not going the right way to make a great forward. A word of
encouragement coming on the top of this, possibly injudicious, success
would have made Martin play like a devil. Instead he deliberately
slacked for a week.
Indeed footer, in spite of its moments, became monotonous. Martin had
to play four and often five times a week in all weathers, and very
often the sides were uneven and the game, consequently, a farce, a
shivery, cheerless farce in which everyone longed for the pleasant
signal for release. By the end of term nobody liked the games and
everybody was as sick of the fields as of the classrooms. If was not
merely that the games were too frequent, but that they were scarcely
ever treated as games. As the end of the term approached, bringing
with it challenge cup matches for old and young, house feeling ran
strong and the various teams were goaded by their prefects with
relentless severity. Sometimes whole fifteens would be swiped in turn
for their failure to win matches, quite irrespective of their capacity
to do so: slackness could always be alleged. At Berney's, it was true,
no great rigour was displayed. Had Spots been captain more blood might
have been shed, but Moore, who directed the house teams, was more
lenient and rarely went further than guttural abuse and threats.
Being, however, himself a forward, he instituted scrumming practice in
the evenings, and Martin found himself being pushed about the house
gymnasium at great pain to his ears and limbs, while larger boys
planted shrewd and stinging blows on the prominent portions of the
losing side: it was no fun being in the back row. As he shoved and
groaned in the perspiring mass, there flamed across his mind the remark
of a well-meaning aunt: 'How you will enjoy the games!' Martin was not
particularly weak or unathletic: his physique and taste for games were
quite up to the normal, but he did not stand alone when he proclaimed
to his friends his weariness with the official recreation which only
doubled life's burden.
"Of course," said Caruth, after scrumming practice one night, "it's
awfully good for us. Bally influence and all that. You know what the
crushers say."
"And they ought to know," added Martin, "as they never play, at least
not compulsorily."
"Anyhow," said Caruth, "there is one comfort."
"What is that?"
"We don't have to sweat it out like Randall's. Their pre's make them
groise at it all day and all night."
"Good job. The stinkers."
Martin's sympathy with the oppressed was not yet as strong as his
hatred of Randall's, the pot hunters, the unspeakable.
Work with the Terror was not always terrible: for Martin it even had
its moments. He enjoyed turning out a good verse or a good
translation, and he enjoyed also the commendation that it won. The
Terror, whose real name was Vickers, was a young man soured by
misfortune. He had meant to go triumphantly to the Bar: he had
connections, he had brains, he would rise. But a financial crisis in
the family had left him in despair, too old to enter for the Civil
Service, too poor to attempt the Bar in spite of his connections. He
had drifted, of necessity, to the arduous, responsible, and despised
task of moulding the future generation. The future generation, as
represented by the Lower Fifth, Classical, of Elfrey, seemed to Vickers
a loathsome crew, fit only to be the victim of the sarcastic tongue on
which he prided himself. He hated the elderly bloods who remained
calmly and irremovably at the bottom of the form: he hated the
ink-stained urchins with brains who passed through his hands on their
way to higher things. The Lower Fifth he held to be an abominable form
because it was neither one thing nor the other. The teaching was not
mere routine, the soulless cramming of impenetrable skulls: on the
other hand, it wasn't like taking a Sixth. There were times,
especially in the afternoons, when the frowst of the water-warmed room,
the dingy walls and desks, the ponderous horror of mistranslated
AEschylus, and the unmannered lumpishness of the human boy (average age
sixteen) would all combine to play upon his nerves and to rend the
amorphous thing which once had been an active, ambitious soul. Wearily
he vented his wrath upon the form.
His method was, as a rule, the sarcasm courteous. He lounged
magnificently while he played with his victim.
"Simpson!" This to a clever but idle youth remarkable for his large,
inky hands and persistent untidiness of apparel. There was something
in Simpson's grimy collars and straggling bootlaces that infuriated
Vickers.
"Simpson!"
"Yes, sir?"
"You owe me, I think, a rendering of Virgil."
"Please, sir, I haven't quite finished it yet, sir."
"And how much, may I ask, have you finished?"
