LIKES AND DISLIKES
By the beginning of October there was a bite in the air, and either
fives or football every afternoon; and before the middle of the month
Jan began now and then to feel there might be worse places than a public
school. He had learnt his way about. He could put a name to all his
house and form. He was no longer strange; and on the whole he might have
disliked things more than he did. There was much that he did dislike,
instinctively and individually; but there was a good deal that he could
not help enjoying, over and above the football and the fives. There was
the complete freedom out of school, the complete privacy of the separate
study, above all the amazing absence of anything in the way of espionage
by the masters. These were all surprises to Jan; but they were
counterbalanced by some others, such as the despotic powers of the
præpostors, which only revived the spirit of sensitive antagonism in
which he had come to school. The præpostors wore straw hats, had fags,
and wielded hunting-crops to keep the line at football matches. This was
a thing that made Jan’s blood boil; he marvelled that no one else seemed
to take it as an indignity, or to resent the authority of these
præpostors as he did. Then there were boys like Shockley whom he could
cheerfully have attended on the scaffold. And there was one man he very
soon detested more than any boy.
That man was Mr. Haigh, the master of the Middle Remove; and Jan’s view
of him was perhaps no fairer than his treatment of Jan. Haigh, when not
passing more or less unworthy pleasantries, and laughing a great deal at
very little indeed, was a serious and even passionate scholar. He had
all the gifts of his profession except coolness and a right judgment of
boys. His enthusiasm was splendid. The willing dullard caught fire in
his form. The gifted idler was obliged to work for Haigh. He had
hammered knowledge into all sorts and conditions of boys; but here was
one who would get up and wring the sense out of a page of Virgil, and
then calmly ask Haigh to believe him incapable of parsing a passage or
of scanning a line of that page! Of course Haigh believed no such thing,
and of course Jan would vouchsafe no explanation of his inconceivable
deficiencies. Pressed for one, indeed, or on any other point arising
from his outrageously unequal equipment, Jan invariably sulked, and
Haigh invariably lost his temper and called Jan elaborate names. The
more offensive they were, the better care Jan took to earn them. Sulky
he was inclined to be by nature; sulkier he made himself when he found
that it exasperated Haigh more than the original offence.
Loder, the captain of his house, was another object of Jan’s dislike.
Loder was not only a præpostor, who lashed your legs in public with a
hunting-crop, but he was generally accounted a bit of a prig and a
weakling into the bargain, and Jan thought he deserved his reputation.
Loder had a great notion of keeping order in the house, but his actual
tactics were to pounce upon friendless wretches like Chips or Jan, and
not to interfere with stalwarts of the Shockley gang, or even with
popular small boys like young Petrie. Nor was it necessary for Jan to be
caught out of his study after lock-up, or throwing stones in the quad,
in order to incur the noisy displeasure of the captain of the house.
Loder heard of the daily trouble with Haigh; it was all over the house,
thanks to Shockley & Co., whose lurid tales had the unforeseen effect of
provoking a certain admiration for “the new man who didn’t mind riling
old Haigh.” Indifference on such a point implied the courage of the
matador—to all who had been gored aforetime in the Middle Remove—save
and except the serious Loder. Passing Jan’s door one day, this exemplary
præpostor looked in to tell him he was disgracing the house, and stayed
to inquire what on earth he meant by having such a filthy study. The
epithet was inexact; but certainly the study was ankle-deep in books and
papers, with bare walls still bristling with the last tenant’s nails;
and it was not improved by a haunting smell of sulphur and tallow, due
to the recent firing of the shilling box of wax matches.
“It says nothing about untidy studies in the School Rules,” said Jan,
tilting his chair back from his table, and glowering at his interrupted
imposition.
“Don’t you give me any cheek!” cried Loder, looking dangerous for him.
“But it does say,” continued Jan, quoting a characteristic canon with
grim deliberation, “that 'a boy’s study is his castle,’ Loder!”
