie; it's a vile, unclean practice." And
pending the day when the Augean stable was to be cleansed, he would walk
down to Grantham's, the big Melton bookseller, cram the pockets of his
cassock with new books, pick his way slowly back to the school, reading
as rapidly as his tobacco-stained forefinger could hack the pages, and
drop the newest acquisition in the handiest corner of the dusty, dim
library.
"Laddie, there is a stranger within our gates, seeking admittance. He
will not be denied."
Burgess's meaning was seldom to be grasped in his first or second
sentence. I waited while he fumbled for a pipe in the pocket of the old
silk cassock, without which none of us had ever seen him. By 1898, at
the age of five-and-fifty, his physical appearance had run through the
gamut of its changes and become fixed. When last we met, seventeen years
later, his body was no more thin or bent, his face no more cadaverous,
his brown eyes no more melancholy, his voice no more tired and his long
white hair no whit less thick than on that September afternoon. And thus
he will remain till a puff of wind stronger than the generality blows
away the ascetic, wasted frame, and the gentle, sing-song voice is heard
no more.
"Where is the divinity that doth hedge a king about?" he demanded of
Dainton, or me, or the world at large. "I sat in this, my Holy Place,
when a serving-man told me that one stood without and would have speech
with me. I bade him begone. 'He insists,' said my serving-man." Burgess
sighed and gently shrugged his shoulders. "The sons of Zeruiah are too
hard for me. I bade him enter, and there came to me a lad no bigger than
a man's hand. 'Thy name and business, laddie?' I asked. He told me he
was known to men as 'David O'Rane,' a wanderer for the first time
setting foot in the Promised Land. His speech was the speech of men in
far places, who go down to the sea in ships and behold the wonders of
the Lord. Shortly he bade me 'See here,' and stated that he proposed to
come to my old school anyway, and that was the way _he_ regarded the
proposition."
"An American, sir?" I asked.
"An Irishman from thine own Isle of Unrest, laddie," Burgess answered.
"Journeying from Dan to Beersheba, and pricking through America on his
way."
He paused, and Dainton asked what had happened next.
"He is fifteen years of age--a year too old by the rules. My Shibboleths
were demanded of the young men at nine-thirty this morning; by the rules
he is half a day too late. Rules, the laddie told me, were for ordinary
men at ordinary times. 'I, at least,' I said, 'am an ordinary man.' And
he smiled and held his peace. 'Who will rid me of this proud scholar?' I
asked, and he answered not a word. I threw him books, and he translated
them--Homer and Thucydides and the dark places of Theocritus. 'Thou art
too old, laddie,' I told him, 'for me to take thee in.' He walked to the
door and I asked him whither he went. 'To a decent school,' he made
answer. 'No decent school will take Melton's rejections,' I told him.
'Then let them share Melton's shame,' he rejoined. I bade him tarry and
tell me of his wanderings. He sits within."
Burgess sighed and relit his pipe. I know few men who smoke more
matches.
"Are you admitting him, sir?" I asked.
"The fatherless child is in God's keeping," answered Burgess. He turned
to Dainton and murmured, "You recall the Liberator?"
Dainton's eyebrows moved up in quick surprise. "Oh, poor boy!" he
ejaculated. It was some while before I was to understand the allusion or
the comment, and I had little time now to speculate, as Burgess turned
to address me.
"Laddie, he will be in Mr. Matheson's house, and will sit at the feet of
Mr. Villiers in the Under Sixth. Were I a just man, I would place him
in the Sixth, but I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this
world. He must learn humility of spirit. He must fag--like Dainton
minor; and be flogged like Dainton minor if he break our foolish rules.
He must wait for a study and suffer on the altar of sport in all
weathers, as a hundred thousand have done before him. I have communed
secretly with thee, laddie, and, when thou goest hence to thine own
place, lo! it will be forgotten as a dream that is past."
I bowed in acquiescence.
"Forget not this one thing," he added. "He is a stranger within our
gates, having neither kith nor kin. Much will he teach us; somewhat,
maybe, can we teach him. Make his path smooth, laddie."
"I'll do my best, sir," I promised. "Where's he going to be till term
begins?"
"The Lord will provide," answered Burgess absently. It was his
invariable formula when at a loss for a more suitable reply.
Dainton rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"Look here, Dr. Burgess," he suggested. "Why shouldn't I take charge of
him for a night and a day?"
Burgess eyed him thoughtfully.
"A night and a day are twenty-four hours," he said.
"We shall be nine to one," answered Dainton reassuringly.
"You have not seen him yet."
Burgess rose from his chair and rang the bell. A moment later the door
opened, and O'Rane entered the library. He was a boy of medium height
with black hair parted in the middle, after the American fashion,
unusually large black eyes and bronzed face and hands. Though the black
eyes sometimes lost their dreaminess and became charged with sudden
passion, though the sunken cheeks and sharply outlined bones of the face
gave him something of a starving animal's desperation, the reality was
considerably less formidable than I had imagined from Burgess's
description. In manner he was a curious mixture of the old and new. On
being introduced, he drew himself up and clicked his heels, and in
speaking he showed a tendency to gesticulate; then without warning his
voice would take on a Western drawl, and unexpected transatlanticisms
would crop up in his speech.
On learning Dainton's proposal he bowed and accepted with a guarded
politeness. We made our way into Great Court, found Sonia and Sam, and
set out for the "Raven." On reaching home I mentioned to Loring that we
had a new boy requiring a certain amount of special consideration; we
span a coin, and Loring took O'Rane for a fag, while Sam was allotted to
me. The stranger within our gates said little that night or next
morning, though all of us tried, one after another, to engage him in
conversation. The ways of the house seemed unfamiliar to him, and he
wandered round thoughtfully with his hands in his pockets, rather
ostentatiously avoiding any advances.
The next evening, after an early dinner, the racing omnibus was brought
round to the door. Tom Dainton, looking like a prize-fighter with his
bony, red face and vast double-breasted overcoat, clambered on to the
box-seat; Loring, recumbent in an arm-chair till the last possible
moment, dragged his sleepy, long body upright and climbed, with a drowsy
protest, to Tom's side; Sutcliffe, with his shock of red hair bared to
the night and his spectacles gleaming in the light of the lamps, hurried
the immaculate and aesthetic Draycott into place and scrambled up behind
him. Sam, overcome with sudden timidity and a sense that the familiar
was fading past recall, kissed his mother and mounted shyly, indicating
a vacant seat for O'Rane. I stayed behind to check the luggage, unearth
the coach-horn and wave good-bye, then leapt on the back step and gave
the signal for departure.
As we started down the drive at a canter, our hosts stood silhouetted
against the lights of the hall. Dainton removed one hand from the torn
pocket of the old shooting-jacket and waved farewell; Mrs. Dainton bowed
majestically; Sonia, bare-legged and sandalled, with a gold bracelet
round one ankle and the face of a Sistine Madonna, raised both hands to
her lips and blew a cloud of tempestuous kisses.
Loring turned encouragingly to Sam.
"My lad, I wouldn't be in your shoes for a thousand pounds this coming
year."
Sam smiled without conviction.
"The tumbril passed rapidly down the Rue St. Honoré," Loring went on,
"amid the jeers of the populace. This day's victims included the younger
Dainton and the _emigré_ O'Rane. Both preserved an attitude of stoical
indifference till they came in sight of the Place de la Revolution, when
Dainton broke down and wept piteously...."
"I didn't," said Sam indignantly.
Loring laughed to himself.
"Cheer up, Sambo," he said. "You're not really to be pitied. O'Rane's
going to be my fag."
"Poor brute," said Draycott.
"Who? O'Rane or me?"
"O'Rane, of course."
Loring smiled round the company, turned in his seat and composed himself
for slumber. O'Rane looked with interest and a shade of defiance from
one face to another.
II
The first few days of the school year were always a busy time for the
seniors. Matheson, a mild-eyed mathematician in Holy Orders, with a
family defying even his powers of enumeration, observed the wholesome
principle of leaving the monitors to take care of his house--a task
which, I can say after six years' experience, one generation after
another performed with efficiency, justice and a sense of
responsibility. His official duties, so far as we could see, were
confined to carving the joints at luncheon, giving leave-out, wandering
in a transient, embarrassed fashion round Hall when the monitors were
taking prep., and scrawling his endorsement of his colleagues'
scurrility and invective at the foot of the monthly reports.
