NICKNAMES
The ready invention and general felicity of the public-school nickname
are points upon which few public-school men are likely to disagree. If
it cannot be contended that either Carpenter or Rutter afforded a
supreme example, at least each was nicknamed before he had been three
days in the school, and in each case the nickname was too good an
accidental fit to be easily repudiated or forgotten. Thus, although
almost every Carpenter has been “Chips” in his day, there was something
about a big head thrust forward upon rather round shoulders, and a
tendency to dawdle when not excited, that did recall the most dilatory
of domestic workmen. Chips Carpenter, however, albeit unduly sensitive
in some things, had the wit to accept his immediate sobriquet as a
compliment. And in the end it was not otherwise with Rutter; but in his
case there were circumstances which made his nickname a secret
bitterness, despite the valuable stamp it set upon his character in the
public eye.
It happened that on the Saturday afternoon, directly after dinner, the
majority of the house were hanging about the quad when there entered an
incongruous figure from the outer world. This was a peculiarly debased
reprobate, a local character of pothouse notoriety, whose chief haunt
was the courtyard of the Mitre, and whom the boys in the quad saluted
familiarly as “Mulberry.” And that here was yet another instance of the
appropriate nickname, a glance was enough to show, for never did richer
hue or bigger nose deface the human countenance.
The trespasser was only slightly but quite humorously drunk, and the
fellows in the quad formed a not unappreciative audience of the type of
entertainment to be expected from a being in that precise condition.
Mulberry, however, was not an ordinary stable sot; it was obvious that
he had seen better days. He had ragged tags of Latin on the tip of a
somewhat treacherous tongue: he inquired quite tenderly after the
_binominal theororum_, but ascribed an unpleasant expression correctly
enough to a _lapsus linguae_.
“I say, Mulberry, you are a swell!”
“We give you full marks for that, Mulberry!”
“My dear young friends,” quoth Mulberry, “I knew Latin before any of you
young devils knew the light.”
“Draw it mild, Mulberry!”
“I wish you’d give us a construe before second school!”
Jan remembered all his days the stray strange picture of the debauched
intruder in the middle of the sunlit quad, with the figures of young and
wholesome life standing aloof from him in good-natured contempt, and
more fresh faces at the ivy-mantled study windows. Jan happened to be
standing nearest Mulberry, and to catch a bloodshot eye as it flickered
over his audience in a comprehensive wink.
“You bet I wasn’t always a groom,” said Mulberry; “an’ if I had ha’
been, there are worse places than the stables, ain’t there, young
fellow?”
Jan looked as though he only wished the ground would open and engulf
him; and the look did not belie his momentary feeling. But he had a
spirit more easily angered than abased, and the brown flush which swept
him from collar to cap was not one of unmixed embarrassment.
“How should I know?” he cried in a voice shrill with indignation.
“He seems to know more about it than he’ll say,” observed Mulberry, and
with another wink he fastened his red eyes on Jan, who had his cap
pulled over his eyes as usual, and arms akimbo for the want of trousers
pockets. “Just the cut of a jock!” added Mulberry, in quite a
complimentary murmur.
“You’re an ugly blackguard,” shouted Jan, “and I wonder anybody can
stand and listen to you!”
It was at this point that Heriot appeared very suddenly upon the scene,
took the intruder by either shoulder, and had him out of the quad in
about a second; in another Heriot rejoined the group in the sun, with a
pale face and flashing spectacles.
“You’re quite right,” he said sharply to Jan. “I wonder, too—at every
one of you—at every one!”
And he turned on his heel and was gone, leaving them stinging with his
scorn; and Jan would have given a finger from his hand to have gone as
well without more words; but he found himself hemmed in by clenched
fists and furious faces, his back to the green iron palings under the
study windows.
“You saw Heriot coming!”
“You said that to suck up to him!”
“The beastly cheek, for a beastly new man!”
“But we saw through it, and so did he!”
“Trust old Heriot! You don’t find that sort o’ thing pay with _him_.”
“I never saw him,” said Jan steadily, despite a thumping heart, “so you
can say what you like.”
And he took a heavy buffet from Shockley without wincing.
“And why should you lose your wool with poor old Mulberry?” that worthy
demanded with a fine show of charity. “One would think there was
something in what he said.”