Jan had to pick himself up, and then his chair, with an ear that tingled
no more than Jan deserved. But this was not one of the events that
rankled in his mind. He had made a swaggering præpostor look the fool he
was; no smack on the head could rob him of the recollection.
With such a temper it is no wonder that Jan remained practically
friendless. Yet he might have made friends among the smaller fry below
him in the house; and there was one unathletic boy of almost his own
age, but really high up in the school, whose advances were summarily
repulsed because they appeared to Jan to betray some curiosity about his
people and his home. It was only human that the lad should be far too
suspicious on all such points; the pity was that this often made him
more forbidding and hostile in his manner than he was at heart. But in
all his aversions and suspicions there was no longer a hard or a
distrustful thought of Evan Devereux, though Jan and he had not spoken
since that first Saturday, and though they often met upon the hill or in
the street without exchanging look or nod.
Otherwise his likes were not so strong as his dislikes, or at any rate
not so ready; and yet in his heart even Jan soon found himself admiring
a number of fellows to whom he never dreamt of speaking before they
spoke to him. Head and chief of these was Cave _major_, who was already
in the Eleven, and who got his football colours after the first match.
How the whole house clapped him in hall that night at tea! The only
notice he had ever taken of Jan was to relieve him of Carpenter’s
yellow-back novel, which the great man read and passed on to another
member of the Fifteen in another house. To the owner of the book that
honour was sufficient solace; but neither new boy had ever encountered
quite so heroic a figure as the great Charles Cave. Then there was
Sprawson—Mother Sprawson, to Cave and Loder—reputed a tremendous
runner, but seen to be several things besides. Sprawson amused Jan
immensely by carrying an empty spirit-flask in his pocket, and sometimes
behaving as though he had just emptied it; he was rather a bully, but
more of a humorist, who would administer a whole box of pills prescribed
for himself to some unfortunate urchin in no need of them; and yet when
he drew Jan in the house fives, and was consequently knocked out in the
first round, nobody could have taken a defeat or treated a partner
better. Then there were Stratten and Jellicoe. Stratten seemed a very
perfect gentleman, and Jellicoe a distinct though fiery one; they were
always about arm-in-arm together, or playing fives on the inner court;
and Jan enjoyed watching them when he could not get a game himself on
the outer. At closer range he developed a more intimate appreciation of
Joyce, with his bad language and his good heart, and of Bingley and his
joyous interest in violent crime.
As for old Bob Heriot, he completely upset all Jan’s ideas about
schoolmasters. He was never in the least angry, yet even Cave _major_
looked less dashing in his presence, and the likes of Shockley
ludicrously small. Not that his house saw too much of Heriot. He was not
the kind of master who is continually in and out of his own quad. His
sway was felt rather than enforced. But he had a brisk and cheery word
with the flower of the house most nights after prayers, and somehow Jan
and others of his size generally lingered in the background to hear what
he had to say; he never embarrassed them by taking too much notice of
them before their betters, and seldom chilled them by taking none at
all. The Shockley fraternity, however, had not a good word to say for
poor Mr. Heriot. And that was not the least of his merits in Jan’s eyes.
On Sunday evenings between tea and prayers it was Heriot’s practice to
make a round of the studies, staying for a few minutes’ chat in each;
and on the second Sunday of the term he gave Jan rather more than his
time allowance. But he seemed to notice neither the stark ugliness of
the uncovered walls, nor the heavy fall of waste paper; and though he
did speak of Jan’s difficulties in form, he treated them also in a very
different manner from that employed by the captain of his house. The
truth was that Haigh had said a good deal about the matter to Heriot,
and Heriot very little to Haigh, whose tongue was as intemperate out of
school as it was in form. But to Jan he spoke plainly on this second
Sunday evening of the term.