When not in form nor engaged in one or other of these functions, he
retired to a faded study and struggled with the weekly acrostic in
"Vanity Fair." Once each season, when the Cup Team had successfully
challenged all comers for possession of the shield, Matheson would
emerge dazedly from the half-light, summon the house to a supper in
Hall, and after a prodigal distribution of steak-and-kidney pie, ham,
tongue, cold fowl, brawn, jelly, meringues, jam roll, lemonade and
diluted claret-cup, hold forth with shining eyes and throbbing voice on
the glories of British Sport and the umbilical connection between the
playing fields of Eton and the battle of Waterloo. It was always a
_tour-de-force_ of simple-minded sincerity; he spoke as one whose heart
was stirred to its depths by the growing glories of his house. And we
cheered encouragingly and thought the better of him for it.
There was little opportunity of making O'Rane's path smooth in the early
days. At Loring's orders and in accordance with the immemorial
"Substance and Shadow" institution, O'Rane was set at the feet of a
senior fag, by name Mayhew, with instructions to learn all that was to
be learned during his days of sanctuary. For a fortnight no master could
send him to Detention School nor give him lines; he could dodge every
practice game on Little End, wear button boots, break bounds, refuse to
fag, cut roll-call, or talk in prep. with complete physical impunity. At
the end of the second week he had theoretically tasted of the Tree of
Knowledge. Ignorance of rules could no longer be pleaded in extenuation
of their breach, and justice went untempered by mercy, save in that no
boy could be thrashed twice in ten days without written authorization
from his housemaster or the Head.
On the last evening of grace I was seated in Loring's study after prep.
when Mayhew came in with the cocoa saucepan and cups.
"Does O'Rane know the rules now?" Loring asked. "I haven't seen him on
Little End so far."
"I think I've told him everything," Mayhew answered.
"Has he got his footer change yet?"
Mayhew hesitated in some embarrassment.
"He hadn't the last time I talked to him about it."
"He must look sharp," said Loring. "Four times next week, or--he knows
the penalty."
Mayhew nodded, and the subject was dropped for a week. Then I was
summoned to a Monitors' Meeting. Loring, as ever, lay full length on the
floor in front of his fire, Tom Dainton sprawled in the arm-chair,
little Draycott swung his legs in their carefully creased trousers from
one corner of the table, and I occupied the only vacant seat in the
window.
"About this fellow O'Rane," yawned Loring from the hearthrug. "He's cut
Little End all this week, so I propose to have him up and inquire the
reason. If none's forthcoming, he must die the death. All agreed?"
He dragged himself to his feet, picked his cane from the wastepaper
basket and dealt two echoing blows to the lower panels of the door. The
studies in Matheson's were in a line, opening out of the long Hall where
the juniors lived and worked and ragged and had their lockers. Two kicks
on a study door meant that the monitor inside required a fag, and it was
the business of the junior in Hall at that moment--"lag of Hall," as he
was called--to eliminate time and space in answering the summons. Two
blows of a cane indicated a potential execution. A sudden silence
descended on Hall; two light feet jumped over a form, there was a
hurried knocking, and a breathless, scared junior thrust his head in at
the door.
"Send O'Rane here."
Through the hushed Hall a sigh of relief went up from the forty odd boys
who were _not_ O'Rane. The name was shouted by one after another, like
the summons of a witness in Court. "O'Rane! O'Rane! Spitfire, you're
wanted! What's it for, Spitfire? Hurry up, they're muck sick if you keep
'em waiting!" Mayhew's voice sympathetically murmured, "Bad luck, old
man!" Then there came a second knock at the door.
Loring stood with his back to the fire, bending his cane into an arc
round one knee.
"Have you been down to Little End this week?" he asked.
"No."
"You know you have to go four times a week?"
"Yes."
"Have you leave off from Matheson?"
"No."
"Do you wish to appeal?"
Within living memory no boy in Matheson's had ever exercised his right
of appeal--a tribute, I hope, to the substantial justice of succeeding
generations of monitors. O'Rane looked round at the four of us with a
mixture of sullenness and timidity in his expressive black eyes.
"Guess I'm up against some blamed rule?" he hazarded.
Loring nodded.
"Then there's mighty little use in plaguing old man Matheson."
Loring threw his cane over to Draycott, the captain of football. "Clear
Hall," he said to O'Rane.
On receipt of the order there was a scuffling of feet as forty boys
jumped up from tables, forms and window-seats. "Clear Hall" was taken up
as the marching refrain, and, as the monitors filed in by one door, the
last stragglers hurried out by the other, and eighty critical,
experienced ears were expectantly strained to appraise the artistry of
Draycott's execution. Loring, who was equally averse from thrashing a
boy or being present when another carried out the sentence, crossed the
room and gazed out of the window.
It was soon over. O'Rane hurried out of Hall, breathing quickly and with
rather a flushed face. As he opened the door, interested voices
chorused, "Bad luck, Spitfire!" "Who did it?" "I say, you got it pretty
tight, Spitfire!" "Was it Draycott? He's not bad for a beginner." We
filed back to the study; the date, offence and victim's name were
entered in the Black Book and initialled by Draycott, and we dispersed
to our own quarters.
A week later Loring ambled into my study with the remark that O'Rane had
still failed to put in an appearance on Little End.
"I don't know what's the matter with him," he said. "If he thinks by
just being obstinate...." He left the sentence unfinished. All his life
Loring had the makings of a martinet, and when roused from his
constitutional lethargy could himself be as obstinate as most people.
"He's laying up trouble for his little self when the week's out, if he
isn't careful."
"What sort of a fag is he?" I asked.
"Oh, not bad. Always looks as if he'd like to throw the boots at my head
instead of taking 'em to the boot-room. That's just his fun, though--the
playful way of the vengeful Celt. The only thing I care about is that he
takes them there."
"I expect he'll shake down in time," I said.
Loring shrugged his shoulders and yawned. "He's pretty generally barred
in Hall. Never speaks to anyone, and, if anyone speaks to him, it
usually ends in a scrap. He's got the temper of the very devil. The best
thing that could happen to him would be if twenty of them sat on his
head and ragged him scientifically, just to show him he's not God
Almighty's elder brother, even if he _did_ get into the Under Sixth
straight away."
The end of the week showed no improvement, and O'Rane was once more had
up and thrashed. A fortnight later the procedure was faithfully
repeated. It was a Saturday night, and when execution had been done, I
stayed behind in Loring's study after Draycott and Dainton had left us.
There was no prep., and the juniors were reading, fighting, singing, and
roasting chestnuts till prayer-time.
"You know I'm about sick of this," remarked Loring, meditatively
stirring the fire with the richly carved leg of a chair purloined from
Draycott's study.
"O'Rane?" I asked.
"Yes; Dainton pretty well cut him in two to-night. It's like hitting a
girl."
"He's a tough little beast," I remarked for want of something better to
say.
"He's a pig-headed little devil," Loring rejoined irritably. "What does
he think he gains by it? Does he imagine we shall get tired of it in
time?"
"Don't ask me," I said.
He rolled over on one side and banged the door with the chair-leg.
"Send O'Rane here," he said, when a fag answered the summons, and to me
as the door closed, "I propose to ask _him_."
O'Rane, when he appeared, looked white and tired, but there was a
sullen, smouldering fire in his dark eyes, and his under-lip was thrust
truculently forward. Silently he put the saucepan on the fire, produced
cocoa and a cake from one of the cupboards and set about opening a fresh
tin of condensed milk.
"Is there anything else you want?" he asked, when the task was finished.
"Yes; I should like a moment's conversation with you. Take the
arm-chair."
Silently the order was obeyed. As I looked at the thin wrists and
ankles, the slight frame made the slighter by the loose American-cut
trousers, I appreciated the justice of Loring's remark about 'hitting a
girl.'
"What have I done _now_?" he asked wearily.
Loring propped his back against the wall.
"Look here, young man, does it amuse you to be thrashed once in ten
days?"
O'Rane's eyes burned with defiance.
"Guess I can hold out as long as you."
"That wasn't my question," said Loring. "Does it ...?"
"D'you think it amuses anyone to be thrashed by Dainton?"
"No. And it doesn't amuse Dainton to thrash you, or the rest of us to
have to look on. I don't know whether you think you'll tire us out. If
you do, it's only fair to warn you that as long as I am head of this
house I propose to see that the rules are obeyed."
O'Rane rose from his chair as though the interview were ending.
"Guess I've stuck out worse than this in my time," he observed.
Loring waved him back to his chair. "What's the difficulty?" he
demanded. "Why won't you play footer like everybody else?"
O'Rane snorted contemptuously.
"I came here to be educated, not to kick a dime ball about."