"Well, sir, last night I had the Agamemnon chorus."
"I see, Simpson. I see."
"Please, sir, I was very busy."
"Our Simpson was busy early this morning also, I suppose."
"Yes, sir."
"At your ablutions, I presume."
Here the form would laugh: Simpson's cleanliness was a standing joke.
"Please, sir, I didn't wake up very early."
"That was very distressing."
There was a silence. "Well, Simpson?" Vickers would continue in his
softest tone.
Simpson gazed moodily at the desk, digging nibs into the wood.
"Our Simpson seems fonder of water than of Maro. We must tighten the
bonds between Simpson and the poet. May I say the whole of the first
Georgic this time?"
"Oh, sir."
"You think the quantity excessive?"
Simpson summoned up his courage and said he did think so.
"Ah, but the verse is so beautiful," came the answer. "I couldn't
deprive you, Simpson. Anyhow, you may begin your _magnum opus_ and let
me know when you have reached line two hundred."
"Yes, sir."
"Thank you, Simpson, that will be delightful. You were translating,
Grant, I think."
Vickers aimed at being a strong man and he never set a grammar paper in
which he did not ask for a comment on the phrase:
"Oderint dum metuant."
"A capital sentiment, Simpson," he would say with his gentlest smile,
as he mouthed out the words. But his pretensions were not idle, as was
shown by the fact that he could lose his temper without becoming
ridiculous. If a weaker man had called the giant Batson 'a
contemptible ass,' Batson would have laughed and the form would have
sniggered. But when Vickers flared up he commanded the silence of the
greatest.
Vickers had a gift of phrase and Martin learned much from him, partly
because he was so afraid that he always worked hard, and partly because
Vickers took a fancy to him and would give him little hints about
translation and composition which he did not choose to waste on the
ruck. Martin was less inky and more intelligent than the average new
boy who was placed in the Lower Fifth. Moreover, his fear of his
master was obvious, and there was no more effective method of
flattering Vickers than to fear him and to let your fear be seen.
Yet it was a relief, even to Martin, to escape from the tension of the
Terror's classroom to the turbulent relaxation that prevailed in the
dark chamber where Barmy Walters taught mathematics. Old Barmy
suffered from acute poverty and incipient senile decay. He had once
been a brilliant undergraduate at Cambridge and then a wrangler, a man
with a future: he now lived in a red-brick villa with a chattering wife
and two gaunt, unwedded daughters. For nearly forty years it had been
his function to instruct the classical side in mathematics: he had
never been a strong man, never fitted for his work. And so in spite of
all his brilliance as a mathematician he had missed promotion, seen his
chance of a house go by, and eventually lost grip. To retire was
financially impossible (Elfrey was too poor a school to have a pension
fund), and he stuck to his work grimly, sitting beneath his blackboard
with an overcoat under his dusty gown, wheezing and grumbling and
looking for his glasses. Plainly he could be ragged: and ragged he was
without mercy or cessation. A couple of hours with the Terror had a
vicious effect on the tempers of his victims, and Barmy Walters found
in the Lower Fifth, coming straight from Vickers, torturers of a
fiendish devilry.
To begin with, there was the distribution of the instrument-boxes
before geometry. The boxes stood in great piles at the end of the room
and it was the duty of the bottom boy to deal them round. It was also
part of the established order of things that the bottom boy dropped the
two and twenty boxes with a series of slow and deafening crashes. At
the end he would say: "Oh, sir, I'm so sorry."
And Barmy would answer: "Um, ah. Really, really, you boys will shatter
my nerves. How many times have I told you to be careful? Um, ah!"
Then there would be a rush to recover the boxes, a long, clattering
rush with much jostling and swearing and spilling of ink, some of which
would find its way to Barmy's glass of water. When peace had been
restored people would begin to ask questions, to demand elaborate
demonstrations on the blackboard, or to consume food. Barmy's room was
renowned as a resort for picnics. Biscuits were popular in winter, but
in summer there was a special line in fruit. Once a daring individual
threw a biscuit at Barmy's head and hit him, whereupon he had to carry
to his housemaster a note which began:
"DEAR RANDALL,--Morgan struck me with a macaroon."