“It’s obvious that you were placed a form too high. Such mistakes will
occur; there’s no way of avoiding them altogether; the question is,
shall we try to rectify this one? It’s rather late in the day, but I’ve
known it done; the Head Master might allow it again. It would rest with
him, so you had better not speak of it for the present. I mean, of
course, that he might allow you to come down to Mr. Walrond’s form, or
even into mine.”
At which Jan displayed some momentary excitement, and then sat stolidly
embarrassed.
“It would be a desperate remedy, Rutter; it would mean your being a fag,
after first escaping fagging altogether; in fact, it would be starting
all over again. I don’t say it wouldn’t make your work easier for you
during the whole time you’re here. But I shall quite understand it if
you prefer the evils that you know.”
“It isn’t the fagging. It isn’t that I shouldn’t like being in your
form, sir,” Jan blurted out. “But I don’t want to run away from Mr.
Haigh!” he mumbled through his teeth.
“Well, you’d only have to fight another day, if you did,” said Heriot,
with a laugh. And so the matter went no further; and not another boy or
master in the school ever knew that it had gone so far.
But the being of whom Jan saw most, and the only one to whom he spoke
his odd mind freely, was the other new man, Carpenter, now Chips to all
the house. And Chips was another oddity in his way; but it was not Jan’s
way at any single point. Chips had always been intended for a public
school. But in some respects he was far less fit for one than Jan. To be
at this school was to realise the dream of his life; but it was not the
dream that it had been before it came true, and the dreamer took this
extraordinary circumstance to heart, though he had the character to keep
it to himself. Jan was the last person to whom he would have admitted
it; he still stood up for the school in all their talks, and gloried in
being where he was; but it was none the less obvious that he was not so
happy as he tried to appear.
Chips’s troubles, to be sure, were not in form; they were almost
entirely out of school, just where Jan got on best. Chips’s skin was
thinner; the least taunt hurt his feelings, and he hid them less
successfully than Jan could hide his. He was altogether more squeamish;
lying and low talk were equally abhorrent to him; he would not smile,
and had the courage to confess his repugnance under pressure, but not
the force of personality to render a protest other than ineffectual.
Such things ran like water from off Jan’s broader back; he was not
particularly attracted or repelled.
One bad half-hour that the pair spent together almost daily was that
between breakfast and second school. It was the recognised custom for
fellows in the same house and form to prepare their construe together;
this took Carpenter and Rutter most mornings into Shockley’s study,
where Buggins and Eyre _major_ completed the symposium. On a Virgil
morning there would be interludes in which poor Chips felt himself a
worm for sitting still; even when Thucydides claimed closer attention
there was a lot of parenthetical swearing. But Chips—whose Greek was
his weak point—endured it all as long as the work itself was fairly
done.
One morning, however, as Jan was about to join the rest, Chips burst in
upon him, out of breath, and stood with his back to Jan’s bare wall.
“They’ve gone and got a crib!” he gasped.
“What of?”
“Thicksides.”
“And a jolly good job!” said Jan.
Chips looked as though he distrusted his ears.
“You don’t mean to say you’ll use it, Tiger?”
“Why not?”
“It’s so—at least I mean it seems to me—so jolly unfair!”
Chips had stronger epithets on the tip of his tongue; but that of “pi”
had been freely applied to himself; and it rankled in spite of all his
principles.
“Not so unfair as sending you to a hole like this against your will,”
retorted Jan, “and putting you two forms too high when you get here.”
“That’s another thing,” said Chips, for once without standing up for the
“hole,” perhaps because he knew that Jan had called it one for his
benefit.
“No; it’s all the same thing. Is that beast Haigh fair to me?”
“I don’t say he is——”
“Then I’m blowed if I see why I should be fair to him.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Haigh,” said Chips. “I was thinking of the rest of
the form who don’t use a crib, Tiger.”
“That’s their look-out,” said the Tiger, opening his door with the
little red volume of Thucydides in his other hand.
“Then you’re going to Shockley’s study just the same?”
“Rather! Aren’t you?”
“I’ve been. I came out again.”