We were in the days prior to "Stalky and Co."; "The Islanders" lay in
the womb of time; never before had I heard public-school sport
criticized, at any rate inside a public school. Loring expounded the
approved defence of games: their benefit to health, the fostering of a
communal spirit, good temper in defeat, moderation in triumph. For a man
who had abandoned Big Side on the day when attendance there ceased to be
compulsory for him, the exposition was astonishingly eloquent.
"Guess I didn't come here for that," was all O'Rane would answer.
"Afraid you'll find it's one of the incidentals," Loring rejoined. "I've
been through it, Oakleigh's been through it, we've all been through it.
It's part of the discipline of the place--like fagging. You don't refuse
to do that."
"I'd cleaned a saucepan or two before I came here. 'Sides, that doesn't
take time like footling away an afternoon on Little End."
Loring sat with his chin on his knees, perpending his next words. I took
occasion to ask how O'Rane spent his precious afternoons.
"In the library mostly. Sometimes in the town hall. Old man Burgess gave
me leave."
"What in the name of fortune d'you find to do there?" I asked.
"It's the only place hereabouts where they keep continental papers. I've
got some leeway to make up."
We sat in silence till the saucepan boiled, and Loring started handing
round the cocoa.
"Then we're to have a repetition of this business every ten days till
you get into the Sixth? Tell me--frankly--are you enjoying yourself
here?"
"Reckon I didn't come here to enjoy myself."
Loring sighed impatiently.
"Do, for the Lord's sake, stick to the question," he said.
O'Rane's lips curled in a sneer that was almost audible before he spoke.
"I'm having a real bully time in a nickle-plated public school with the
English aristocracy crawling round like ants on a side-walk." The words
poured out in a single breath. "Guess I can't help enjoying myself."
"D'you get on well with the other fellows?"
"Would you get on well in the middle of a flock of sheep?"
Loring shook his head with a gesture of despair.
"You know, you're not giving yourself a fair chance," he told him.
"What's the point of going through life with your hand against every
man?"
"And every man's hand against me."
"I dare say. Whose fault is it, you silly ass?"
O'Rane laughed ironically.
"Mine without a doubt."
Loring tried a fresh cast.
"How d'you get on with Villiers?" he asked.
"Like oil and water. He sees fit to make fun of me before the form--says
I can't talk English because I say 'grass' and not 'grarse' like the
sheep. If I can't talk English, I can't--but I can talk to him in
Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Gaelic and Magyar. Then he
reports me to the Head."
I did my best not to laugh, but his palpable sense of injustice was
sufficiently sincere to be ludicrous.
"I now understand why you go by the name of Spitfire," Loring remarked.
"The dago that first called me that has a broken thumb to remember it
by."
At this moment the prayer-bell began to ring, and O'Rane jumped up from
his chair. As I strolled in to prayers, Loring called down grievous
curses on the race to which O'Rane and I belonged.
"What are we going to do with him, George?" he demanded. "This is mere
cruelty to children."
The answer came after call-over. O'Rane passed us at the foot of the
stairs on his way to Middle Dormitory. There was the ghost of a smile on
his lips as he bade us good-night.
"Good-night, O'Rane," I responded.
"We shall meet in ten days' time."
Loring linked arms with me and entered Draycott's study.
"The fellow's mad, you know," he decided.
III
To give O'Rane his due, for nine days out of ten--or, in less diplomatic
language, between thrashings--he caused us singularly little trouble.
When Loring, who as a Catholic was excused Early Chapel, hurried through
Hall on his way to Mass at St. Peter's, he would find O'Rane recumbent
on a form in front of the fire, peacefully reading till first Roll Call.
In the afternoon, when I came back from a walk, he would have changed
his position, and I could be sure of finding him curled up in a
window-seat with the line of his thin shoulder-blades clearly showing
through his coat. As a fag Loring reported him efficient, punctual and
tolerably obliging, though their conversation seldom matured into
anything more than question and answer. The _modus vivendi_ was
uncomfortable, but no compromise seemed possible without a surrender of
principle.
I believe Matheson descended from Olympus on one occasion and told
O'Rane that such slackness in an Under-Sixth-form boy was a deplorable
example to the other juniors. The irresistible reply was, of course,
that leisure could be purchased at a price, and, as no one else seemed
anxious to come into avoidable conflict with authority, the example
could hardly be called effectively corrupting. Matheson rubbed his chin
and retired to think it over; O'Rane returned, sardonically smiling, to
his book.
With the rest of Hall his relations at this time were frankly hostile.
Mayhew, who was too good-natured and buoyant ever to have an enemy, and
Sam Dainton, whose salt he had eaten, were able to preserve a show of
intimacy; between them they induced him to discontinue parting his hair
in the middle, and on one Leave-out Day to walk over for luncheon at
Crowley Court. Almost everyone else regarded him with dislike tempered
by a certain discreet fear. Conversations were conducted for his benefit
in approved American dialect; knots of boys, too numerous for one man to
tackle, gathered round and poured opprobrium on him when he cut the
first round of the Cup Ties. Beyond possibility of doubt he was shown
that the one unforgivable sin was "Side," and that he was prone to
commit that sin not infrequently. More, he transgressed in unfamiliar
ways. It was no ordinary question of wearing exceptional clothes,
adopting a lordliness of speech, or cultivating an _impressement_ of
manner; he frankly snubbed the Hall veterans like Sinclair, who was in
the Team, professed contemptuous indifference to the prestige or welfare
of the house, and on at least one occasion strolled unconcernedly into
the Head's library after Sunday Chapel, thereby ranking himself with the
highest in the land. Theoretically Burgess was at home on Sunday
evenings to anyone who cared to drop in for a talk; in practice the
Sixth, and the Sixth only, conceived themselves capable of appreciating
him or worthy of the privilege.
I had no idea that one boy could disgruntle a house so completely. Had
his fellows been content to leave him entirely alone, their path and his
would have been appreciably smoother; passive disapprobation, however,
is a sterile policy for a boy to adopt, and the outspoken asides and
collective imitations continued until O'Rane put himself beyond the pale
of civilization by his quarrel with Sinclair.
The material for a breach had been accumulating for some time. Sinclair,
an old "Colour" and the head of the previous season's bowling averages,
represented tradition and the established order. He was a thick-set,
bull-necked and slightly bandy-legged boy of sixteen with a complete
inability to learn anything that had ever found its way into a book. For
five terms he had resisted every effort of his form-master, Bracebridge,
to lever him out of the Remove and on the eve of superannuation was
still ranking as a junior, the object of veneration to new boys, of
sympathy to those who were promoted over his head and of inarticulate
dissatisfaction to himself. Something was wrong with a system that left
him in Hall--the school slow bowler, still technically liable to be
fagged. Something was wrong, and more was required to set it right than
the veneration of new boys. And then there came a new boy who boasted he
had never seen cricket played and never wanted to; who cut football
practice and absented himself from Cup Ties; whose lashing tongue and
the blasphemous resources of a dozen languages made short work of
exhortations and protests and who seemingly came to Melton with no other
object than a desire to revile every institution of public-school life.
It was beneath Sinclair's dignity to hover on O'Rane's flank and whistle
"Yankee Doodle," but he made himself the rallying point for all sane
arbiters of good taste, and indulged in immeasurable silent disapproval.
One Saturday night I was having cocoa in Draycott's study--an æsthetic
room with grey paper and a large number of Meissonier artist's-proofs.
For bravado--or because Matheson seldom visited a monitor's study--one
shelf of his bookcase was filled with the "Yellow Book," another with
Ibsen's plays, and a third with the poetry of Swinburne. My host,
chiefly memorable to me in those days by reason of his violet silk
socks, was dispensing hospitality, when Loring drifted sleepily in and
demanded to partake of the feast.
"You must bring your own cup or have a dirty one," said Draycott,
inspecting his cupboard shelves.
"Bang on the door and get one washed," Loring recommended, throwing
himself on to the rug in front of the fire.
"It's no good. All the fags are over in Matheson's side, getting Leave
Out for Wednesday."
"Well, bang and go on banging. They must come back _some_ time."
Draycott kicked the door and waited. The only fags in Hall at the time
were Sinclair, whose leave had been stopped for the rest of the term,
and O'Rane, who was going over to Crowley Court. Sam Dainton had
undertaken to get leave for both. The law and custom of the constitution
were thrown into conflict, for, while custom decreed that a "school
Colour" was never fagged, in the eyes of the law Sinclair was
technically "lag of Hall."
"Fag wanted," Sinclair murmured, hardly looking up from his imposition.
O'Rane, who had entered for the Shelton Greek verse prize and was
engaged in making his fair copy, glanced casually round the room.