The conjunction of the words 'strike' and 'macaroon' so pleased Mr
Randall that he omitted to deal with Morgan.
All the obvious things were done to Barmy by one or other of his
classes. Mice were brought into form and released, and once a grass
snake. He found a hedgehog in his mortar-board. Barmy had an idea
that fifty lines formed a long imposition and he used to whine out:
"Um, ah, boy, I'll give you a long day's work. Take fifty lines."
He would enter the imposition in a note-book which he left in his
unlocked desk, and in the morning he would find 'shown up' written
against it in his own handwriting. After a long day of wheezing and
grumbling about his shattered nerves Barmy would be seen mounting his
aged bicycle with fixed wheel and pedalling laboriously to the villa
and the chattering wife and the gaunt, unwedded daughters. Yet perhaps
he was not altogether unhappy, for, if a master is to be ragged, he may
as well sink to the depths: the tragedy of the defenceless dotard has
less pathos than the suffering of the young man with ideals, whose
burning desire to teach well and to succeed is thwarted by just the
slightest lack of that presence and authority which make the master.
Undoubtedly, however, Barmy could be hurt, and Martin was not old
enough to understand the consummate brutality of the proceedings in
that dismal room. Like all young schoolboys, Martin regarded a master
or crusher as a natural foe, a person with whom truceless war is waged.
If he is fool enough to let himself be ragged, that is his look-out: he
has all the resources of punishment on his side and if he cannot use
them he deserves no mercy. So Martin worked off his vitality in
ragging, and, being of an ingenious turn of mind, became noted for the
improvisation of new japes. He was patronised by the bloods of the
form and enjoyed himself hugely: without realising the nature and
results of his conduct, he even lay awake at nights devising new and
exquisite methods for completing the destruction of Barmy's nervous
system.
V
Every school, even so modern a foundation as Elfrey, has its
traditional rows, its stories of rags perpetrated on a colossal scale
by the heroes of old: but the modern schoolboy finds that, like fights,
they don't happen. Martin's life moved calmly on and its monotony was
only broken by sundry interludes, painful or humorous, with masters or
prefects. Still, ragging old Barmy was tame enough and only once was
he involved in a genuine row, an affair that counted and was history
for several years. Partly because it was his only rag, and partly
because it chanced to occur in his first term, while he was still very
impressionable, the memory remained with him clearly and for ever. It
is true also that he played a part in the drama and even was
responsible for its name, so naturally he remembered that notable
December night with its comradeship and perils and glorious achievement.
The end of term, so exasperating to the harried teacher, brings
exhilaration to the taught. As Christmas approached Martin found
prefectorial discipline slackening and, though exams might mean harder
work in school, there was in the house a very agreeable relaxation of
tension. Even games were taken less seriously, and one or two of the
more audacious spirits actually cut without detection. But just as
Berney's began to slacken their reins, Randall's, the neighbouring
house, became more vigorous than usual: for Randall's were in the final
of the "footer pot."
Berney's always objected to Randall's. This animosity might have been
accounted for by the mere fact of neighbourship, but there was more in
it than that. As was Athens to Sparta, so was Berney's house to
Randall's. Berney's stood always for an easy-going tolerance and,
though, for instance, it was not a particularly well-dressed house, it
left its nuts in peace. In all its pursuits it was either brilliant or
ineffectual, and, if it did anything at all, it did it beautifully:
both in games and work it was a house of individuals. A typical
batsman from Berney's would make three divine, soul-satisfying cuts and
be caught in attempting an impossible fourth: Berney's was never
thorough and never took defeat to heart.
Randall's, on the other hand, had no nuts and suspected with Draconian
severity the faintest traces of nuttishness. The average member of the
house was tall and lumpy and sallow, badly dressed and with no grease
to his hair. It was a standing joke with the school that Randall's
youths owed their yellow faces not only to general unhealthiness, but
also to a dislike of soap and water. They trained like professionals
and made tin gods of their challenge cups. They worked always with a
dull, sickening energy: they never had a decent three-quarter among
them, but won their matches by working the touch-line and scoring from
forward rushes. Yet undoubtedly, despite all their ignorance of the
way things should be done, they achieved results.