“You fairly stink of the racing-stables,” said Buggins. “You know you
do, you brute!”
And Eyre _major_ led a laugh.
“Racing-stables!” echoed Shockley. “There’s more of the stable-boy about
him than the jock.”
Jan folded his arms and listened stoically.
“Ostler’s lad,” said one satirist.
“Nineteenth groom,” from another.
“The tiger!” piped a smaller boy than Jan. “The tiger that sits behind
the dog-cart—see how he folds his arms!”
And the imp folded his at the most untimely moment; for this was more
than Jan was going to stand. Submission to superior force was a law of
nature which his common sense recognised and his self-control enabled
him to keep; but to take from a boy inches shorter than himself what had
to be taken from one as many inches taller, just because they were all
against him, was further than his forbearance would go. His flat left
hand flew out as the smaller boy folded his arms, and it fell with a
resounding smack upon the side of an undefended head.
Within the fewest possible moments Jan had been pinned against the
palings by the bigger fellows, his arm twisted, his person violently
kicked, his own ears soundly boxed and filled with abuse. This was
partly because he fought and kicked as long as he had a free leg or arm.
But through it all the satisfaction of that one resounding smack
survived, and kept the infuriated Jan just sane enough to stop short of
tooth and nail when finally overwhelmed.
“Tiger’s the word,” panted Shockley, when they were about done with him.
“But if you try playing the tiger here, ever again, you son of a gun,
you’ll be killed by inches, as sure as you’re blubbing now! So you’d
better creep into your lair, you young tiger, and lie down and die like
a mangy dog!”
It had taken some minutes to produce the tears, but the tears did not
quench the fierce animosity of the eyes that shed them, and they were
dry before Jan gained his study and slammed the door. And there you may
picture him in the chair at the table, on the still bare boards: hot,
dishevelled, aching and ashamed, yet rejoicing in his misery at the one
shrewd left-hand smack he had somehow administered upon an impudent
though defenceless head.
He could hear it for his consolation all the afternoon!
The studies emptied; it was another belated summer’s day, and there was
a game worth watching on the Upper. Soon there was no sound to be heard
but those from the street, which came through the upper part of the
ground-glass window, the only part of the back study windows that was
made to open; but Jan sat staring at the wall before his eyes, as though
the fresh air was nothing to him, as though he had not been brought up
in his shirtsleeves in and out of the open air in all weathers.... And
so he was still sitting when a hesitating step came along the passage,
paused in the next study, and then, but not for a minute or two, at
Jan’s door.
“What do you want?” he demanded rudely, when he had responded to a
half-hearted knock by admitting Chips Carpenter. Now, Chips had
witnessed just the bitter end of the scene in the quad, but Jan did not
know he had been there at all.
“Oh, I don’t exactly want anything. I can clear out if you’d rather,
Rutter.”
“All right. I’d rather.”
“Only I thought I’d tell you it’s call-over on the Upper in
half-an-hour.”
“I’m not going to call-over.”
“_What?_”
“Damn call-over.”
Carpenter winced: he did not like swearing, and he did like Rutter well
enough to wince when he swore. But the spirit of the oath promptly
blotted the letter from his mind. Carpenter was a law-abiding boy who
had been a few terms at a good preparatory school; he could scarcely
believe his ears, much less a word of Rutter’s idle boast. Rutter
certainly looked as though he meant it, with his closed lid of a mouth,
and his sullen brooding eyes. But his mad intention was obviously not to
be carried out.
“My dear man,” said Carpenter, “it’s one of the first rules of the
school. Have you read them? You’d get into a frightful row!”
“The bigger the better.”
“You might even get bunked,” continued Chips, who was acquiring the
school terminology as fast as he could, “for cutting call-over on
purpose.”
“Let them bunk me! Do you think I care? I never wanted to come here. I’d
as soon’ve gone to prison. It can’t be worse. At any rate they let you
alone—they got to. But here ... _let_ them bunk me! It’s the very thing
I want. I loathe this hole, and everything about it. I don’t care
whether you say it’s one of the best schools going, or what you say!”
“I say it’s _the_ best. I know _I_ wouldn’t swop it for any other—or
let a little bullying put me against it. And I have been bullied, if you
want to know!”
“Perhaps you’re proud of that?”