"_I_'m not lag," he observed.
At the sound of voices Draycott repeated his summons.
"I'm blowed if _I_ go," said Sinclair. Then, as O'Rane sat bent over his
copy of verses, "Go on, will you?"
"Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed
Murmured like a noontide bee,
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Would'st thou me? And I replied,
No, not thee!"
O'Rane read the lines aloud, dipped his pen in the ink and began
writing.
"Of course, if you want me to _make_ you...." said Sinclair menacingly.
There was a moment's pause, both boys rose from their seats, Sinclair
took a step forward, they closed. What immediately followed is not
clear, but, when Draycott indignantly flung his door open and advanced
into Hall, he found Sinclair sprawling on the floor and gasping out,
"You're breaking my arm, damn you!" while O'Rane sat on the small of his
back and twisted his arm every time the words "Damn you!" passed his
lips.
"Are you lag, Sinclair?" Draycott asked, artistically dispassionate.
"Take this cup down and wash it."
Sinclair rose and obeyed; O'Rane returned to his interrupted copy of
verses, and that same evening after prayers both were thrashed for the
comprehensive offense of "ragging."
"I hope they make it hot for that young swine," Loring remarked, as he
flung his cane into the corner. Many years had gone by since a member of
the Team had been thrashed, but the case could not be overlooked.
Feeling ran high in the studies, and a good deal higher in Hall. We
could hear the Democracy working itself into a frenzy of indignation and
sympathy, and the lights in Middle Dormitory had not been turned out for
more than five minutes when Loring's prayer began to be answered.
We had adjourned to Tom Dainton's Spartan study--two uninhabitable
chairs and a pair of boxing-gloves--and were still discussing the
enormity of O'Rane's offence when a sound of scuffling made itself heard
above. Then there came a thud, renewed scuffling, two more thuds, some
angry voices, a fourth thud, a sharp cry--and sudden silence.
Loring leapt to his feet with anxiety in his grey eyes.
"Hope to God they haven't killed him!" he exclaimed.
We bounded up the stairs to Middle Dormitory. As our footsteps rang out
on the stone floor of the passage, bare feet pattered over bare boards,
and a dozen spring-mattresses creaked uneasily as their tenants leapt
back into bed.
"What's all this row about?" Loring demanded, as he flung open the door.
The moonlight, flooding in through the uncurtained windows, showed us
fifteen boys in bed, driven thither by an instinct older and stronger
than chivalry; the sixteenth stood with his head bent over a basin,
blood flowing freely from a cut on his forehead.
Loring picked his way through a jungle of scattered clothes and
overturned chairs.
"What's happened, Palmer?" he asked.
"I knocked my head against the chest of drawers," was the strictly
truthful answer. "It's only a scratch."
"Ragging, I suppose? Why were you out of bed after Lights Out?"
Palmer preserved a discreet silence.
"Anybody else been out of bed?" Loring demanded of the twilit room.
"Say, Loring, I guess this is _my_ funeral," drawled O'Rane in answer.
"_I_ opened up his durned head for him."
"I was in it too," said Sinclair.
"So was I."
"So was I."
Loring turned to Palmer. "Put on a dressing-gown and go down to the
matron's room. You other fellows--anyone who's been out of bed, put on
his trousers and come down to my study. O'Rane and Sinclair, you stay
where you are."
On the wholesale execution that followed there is no need to dwell.
Castigation in bulk, for some obscure reason, was always known as a
'Regatta' at Melton, and, as Regattas went, this was celebrated on a
lavish scale.
"Now I suppose I shall have to show that little beast up to Matheson,"
said Loring, when all was over. "And I hope Matheson'll give it to him
tight. Life's not safe in the same house with him."
There was a knock at the door, and one of our late victims entered in
tweed trousers, felt slippers, and pyjama jacket. The bitterness of
death was past, and he smiled cheerfully.
"I say, Loring, you know, it wasn't altogether O'Rane's fault. I started
it."
Loring looked at the speaker with cold surprise.
"So far as I remember, you've been dealt with."
"Yes, but I didn't want to get him into a row with Matheson. We were
about ten to one."
"You seem to have come off second-best," suggested Draycott.
"I know. He's got some filthy Japanese trick. He'd take on half the
school as soon as look at them. Palmer doesn't want a row on _his_
account."
Loring meditated with his hands in his pockets. "Well, you go off to bed
now, Venables," he said. "And when you get there, stay there. Good
night."
There the matter ended for a time. After first Roll Call next day,
Palmer embarked on a long and patient explanation of his bandaged head.
He had been walking quietly down the middle of the dormitory when he
caught his foot in the cord of someone else's dressing-gown. Pitching
forward and trying to recover his balance.... Matheson shook an
uncomprehending head and hurried away to Chapel.
Public opinion in Hall rose tempestuously within measurable distance of
assassination point.
IV
The morrow of the Regatta was a Sunday. I spent the morning dutifully
writing to my mother in Ireland and in the afternoon suggested to Loring
that if he wished to preserve his figure he had better come for a walk
with me. The bait was taken. He had a horror of becoming fat, and,
though in fact no heavier than was to be expected of a man with his
frame, could usually be roused from his Sunday occupation of pasting
book-plates into large-paper éditions-de-luxe by a hint that his weight
was rising visibly.
We crossed Great Court, span a coin at Big Gateway and chose the Forest
road in the direction of Crowley. As bounds--for all but monitors--ended
at the far side of the cricket ground, we anticipated an uninterrupted
walk. It was a mild afternoon for the end of October, and we went at an
easy pace through the town and into the half-mile belt of trees that
screened Melton from the south-west wind and marked the beginning of the
long hill which sloped down and down past Crowley Court and Bishop's
Cross to Southampton. Mr. Gladstone had died in the May of that year,
and Loring, fresh from some hasty, ill-written memoir, was full of the
dream once dreamt by the youthful Gladstone in the shadow of St.
Peter's, that the world might one day see again the union of all
Christian Churches. The traditional and picturesque had captured his
imagination as they were to capture it throughout life. He re-created
the dream with rare enthusiasm until we were brought to a standstill on
the farther fringe of Swanley Forest.
Anyone who is familiar with the neighbourhood of Melton knows that the
Southampton road takes a sharp turn to the right at the second milestone
on leaving the Forest. We had pushed our way through the fallen leaves
and rounded the bend, when I noticed a figure seated on the milestone.
The back was turned to us, and the head was bowed as though in sleep.
Loring paused to inhale the sweet, heavy air of the pine woods.
"Humpty Dumpty will have a great fall," he remarked, "if he goes to
sleep on milestones."
"It's somebody from the school," I said.
On the ground by the side of the stone lay a straw hat such as--for no
conceivable reason--we were compelled to wear in all weathers. Loring
moved forward and then stopped suddenly.
"Oh, my Lord!" he exclaimed. "As if we hadn't thrashed the fellow till
we were tired of it!"
I took a second look. The back was bowed till the shoulder-blades stood
out in two sharp points, the chin rested on the knees and two thin hands
were clasped round two thinner ankles. The attitude was unmistakable,
even if I had not recognized the silky black hair floating back from the
forehead as the wind blew softly inland from the sea. We walked on and
stopped beside him; his eyes were gazing far out over the distant
Channel, and he failed to observe our approach.
"A good view," said Loring.
"She's a Royal Mail boat. Lisbon, Gib., Teneriffe, B.A., Rio." I could
hardly see the ship, but a wreathing spiral of smoke, mingling with the
low clouds, gave me her position. "There's been a home-bound Orient, and
two P. and O.'s, and a D.O.A., oh, and one British India. Two a minute,
and steaming, steaming to the uttermost parts of the earth."
He spoke in a dreamy, sing-song voice, and his soul was five thousand
miles from Melton.
"Is this a usual pitch of yours?" Loring asked.
"It is. When a man wants to think and be alone with no one but his own
self by.... There's days you can smell the sea, and days when the air's
so clean and clear you could put out your hand and touch one of the
little ships...." His voice sank almost to a whisper, " ... to show the
love you have for her, and the lonely, cold sea she's ploughing up into
white foam."
Loring looked at me in amazement and shook his head helplessly. To him,
who had at that time never set foot in Ireland, the soft and unexpected
Irish intonation of O'Rane's voice conveyed nothing; he was as yet
unacquainted with the Celtic luxuriance of misery.
"O'Rane!" I said.
His head turned slowly, and, as his eyes met ours, their expression was
transformed. Dreaminess and melancholy rushed out of him as his spirit
returned from afar; in less than a second he was English again--with
occasional lapses into the cadence and phraseology of America.