Of course Berney's hated Randall's bitterly and for ever. But towards
the end of term relations became more strained than was usual. To
begin with, Randall's had defeated Berney's by thirty-five points to
three in the first round of the footer pot. Once Spots had romped
away, but for the rest of the match the heavy Randallite scrum had kept
the ball close and pushed their light opponents all over the field.
And Randall's juniors had crowed over their triumph, had hailed every
fresh try with much shouting and throwing up of caps (it was generally
held that gentlemen showed their joy by reasonable yelling and that
only a low soccer crowd would hurl their caps into the air), and
behaved as offensively as could be expected. Now Randall's prepared to
win the final as though the future of the world rested on their
efforts, while Berney's jeered from study windows or the house yard.
So Randall's sulked and refused to send back balls which were kicked
over into their yard, and Berney's had to scale walls secretly to
recover their property. Nor did they always succeed. But the actual
cause of open hostilities was the affair of Gideon.
Gideon's real name was Edward Spencer Lewis-Murray. Some reader of Mr
Eden Phillpotts had called him Gideon because he was dark and had a
large nose. Whether or not he was a Jew is immaterial. Certainly he
not only went to school chapel, but consumed ham in large quantities.
One day he had been ragged about his nose and straightway he marched to
the tuck-shop, ordered an unparalleled amount of ham and pork sausages
(for he was wealthy) and devoured the entire feast before a large
assembly. His capacity was enormous, and he thus gained two ends at
once: he demonstrated his loathing of Jewish practices and established
an undoubted record in consumption.
His nose, however, was certainly large, and the name of Gideon clung to
him: but he took his ragging sensibly, and, while remaining a butt, he
became, in a way, popular. So when, a few days before the end of term,
he was shamefully mishandled by some members of Randall's the
Berneyites were furious and Gideon became temporarily a martyr and a
hero. He had kicked a football into Randall's yard: then, having
shouted "Thank you" in vain, he had climbed over the wall to look for
it. Shouts of "Gideon," "Berney's Yiddisher," "Jew-beak," "Back to
Joppa you dirty Jew-ew," and lastly a great roar of "Stone the dirty
Semite" had been heard. And Gideon had not returned. He had, it
turned out, been ceremoniously stoned--that is to say, he had been
lashed to a pillar in Randall's house gym, and pounded with footballs
thrown hard from a distance of five yards. Then he had been stripped
and thoroughly washed in cold water: they had, he said, made jokes
about Jordan and total immersion. He reappeared just before tea,
raging and very battered. All through the meal his nose bled profusely
and it was a sign of the times that no one made jokes, the old,
inevitable jokes, about Gideon's 'konk.'
Berney's discussed the affair with animation. Jew or no Jew, Gideon
was of Berney's and as such he deserved respectful treatment. The
workroom seethed with wrath and Gideon revelled in hospitalities
hitherto undreamed of. Even Cullen and Neave stooped from their
heights and actually led the wail of sympathy.
"The swine," said Neave. "Forty of 'em lamming into one poor devil."
"Jaundiced Bible-bangers," said Cullen. "I suppose they're praying now
for that mangy pot."
It was a traditional jest that Randall's had house prayers before cup
matches to invoke heavenly aid for their team.
"Let's hope Smith puts it across them."
There was a chorus of approval.
"My sainted aunt," Neave went on. "Can't we do something?"
"What?"
"Can't we avenge our Gideon?"
It was then that Martin, standing timidly on the outskirts of the crowd
and drinking in every word of the great ones, remarked boldly:
"For Gideon and the Lord."
He raised a roar of laughter. The school had been working at Judges
that term in divinity and the story of Gideon was familiar to all.
Martin's allusion to the Israelites' act of revenge was distinctly
opportune. The ringing of the prep bell abruptly ended the
conversation.
On the following day Randall's put it across Smith's, scoring
twenty-eight points to nil. Again the victory was due to forward
rushes.
"Not a decent movement in the match," said Spots angrily to Martin.
"It's scandalous that the pot can be won by a pack of well-drilled
louts."