“I hate it, Rutter! I hate lots of things more than you think. You’re in
that little dormitory. You’re well off. But I didn’t come here expecting
to find it all skittles. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else if it was
twenty times worse than it is!”
Rutter looked at the ungainly boy with the round shoulders and the
hanging head; for the moment he was improved out of knowledge, his flat
chest swelling, his big head thrown back, a proud flush upon his face.
There was a touch of consciousness in the pride, but it was none the
less real for that, and Jan could only marvel at it. He could not
understand this pride of school; but he could see it, and envy it in his
heart, even while a fresh sneer formed upon his lips. He wished he was
not such an opposite extreme to Carpenter: he could not know that the
other’s attitude was possibly unique, that few at all events came to
school with such ready-made enthusiasm for their school, if fewer still
brought his own antagonism.
But, after all, Carpenter did not understand, and never would.
“You weren’t in the quad just now,” said Jan, grimly.
Chips looked the picture of guilt.
“I was. At the end. And I feel such a brute!”
“You? Why?” Jan was frowning at him. “You weren’t one of them?”
“Of course I wasn’t! But—I might have stood by you—and I didn’t do a
thing!”
The wish to show some spirit in his turn, the envious admiration for a
quality of which he daily felt the want, both part and parcel of one
young nature, like the romantic outlook upon school life, were equally
foreign and incomprehensible to the other. Jan could only see Carpenter
floundering to the rescue, with his big head and his little wrists; and
the vision made him laugh, though not unkindly.
“You _would_ have been a fool,” he said.
“I wish I had been!”
“Then you must be as big a one as I was.”
“But you weren’t, Rutter! That’s just it. You don’t know!”
“I know I was fool enough to lose my wool, as they call it.”
“You mean man enough! I believe the chaps respect a chap who lets out
without thinking twice about it,” said Carpenter, treading on a truth
unawares. “I should always be frightened of being laughed at all the
more,” he added, with one of his inward glances and the sigh it fetched.
“But you’ve done better than you think. The fellows at the bottom of the
house won’t hustle _you_. I heard Petrie telling them he’d never had his
head smacked so hard in his life!”
Jan broke into smiles.
“I did catch him a warm 'un,” he said. “I wish you’d been there.”
“I only wish it had been one of the big brutes,” said Chips, conceiving
a Goliath in his thirst for the ideal.
“I don’t,” said Jan. “He was trading on them being there, and by gum he
was right! But they didn’t prevent me from catching him a warm 'un!”
And in his satisfaction the epithet almost rhymed with _harm_.
Nevertheless, Jan looked another and a brighter being as he stood up and
asked Carpenter what his collar was like.
Carpenter had to tell him it was not fit to be seen.
Jan wondered where he could find the matron to give him a clean one.
“Her room’s at the top of the house near your dormitory. I daresay she’d
be there.”
“I suppose I’d better go and see. Come on!”
“Shall we go down to the Upper together?” Chips asked as they reached
the quad.
“I don’t mind.”
“Then I’ll wait, if you won’t be long.”
And the boy in the quad thought the other had quite forgotten his mad
idea of cutting call-over—which was not far from the truth—and that he
had not meant it for a moment—which was as far from the truth as it
could be. But even Carpenter hardly realised that it was he who had put
Rutter on better terms with himself, and in saner humour altogether, by
the least conscious and least intentional of all his arguments.
Jan meanwhile was being informed upstairs that he was not supposed to go
to his dormitory in daytime, but that since he was there he had better
have a comfortable wash as well as a clean collar. So he came down
looking perhaps smarter and better set-up than at any moment since his
arrival. And at the foot of the stairs the hall door stood open, showing
a boy or two within looking over the new illustrated papers; and one of
the boys was young Petrie.
Jan stood a moment at the door. Either his imagination flattered him, or
young Petrie’s right ear was still rather red. But he was a good type of
small boy, clear-skinned, bright-eyed, well-groomed. And even as Jan
watched him he cast down the _Graphic_, stretched himself, glanced at
the clock, and smiled quite pleasantly as they stood face to face upon
the threshold.
“I’m sorry,” said Jan, not as though he were unduly sorry, but yet
without a moment’s thought.
“That’s all right, _Tiger_!” replied young Petrie, brightly. “But I
wouldn’t lose my wool again, if I were you. It don’t pay, Tiger, you
take my tip.”