"Guess I'm up against another of your everlasting rules, Loring," he
said.
"The rules aren't mine," Loring returned pleasantly. "I found 'em
here--five years ago. I only have to see they're kept."
"And, if I try to break them, you'll try to break me? Do you think
you'll succeed?" he demanded defiantly.
Loring laughed, and by the narrowing of O'Rane's eyes I could see he did
not relish laughter at his own expense.
"I've never given the matter a thought."
"In ten--in eight days' time you'll thrash me for walking two miles
through Swanley Forest?"
"No--for breaking bounds. If I _do_ thrash you. Frankly, I'm getting
rather sick of it. Probably you are too. I'm going to suggest that you
should accompany Oakleigh and me back to school; you're not breaking
bounds if you're with us."
O'Rane looked at him for a moment, and his lip curled.
"Mediaevalism tempered by Jesuitism."
Loring smiled good-humouredly. "Not very gracious, is it? And we
probably shan't agree over Jesuits."
O'Rane, to his credit, blushed.
"I apologize. I forgot you were a...."
Loring waved away the apology.
"That's all right," he said. "But why come to the oldest school in
England if you object to mediaevalism? Possibly you weren't consulted,
but, as you _are_ here, why not take the place as you find it, or else
clear out?"
O'Rane's grip tightened on his ankles.
"I shall stay here till I'm ready for Oxford and I shall stay at Oxford
till I've got everything this country can give me. Guess I've knocked
about a bit in my time and somehow I was always on the underneath side.
Greasy Levantines, Chinese storekeepers, American-German-Jews. I'm a bit
tired of it. I want to get on top. I've seen Englishmen in most parts of
the world--mostly on top--I'm going to join 'em, and get some of my own
back grinding other people's faces."
Loring looked at his watch.
"If you don't want to be late for Chapel, it's time we started back.
Look here, grinding other people's faces is a laudable ambition so far
as it goes, but it's rather remote. How old are you? Fifteen? Well,
you've got another three years here, and you can spend 'em in one of two
ways. We can go on thrashing you this term at the rate of once in ten
days; then you'll get into the Sixth, there won't be many rules to
break, and, if you break 'em, Burgess'll sack you. That apart, you can
go on living your present life, without a friend in the school, taking
no share in the school, no use to man or beast. Or, on the other hand,
you can make the best of a bad job and live on decent terms with your
neighbours. I make no suggestion. I only ask if there's any particular
point in regarding everyone as your natural enemy?"
We walked for a hundred yards or so in silence. Then O'Rane said:
"It doesn't occur to you that every man _is_ the natural enemy of every
other man?"
Loring flicked a stone out of the road with the point of his stick.
"Because it isn't true," he said.
"When there are two men and only food for one? You'd fight me to the
death for that one loaf."
"In practice, yes. Theoretically, I should halve it with you. That's
the sort of public-school idea."
"And it doesn't square with the practice. I'm out for the loaves before
someone else gets them."
"Always assuming he isn't stronger than you," said Loring.
"Then I'll try and make myself stronger than him."
"And the end of the world will come when the strongest man has starved
everyone else. A happy world, O'Rane, a happy end to it, and a glorious
use of physical strength."
"That's been the world's rule so far."
"Utter bunkum!" Loring stopped and faced his antagonist. We had reached
the cricket ground and the beginning of bounds, so that O'Rane no longer
needed a convoy. "For the first years of your life you were so weak that
it took one woman to feed you and another to put your clothes on so that
you shouldn't die of exposure. On your theory there wouldn't be a woman
left alive, far less a child. You must find some other answer to the
riddle of existence. You can't do much with all-round hate and
promiscuous throat-cutting."
"If someone takes a knife to me, I'll try to get in first blow," O'Rane
persisted obstinately.
"Well, that's a slight improvement on knifing at sight. The next
discovery for you to make is that your neighbours don't _all_ want to
trample on you."
O'Rane's eyes fired with sudden, vengeful passion.
"Guess you were born on top, Loring."
"Yes, I've had a very easy time." He swung his stick thoughtfully and
looked up the hill at the school buildings aglow in the light of the
setting sun. "But it hasn't made me want to walk on other people's
faces. You see, one day the positions might be reversed, so why make
enemies? Besides, there's enough misery in the world without adding to
it unnecessarily. If I had any energy to spare, I might even try to
reduce it. Overhaul your philosophy a bit, O'Rane." A child, bowling a
hoop, ran down the road and narrowly avoided treading on my toes. Loring
pressed the incident into service. "On your showing, Oakleigh ought to
have brained that kid, instead of which he moved politely out of the
way. The strong yielding to the weak. Think it over, and you'll find
life isn't a bit clear cut. It's full of inconsistencies and oppositions
and compromises; we do things for the most illogical reasons. Well,
you're back in bounds, and, if you like to stay, you can, and, if you
prefer to go on by yourself, we shan't be offended. You're going on? All
right; good-bye."
As O'Rane strode away in the twilight I complimented Loring on his
discourse.
"The heavy father," he muttered. "And a fat lot of good it's done. You
know, that fellow's three parts mad. What were his people thinking
about, sending him here?"
"I don't think he's got any," I said.
Loring linked arms with me, and we returned to the school without the
exchange of a word. As we entered Big Gateway, he observed:
"He must have been pretty well hammered by someone to get into this
state."
And half-way across Great Court I heard him murmur:
"Lonely little devil."
V
Three days later came the second Leave-out Day of term. Loring and I had
been invited over to Crowley Court, and after Roll Call we changed our
clothes and assembled outside Burgess's house to await the racing
omnibus that Dainton was bringing to meet us.
"Are we all here?" Tom asked, as his father came in sight, walking the
horses slowly up the hill.
"O'Rane's not coming," Sam answered. "He hasn't finished his 'Shelton'
yet."
"All aboard then."
We drove away through the Forest belt, made a large luncheon at Crowley
Court, spent the afternoon engaged in a sanguinary ratting expedition
round Dainton's farm buildings and returned to Melton in time for house
prayers. When we left in the morning, Sinclair and O'Rane had been
seated at opposite ends of Hall, employed respectively on overdue
impositions and a prize copy of verses. On our way back we passed them
walking arm in arm up the hill to Big Gateway and found them, later in
the evening, sharing the same form in front of the fire and talking in
apparent peace.
"The age of miracles is not yet past," I said to Loring, as I went in to
prayers.
"O'Rane told me they'd made it up," he answered, "when he came in to
take my boots down."
A term or two later I heard the story of the reconciliation. As the last
of us left the house for Leave Out, O'Rane picked up his papers, flung
them into his locker and crossed to Sinclair's end of Hall.
"May I speak to you a moment?" he asked.
"It's a free country," was the uncompromising answer.
"Well, I guess there's a certain amount of unfriendliness between us. Is
there any use in keeping it up?"
Sinclair looked at him in some surprise, then returned to his writing.
O'Rane sat down on the table, and Sinclair ostentatiously gathered up
his books and retired to a window-seat where there was only room for
one. "I'm quite happy as I am," he said.
"See here," said O'Rane, without attempting to follow him, "it's going
to be a bit awkward if we live three years in the same house without
speaking."
"Don't worry about me," Sinclair answered, without looking up. "I shan't
be here three years."
"Well, two, if you're so blamed particular."
"Or two either. They'll fire me out at the end of this term."
O'Rane jumped down from the table and walked to the window with his
hands in his pockets.
"What the deuce for?" he demanded.
"Super-ed of course, you fool."
Softly whistling, O'Rane picked up the first half-finished imposition.
"Won't you get your remove?" he asked.
"Not an earthly. _I_ can't do their dam' stuff."
"You can do this thing: A train going forty miles an hour...."
Sinclair flamed with sudden anger.
"Oh, do, for God's sake, go away and leave me in peace," he cried. "I
dare say it's all very easy for people like you...."
"But I'll show you how to do it."
"I don't _want_ to be shown. If I've been shown once I've been shown a
million times. It's _no good_! Bracebridge says, 'D'you follow that?'
and I say, 'Yes,' and all the time I've not the foggiest conception what
he's driving at."
Taking the pen from the other's hand O'Rane wrote down three lines of
figures and handed Sinclair the answer.
"And what good d'you think that is?"
"I just think that this is a poorish way of spending a Leave-out Day,"
O'Rane answered. "If you finish the things off...."
"It's all right, my leave's stopped."
O'Rane propped Sinclair's book against the window-ledge and began
writing. Outside the sun was shining in the deserted Great Court, and a
southerly breeze caught up the fallen creeper leaves and blew them with
a dry rustle across the grey flagstones.