Randall's began to stink in the nostrils of the whole school, for their
elation at their successes was always characteristic. They revelled
with a serious, unconvincing revelry. Other houses always celebrated
the occasion by demanding and obtaining ices (in mid-December) at the
school tuck-shop: it was a tradition and a noble one. Randall's gorged
themselves with lumps of bread and ham.
Martin happened to walk back to Berney's just behind Cullen and Neave.
He would not have spoken to them had they not turned and addressed him.
It was condescension, and he appreciated it.
"Hullo," said Cullen. "What about old Gideon?"
"I don't know," answered Martin. "Can't anything be done."
"Possibly. Do you remember what you said last night?"
"For Gideon and the Lord?"
"Yes."
"What about it?"
"We'll let you know in dormy to-night."
"Good. That's ripping."
Proceedings in the lower dormy that evening were unusual. Silence was
called and then Neave read from the book of Judges:
"And the three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers, and
held the torches in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right
hands to blow withal: and they cried, The sword of the Lord, and of
Gideon."
Then he continued: "That, my brethren, is the text. And what is its
lesson for us here in a community such as ours?" There was a laugh,
for he was beautifully constructing a lay sermon on Foskett's lines.
"Only to avenge our Gideon very mightily with pitchers. To-morrow
night, as you may know, is the last night of term and our brothers next
door" (Cries of "Swine" and counter-cries of "Order") "will hold a
supper to celebrate their triumph in the playing-field. Now it is a
good tradition of the Public Schools and a byword among clean-living
Englishmen" (Laughter, for it was sheer Foskett) "that we do pass the
last night of term in what my form master would call--thorubos. A
Greek word, O Stinkers of the Modern Side. My brothers, it is up to us
to infect Randall's with thorubos or disorder. (Cheers and a voice,
"What about pitchers?")."
"Ah, my young friend, you hit the nail on its head. As everybody
knows, to get on to Randall's gym is as easy as falling downstairs.
From there you can get to the fire ladders and up to Randall's dormies.
To-morrow night it is proposed to invade the dormies while the whole
house gorges below and listens to slush about their pestilential pots.
Meanwhile we snitch their water jugs and empty the water on their
little beds. Then we bring the jugs back here and wait. The windows
on this side of the dormy look out on the zinc roof of Randall's gym:
beyond is the dining-room, where the swine will be guzzling. With
windows open we can easily hear what's going on. When old Toffee
Randall gets up to propose his blighted house" (Neave had in his
excitement sunk from the level of the lay sermon) "I move that we chuck
all the empty jugs on that zinc roof and shout: 'For Gideon and the
Lord.' There ought to be row enough to raise hell. You know what
those roofs are ... and there will be forty pitchers. They won't have
the least notion what the row is till they get upstairs and see their
beds. They'll think it's a private rag of our own, but they'll learn
in due time. Now don't anyone say a word. We've got to keep this to
our dormy or the pre's are bound to find out."
The hurried arrival of Spots, followed by the extinction of the lights,
put an end to further devising of conspiracy. For a long time Martin
lay awake, gazing at the ceiling and turning restlessly from side to
side. Excitement, that terrible mingling of sheer joy and sheer
terror, gripped him, almost physically: as he thought of the splendours
and the perils of to-morrow night he felt as he had felt before when he
was walking down the study passage to the prefects' common-room and
listening to Spots's following tread. What, he wondered, would be the
end of it all? There would be a row, inevitably. They might even be
kept back a day: that would be wretched. But swiping? He could endure
that for the glory of sharing in a rag, a colossal rag with Neave and
Cullen as leaders. Besides he hated Randall's, hated them so bitterly
that the prospect of soaking their beds and smashing their pitchers was
heavenly even at the cost of swipings innumerable. Nowhere is group
feeling more obvious and more powerful than in the world of youth. In
a single term Martin had become so passionately one of Berney's that
his hatred of Randall's and their smudgy type of success made him
quiver with anger. He didn't care a straw for Gideon's nose: nobody
really cared for Gideon's sufferings. They were all linked by the
single bond of hatred.
It was Randall's that mattered ... the swine.