"That's no reason for wasting all day over muck of this kind," he
remarked. "One pipe letting water into a cistern at the rate of ten
gallons a minute, and another pipe letting it out.... If you make up
your mind to get a remove, guess nothing'll stop you. That's the way I
regard the proposition. If you make up your mind to do any dam' thing in
this world.... Turn up the answers and see if I've got it right. Our old
friend the clock: when will the hands next be at right angles? Echo
answers 'When?' I wonder if anybody finds the slightest use for all this
bilge when once he's quit school. Turn up the answers. _He's_ fixed. How
many more have you got to do?"
"Four."
"Anything else?"
"An abstract of three chapters of Div." Sinclair had almost forgotten
the quarrel and the enormity of O'Rane's "Side," and was looking with
surprised admiration at the quickly moving pen.
"We'll do that this afternoon. I'll give tongue, and you can write it
down. See here, surely if you can make old man Bracebridge give you--or
us--decent marks every day for prep...."
"That won't help in the exams."
O'Rane worked three more problems in silence; then he said:
"We must fix the exams. somehow. I don't see it yet, but it can be done.
We'll circumvent Bracebridge. And the answer is one ton, three
hundredweights, no quarters, eleven pounds, twelve ounces." He threw
down his pen and rose with a yawn. "Come for a walk; it's only eleven."
Sinclair felt that some expression of thanks was due from him. It was
not easy to frame it, and he was still half-consciously resentful of
O'Rane's unasked interference.
"Aren't you taking Leave?" he growled.
"No."
"I thought you were going home with young Dainton."
"I cried off."
A ray of light struggled fitfully through the clouds of Sinclair's
brain.
"Did you stay here just to ass about with this filth?" he demanded,
rather red in the face, pointing contemptuously to the pile of
impositions.
"Well, as I was doing nothing...."
"Rot! Did you or did you not?"
"Yes; I did."
Sinclair meditated in an embarrassed silence; then he held out his hand.
"You know, Spitfire, you're not half such a swine as I thought," he
admitted handsomely.
"Go and get your hat," O'Rane ordered. "I'll wait for you on Little
End."
They walked in Swanley Forest till luncheon, returned to Matheson's for
a hurried meal, and set out again along the favourite, forbidden
Southampton road. As we returned from Crowley Court, we passed them
between the cricket ground and Big Gateway, trudging with arms linked,
tired and happy. At the porter's lodge O'Rane darted aside to inspect
the notice-board.
"I wanted to see when the Shelton's had to be sent in," he explained.
"Are you going in for it?"
"I don't know. They've got to reach Burgess to-morrow. Come back to
Matheson's and finish the Div."
In the still deserted Hall Sinclair sat, pen in hand, while O'Rane
rapidly turned the pages of an Old Testament history and dictated an
irreligious abstract. As each sheet was finished, it was blotted and
placed on one side. Once O'Rane exhibited some modest sleight of hand.
Sinclair had written his name at the top of a fresh piece of paper, and
before anything could be added O'Rane begged him to poke the fire. On
his return to the table the sheet had disappeared.
Late that night, when Leave was over, and Hall resounded with the voices
of elegant young men in brown boots, coloured waistcoats and other
unacademic costume, O'Rane descended with inkpot and pen to the
changing-room. Seating himself on an upturned boot-basket, he produced
from one pocket the foolscap sheet with Sinclair's name at the head,
from another an incredibly neat fair-copy of a set of Greek Alcaics.
Working quickly and in a bad light he produced a far from tidy version,
with sloping lines, sprawling characters and not infrequent blots. As
the prayer-bell began to ring he endorsed an envelope with the words,
"Shelton Greek Verse Prize: The Rev. A. A. Burgess, Litt.D.," and
dropped it into the house letter-box.
A week later the results were announced in Great School. We were
assembled for prayers when Burgess walked down between the rows of
chairs, mounted the dais and paused by the Birch Table. In his hand was
the Honour Book, in which were entered the names of all prize-winners
together with the subject set and the winning composition. Leaving the
book on the table, he unslung his gown from his shoulder, pulled it over
his cassock and sank into the great carved chair of Ockley in the middle
of the Monitorial Council, facing the school.
Sutcliffe, the captain, seated on his right, inquired if the Shelton
Compositions had been judged.
"Aequam memento rebus in arduis
Servare mentem,"
Burgess answered. "Thou art not the man, laddie."
"Is it Loring?" I asked from the other side.
"The prize has not gone to my illustrious Sixth."
"O'Rane," Loring murmured, looking down the school.
"Neither to the less illustrious Under Sixth," said Burgess. He arose
and strode to the Birch Table. "The result of the Shelton Greek Verse
Prize is as follows: First, Sinclair. _Proxime accesserunt_ Sutcliffe
and Loring. There were twenty-three entries. I believe this is the first
time the prize has been won by a member of the Remove. Sinclair will
stay behind after prayers."
He stalked back to his seat, and the school, after a moment's perplexed
hesitation, broke into tumultuous applause. As the name was given out I
heard a whispered, "Who? Sinclair? Rot!" Yet there was no one else of
that name in the school. Bracebridge spun round in his chair to gaze at
his astonishing pupil, and I could see Sinclair, scarlet of face,
half-rising from his seat, when Burgess threw his cassock on to the
floor and intoned the "Oremus."
There was little reverence in that day's prayers. As monitor of the week
I knelt in front of the Birch Table and out of the corner of my eye
could see the Fourth patting Sinclair surreptitiously on the back and
the Shell turning round with admiring grimaces. Burgess alone seemed
unsurprised. "_In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_," he
intoned as I finished reading prayers. "_Ire licet_," he called out, as
I returned to his side. The lower forms filed out, till the whole of
Great School below the dais was empty, and Sinclair stood blushing by
the Birch Table. Burgess opened the Honour Book and ran quickly through
the back pages for two years.
"This is the first school prize thou hast won, laddie?" he demanded.
"Let it not be the last. Come hither, and on the tablets of thy mind
record these my words. Here thou writest thy name, and here the date,
and here the English and here thy polished Greek. In a fair, round hand,
laddie."
He closed the book with a snap and struggled out of his gown.
"I'm ... I'm afraid there's a mistake, sir," Sinclair stammered.
"It is as thou sayest. A proparoxyton in the third line where an oxyton
should have been. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of
this life, but it may be thou wilt live to see a murrain upon the land,
destroying the Scribes of Oxford and the Pharisees of Cambridge, and on
that day the last Greek accent will be flung headlong into the Pit. Till
that day come, thou shalt continue to pay thy tithe of mint and dill and
cummin to the monks of Alexandria."
Sinclair stared at him in piteous bewilderment.
"But I never wrote those lines, sir," he protested.
"Small were thine honour, laddie, if thou hadst." He glanced at the
topmost of the pile of compositions. "Of the making of blots there is no
end. Wherefore I said, 'in thy fairest, roundest hand.'"
He rose to his feet and walked down school, while the rest of us
followed a few paces behind. Sinclair made one last attempt.
"Sir, I don't know what an Alcaic _is_!"
Burgess laid a hand on his shoulder.
"When the sun of yestere'en sank to rest, laddie, I sat in judgement on
these verses. And when he rose in the east this morning, lo! I laboured
still at my task. Peradventure thou didst write them in thy sleep.
Peradventure as in the book of 'Trilby'--nay, laddie, start not! it is
no play of Sophocles. But why vex the soul with idle questionings?
Should thy feet bear thee to the Common Room, laddie, I pray thee ask
Mr. Bracebridge to commune with me in my house. Mine eyes are dim, yet I
descry a young man by the steps of the Temple. Thou sayest it is the
young O'Rane? Bid him to me, an he be not taken up with higher thoughts.
Good night, laddies!"
With an answering 'good night' we dispersed to our houses and left him
to walk across Great Court with O'Rane.
"In the third line, laddie," I heard him beginning, "a proparoxyton
where an oxyton should have been."
O'Rane looked up, unabashed, but with generous admiration.
"Didn't I make it oxyton, sir?" he asked.
"Thou didst not. And wherefore didst thou counterfeit the image and
superscription of Sinclair?"
O'Rane hesitated discreetly, but, as Burgess too was silent, he elected
to embark on a candid explanation.
"_He_ wrote his name, sir, and then I bagged the paper...."
"'Bagged,' laddie? What strange tongue is this?"
"Stole, sir. I stole the paper and wrote the verses underneath. He
doesn't know anything about it."
"Yet wherefore?"
O'Rane shrugged his shoulders.
"It seemed such rot--so hard on him, sir, to be super-ed just because he
can't get his remove."
Burgess smoothed his beard and looked at O'Rane with tired,
expressionless eyes.
"But the marks for the Shelton Prize are not taken into account in
awarding removes," he said.
"No, sir, but you yourself said he was the first fellow to win the prize
out of the Remove. It'll be jolly hard to super him after that."
They had crossed Great Court and were standing at the door of the Head's
house.
"And thine own day of reckoning, David O'Rane? Whereof shall that be?"
O'Rane made no answer for some moments; then in a tone from which he
strove in vain to banish the note of disappointment:
"I've lost the prize, sir, anyway."
"Thou wilt yet be young when the season returns to us again. But thou
hast made of me a mockery and a scorn in the market-place. An thou trip
a second time, this place will know thee no more. Good-night, laddie."
"Good-night, sir, and thank you, sir." He lingered for a moment.
"Sir...."
"Go thy ways in peace, David O'Rane."
"Sir, how did you know it was I?"
"Me, laddie, me. For thirty lean years have I wrestled with the tyranny
of Miles Coverdale. Laddie, I am old and broken, but whensoever thou
hast stripes laid upon thee for contumacy, whensoever thou breakest
bounds or breakest heads, whensoever thou blasphemest in Pentecostal
tongues, be assured that the Unsleeping Eye watcheth thee. And now Mr.
Bracebridge would have speech of me."
O'Rane turned away, and Burgess addressed the newcomer.
"I'm starting an Army Class this term," he said. "I shall take Sinclair
from your form."
"I didn't know he was thinking of the Army," answered Bracebridge.
Burgess fitted his latch-key into the door.
"The Lord will provide," he observed mournfully.
VI
The episode of the Shelton Greek Verse Prize marked a turning-point in
O'Rane's early career at Melton and revealed to me for the first time
his resourcefulness and concentrated determination no less than his
innate and unconscious love of the dramatic. The story was all over the
house that evening and was to spread throughout the school next day.
Ishmael found himself of a sudden venerated and courted, and to do him
justice he was far too young and human to remain uninfluenced.
"Spitfire" dropped into desuetude as a nickname and was replaced by
"Raney"; there were no more concerted "raggings" or resultant cut
heads, and the former eccentricities of an outsider became the caprices
of a hero. In a night and a morning O'Rane became a political leader.
The change was effected with little or no sacrifice of principle. He
still came up for judgement before us once every ten days and was
formally and efficiently chastised until the end of term, when he
received his remove into the Sixth. The flow of his criticism was
unchecked, but no longer so bitterly resented. With a little assistance
from Sinclair and Mayhew, his social qualities were brought into play:
we would hear his voice leading an unlawful sing-song in Middle
Dormitory, occasionally he contributed to Mayhew's manuscript "Junior
Mathesonian," and an echo of wild stories came to us with all the
violence and bloodshed of the late Græco-Turkish War, to be followed by
anecdotes of life in the Straits Settlements and Bret Harte tales of the
Farther West. No one believed a half of what he said, but the
stories--as stories--were good. His personality developed and lent
weight to his opinions and criticism; he grew gradually more mellow,
less alien in speech and habit of mind. His face became less thin, and
the practice of promiscuous expectoration left him.
I was to have ocular proof of his new ascendancy before the end of the
term. The evening of the last Saturday I was condemned to spend in Hall.
There was a high, three-panelled board over the fireplace, carved with
the names of monitors and members of either Eleven, and, as I was at
that time credited with some facility in the use of a chisel, the
unanimous vote of my fellows entrusted me with the arduous task of
bringing the jealously guarded record up to date. Planting a chair in
the fireplace, to the enduring mortification of a chestnut-roasting
party, I settled to my work. The fags gradually resumed their
interrupted occupations, and in the intervals of hammering I caught
fragments of triangular conversation.
"I say, Raney," Palmer began, "is it true you're coming to watch the Cup
Tie on Tuesday?"
O'Rane, seated for purposes of his own on the top of the lockers, six
feet up the side of the wall, grunted and went on reading.
"It isn't compulsory, you know," Palmer went on. "You won't be thrashed
if you don't."
"Silence, _canaille_," O'Rane murmured.
"I suppose you know the way to Little End? Across the court and under
the arch.... I'll show you, if you like. The Matheson colours are blue
and white. The game's quite easy to follow. There are two goals...."
O'Rane yawned indolently, closed his book and threw it at the speaker.
"See here, sonny, you'll rupture yourself if you do too much funny-dog.
I'm just coming to your dime-show to watch you beach-combers doing your
stunt. And when it's all over I want you to start in and tell me what
good you think you've done."
One or two voices raised themselves improvingly in defence of sport, the
tradition of fair play, working for one's side and not for one's self,
physical fitness and the like--much as Loring had done a few weeks
earlier.
"You bat-eared lot!" was O'Rane's withering commentary.
"Everyone knows you're an unpatriotic hog," observed Venables.
"'Cos I don't kick a filthy bit of skin about in the slime? You lousy,
over-fed lap-dog, a fat lot you know about patriotism! See here,
Venables, what _use_ d'you think you are? Can you ride? No. Can you
shoot? No. Can you row? Can you swim? Can you save yourself a
God-Almighty thrashing any time I care to foul my hands on you?"
"If you fought fair...." Venables began indignantly.
"I fight with my two hands same as you. 'Course, if you fool round with
your everlasting Queensberry Rules, don't be surprised if I hitch you
out of your pants and break an arm or two. And, meantime, you sit and
hand out gaff about patriotism and the fine man you're growing into by
playing football. All the time you know you'd be turned up and smacked
if you didn't, and you don't cotton on to that. I've a good mind to take
you in hand, Venables."
Mayhew, who was struggling with the current number of his paper, laid
his pen down and addressed the meeting.
"Proposed that O'Rane do now shut his face," he suggested.
"Seconded!" cried Sinclair, who was lying on his back in the middle
window-seat, drinking cocoa through a length of rubber tubing stolen
from the laboratory.
O'Rane smiled and drummed his heels against the echoing locker doors.
"Sinks, come here!" he commanded.
There was no movement on Sinclair's part.
"Laddie!" O'Rane's voice took on the very spirit of Burgess. "I'm an old
man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. I pray thee come to
me lest a worse thing befall thee. For and if thou harden thine heart,
peradventure I may come like a thief in the night and evilly entreat
thee so that thou shalt wash thy couch with thy tears. Then shall thy
life be labour and sorrow."
Unprotesting and under the eyes of Hall, Sinclair rolled off the
window-seat and ambled round to O'Rane's corner.
"What's the row?" he demanded.
"I'm going to make a man of Venables--make men of them all," was the
reply.
There was a whispered consultation, and I caught
"Mud-Crushers"--contemptuous appellation of a despised Cadet Corps. "No,
I'm blowed if I do," Sinclair flung up to the figure on the lockers.
"_I_ will if _you_ will," whispered O'Rane. A moment's hesitation
followed. "It'll be rather a rag," Sinclair admitted.
"We'll start on Palmer," O'Rane pronounced. "He's the biggest. Hither,
Palmer."
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Palmer, still with a cross of
sticking-plaster on his forehead, look up from his book.
"Go to----," he began valiantly enough, and then anticlimactically as he
caught sight of me, "What d'you want?"
"Thee, laddie. Sinks and I are old men, broken with the teares and
sorrows of this life. If you _don't_ come, I don't mind telling you
you'll get kidney-punch in Dormitory to-night. That's better. I'm
joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. Sinks is joining too. He didn't want
to, but I threatened him with kidney-punch."
"More fool him," returned Palmer, preparing to go back to his book.
"Half a sec.," cried Sinclair, with a restraining hand on his shoulder.
"Raney and I are joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. If you don't join
too, and recruit Cottrell, you'll get kidney-punch from us both."
Palmer looked his persecutors up and down. He was no coward and would
have left enduring marks on Sinclair, but of O'Rane's disabling,
Japanese methods no one had yet made beginning or end.
"But what's the good of my mucking about in a filthy uniform?" he
demanded. "I'm going to be a land agent."
"Decide. Don't argue," ordered O'Rane. "Think how useful a little rifle
practice will be when you're invited to murder hapless driven birds."
"But it's all rot...."
O'Rane waved him away. "If you will arrange to be in bed at 9.45
to-night, Sinks and I will give ourselves the pleasure of waiting on
you."
Palmer hesitated a moment longer.
"Oh, anything for a quiet life," he exclaimed.
"Now go and recruit Venables," said O'Rane. "Sinks and I are old men,
broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. We should hate to be
dragged into a vulgar brawl, but you may use our names as a guarantee of
good faith. I saw a man killed with a kidney-punch out in Kobe once."
The recruiting was going briskly forward when I gathered up my mallet
and chisel, picked the chair out of the fireplace and returned to my
study. Early in life O'Rane had learned three lessons in collective
psychology: a sense of humour is a strong ally; fifty sheep follow when
one has butted a gap in a hedge; and the basis of democracy is that all
men are entitled to see that their neighbours suffer equally with
themselves.
After Third Hour on Monday a batch of forty-three recruits (the Corps
was unfashionable in Matheson's) presented themselves at the door of the
Armoury graded according to height. I was passing through Cloisters with
Tom Dainton, and we heard Sinclair's voice leading the marching song:
"Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em!"
The words aptly described the internal relationships of the Press Gang.
The smallest fag marched under the suspicious eye of one slightly larger
than himself, the slightly larger was in turn under the surveillance of
a fag yet larger. There was an eleventh-hour flicker of mutiny, promptly
extinguished.
"I'm hanged if I can see the fun of this," cried Venables, flinging down
the pen.
Sinclair, Palmer and Cottrell had already signed and were with
difficulty restrained from tearing the would-be deserter limb from limb.
"It's the damnedest silly rot I was ever mixed up with," he grumbled, as
he signed his name viciously in the Recruits' Book. "Nobody but a
congenital idiot like Raney----Here, Carlisle, come and sign, curse
you!"
Two days later, term came to an end. My mother and sister were in Cairo,
and as I did not fancy spending Christmas by myself in the wilds of the
County Kerry, I had accepted Loring's invitation to stay with him in
London. We were almost the last to shake little Matheson's hand and
leave the house, for Loring never cared what train he took, so long as
he was not hurried. He was now lying contentedly back in his arm-chair,
divested of his responsibilities as Head of the house and appreciatively
tasting the first savour of the holidays. It was three o'clock in the
afternoon, and O'Rane had just finished packing the last box of books.
"Is there anything more?" he asked, stretching his back and brushing the
dust from his clothes.
"I think not, thanks. You're not a bad fag, young man. I'm quite sorry
you've got into the Sixth."
"No more of our ten-day meetings," said O'Rane.
Loring half-closed his eyes.
"Believe me or not," he said, "I always regarded those meetings as a
blot on our otherwise delectable friendship. Are you going home for the
holidays, Spitfire?"
"I haven't got a home," O'Rane answered, with a sudden return of his old
sullenness.
Loring opened his eyes and bowed apologetically.
"Sorry. I didn't know. No offence meant. What _are_ you going to do with
yourself?"
"Oh, I shall find something to do."
"Would it amuse you to stay with me any part of the time? Oakleigh's
coming, in case you feel you can't stand me alone. I'll take you to a
Christmas pantomime as a reward for being a good little fag."
"It's awfully kind of you, Loring." O'Rane hesitated and grew very red.
"I don't think I shall have time, though."
"Not for one night, even? Loring House, Curzon Street, will find me all
the holidays."
"I'm afraid I shall be working."
"Bunkum! You've not got any work to do."
"I _have_."
"What kind?"
The old expression of defiance battling with prolonged persecution came
into O'Rane's black eyes. "If you _must_ know," he said, "I came here
with enough money for one term and I must raise some more. It's awfully
kind of you, though. Good-bye. I hope you'll have a pleasant time.
Good-bye, Oakleigh."
As the door closed behind him, Loring turned to me with a rueful shake
of the head.
"I seem to have a genius for putting my foot into it with him," he
observed.
"It couldn't be helped," I said. "He's a mysterious little animal."
Loring sat staring into the fire. At length he roused himself with the
question:
"But what's he going to do with his little self? I rather feel as if
I'd been what he'd call a 'God-Almighty brute' to him this term. I'd no
idea he was ... I wonder if the Guv'nor can do anything for him."
"I shouldn't dare," I said.
Loring stretched himself and looked for his coat and hat.
"Come along if we're going to catch the 4.10," he said. "I say, what a
cheerful prospect for the little beast to look forward to, if he has to
do this every holiday."
We were a small party at Loring House that Christmas. The Marquess
divided his time between London and Monmouthshire according to the
weather and the possibility of hunting; Lady Loring departed to San Remo
with the New Year; and Lady Amy arrived spasmodically for a night and a
day between visits to school friends, sometimes alone, but once with my
cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, with whom at this time Loring was
unblushingly in love. For the most part we had the great house to
ourselves for such times as we could spare to be at home. And the
arrangement suited all parties. Though devoted to his mother and sister,
I always fancied there was a perplexed misunderstanding between Jim and
his father. I do not suggest a want of affection, but their minds were
cast in different moulds, and I sometimes wonder if the Marquess, with
his zest for pleasure and society, ever found common ground with his
serious, detached and incurably romantic son. Be that as it may, we had
no time to get bored with our own society. Loring's passion for the
theatre dated from early years, and if we went once we went five times a
week for the period of the holidays. The day was not hard to get
through, as we ran breakfast and luncheon into one, rode in the Park on
fine afternoons and returned in time to drink a cup of tea, dress, and
dine out at one or other of Loring's favourite eating-houses. Lady Amy
accompanied us when she was in town,--a tall, grey-eyed, dark-haired
girl of sixteen she was then, wonderfully like her good-looking brother
in speech, appearance and manner,--but as a rule the two of us roamed
London by ourselves.
Taken all in all, they were very pleasant holidays, though in the last
seventeen years I have forgotten nine-tenths of what we did or where we
went. Our New Year's Eve party, however, lingers in my memory. Lord
Loring took us all to supper at the Empire Hotel. It was the first time
I had been there, and from our place overlooking the river we commanded
the room. To this day I can recall something of the crowded, brilliantly
lit scene; the little tables with their pink-shaded lights, the red
uniforms of the orchestra, the waiters in their knee-breeches and silk
stockings, the white shoulders of the women and the shimmer of their
diamonds. Party followed party, till it seemed as if the great room
could never contain them, and in the entrance-hall beyond the stairs we
could see fresh parties arriving, more ermine cloaks being shed, new
ranks of men settling their waistcoats and straightening their ties as
they approached with an air of well-bred, bored indifference, bowing to
friends here and there and working slowly forward in search of their
tables.
"Not a bad sight, is it?" said Lord Loring. "They stage-manage the thing
very fairly well. If only our waiter would unbend to take our orders."
He looked round and caught sight of the manager with a plan of the
restaurant in his hand, allotting tables and ushering parties through
the narrow gangways.
"I'll catch hold of this fellow," said Jim, rising up and intercepting
the manager. There was a moment's conversation, punctuated by
deprecatory play of the hands and apologetic shrugging of the shoulders.
"He says our man will be here in a minute. A wild Grand Duke has just
arrived here from Russia and lost his suite on the way. Apparently our
waiter is the only man who speaks the lingo."
Lord Loring accepted the situation and began to describe the
arrangements for marking the arrival of midnight. On the first stroke of
twelve all lights were to be put out; as the last died away there would
be a peal of bells, limelight would be thrown on the entrance-hall, and
a sledge drawn by dogs would make its appearance with a child on board
to symbolize the advent of the New Year.... He interrupted his account
to give the order for supper to our waiter who had at last arrived.
"Then link hands for 'Auld Lang Syne,'" added Lady Loring.
At that moment I received a disconcerting kick and looked up to find Jim
gazing at the end of the table where his father was seated. I followed
the direction of his eyes, saw the waiter raise his head and take the
wine-list, and as he did so I caught a glimpse of his face.
In a claret-coloured livery coat, black knee-breeches and white
stockings stood David O'Rane. Our eyes met, but he gave no sign of
recognition and a moment later he had hurried away with an obsequious
"Very good, my lord."
As we waited for our coats an hour or two later, Jim whispered, "I'm
going to tell the Guv'nor. It's hardly decent, you know. A Meltonian
assing about like that. The Guv'nor must get him out of it." He turned
to his father. "I say, dad, did you particularly notice our waiter?"
"Yes. Rather a capable youngster, I thought."
"Well, he's ... he's...." Jim stammered unwontedly and seemed suddenly
to repent his purpose.
"What about him?" asked Lord Loring.
"Oh, nothing. He comes from Melton, that's all."
"From the 'Raven'?"
"No, another place farther up the hill," Jim answered vaguely.
"Funny you should meet him here," observed Lord Loring, as he lit a
cigar.
And with those words the subject was dropped.