“Because of the crib?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell them so, Chips?”
“I had to; and—and of course they heaved me out, Tiger! And I’ll never
do another line with the brutes!”
He turned away; he was quite husky. Jan watched him with a shrug and a
groan, hesitated, and then slammed his door.
“Aren’t you going, Tiger?” cried Chips, face about at the sound. “Don’t
mind me, you know! I can sweat it out by myself.”
“Well you’re not going to,” growled Jan, flinging the little red book
upon the table. “I’d rather work with an old ass like you, Chips, than a
great brute like Shockley!”
So that alliance was cemented, and Chips at any rate was Jan’s friend
for life. But Jan was slower to reciprocate so strong a feeling; his
nature was much less demonstrative and emotional; moreover, the term he
had applied to Carpenter was by no means one of mere endearment. There
was in fact a good deal about Chips that appealed to Jan as little as to
the other small boys in the house. He was indubitably “pi”; he thought
too much of his study; he took in all kinds of magazines, and went in
for the competitions, being mad about many things including cricket, but
no earthly good at fives, and not allowed to play football. He had some
bronchial affection that prevented him from running, and often kept him
out of first school. “Sloper” and “sham” were neither of them quite the
name for him; but both became unpleasantly familiar in the ears of
Carpenter during the first half of his first term; and there was just
enough excuse for them to keep such a lusty specimen as Jan rather out
of sympathy with a fellow who neither got up in the morning nor played
games like everybody else.
Nevertheless, they could hardly have seen more of each other than they
did. They went up and down the hill together, for Chips was always at
Jan’s elbow after school, and never sooner than when Jan had made a
special fool of himself in form. Chips was as little to be deterred by
the gibes of the rest on the way back, as by the sullen silence in which
the Tiger treated his loyalty and their scorn. If Rutter had recovered
tone enough to play fives after twelve, Carpenter was certain to be seen
looking over the back wall; and as sure as Jan went up to football in
the afternoon, Chips went with him in his top-coat, and followed the
game wistfully at a distance. Down they would come together when the
game was over, as twilight settled on the long stone street, and tired
players shod in mud tramped heavily along either pavement. Now was
Chips’s chance for the daily papers before the roaring fire in hall,
while Jan changed with the rest in the lavatory; and as long as either
had a tizzy there was just time for cocoa and buns at the nearest
confectioner’s before third school.
The nearest confectioner’s was not the fashionable school resort, but it
was quite good enough for the rank and file of the lower forms. The
cocoa was coarse and thick, and the buns not always fresh; but the boys
had dined at half-past one; tea in hall was not till half-past six; and
even then there was only bread-and-butter to eat unless a fellow had his
own supplies. Jan had not been provided with a hamper at the beginning
of the term, or with very many shillings by way of pocket-money; he
would have starved rather than write for either, for it was seldom
enough that he received so much as a letter from his new home. But it
did strike him as a strange thing that a public-school boy should
habitually go hungrier to bed than a coachman’s son at work about his
father’s stables.
Milk and “dog-rocks” were indeed provided last thing at night and first
thing in the morning; but if you chose to get up late there was hardly
time for a mouthful as you sped out of the quad and along the street to
prayers, buttoning your waistcoat as you ran. This was not often Jan’s
case, but it was on the morning after the match between his house and
another in the first round of the Under Sixteen. Heriot’s had won an
exciting game, and Jan was conscious of having done his share in the
bully. He was distinctly muscular for his age, and had grown perceptibly
in even these few weeks at school. His sleep was haunted by an
intoxicating roar of “Reds!” (his side’s colour for the nonce) and
stinging counter cries of “Whites!” Once at least he had actually heard
his own nickname shouted in approval by some big fellow of his house;
and he heard it all again as he dressed and dashed out, on a
particularly empty stomach, into a dark and misty morning, with the last
bell flagging as if it must stop with every stroke; he heard it above
his own palpitations all through prayers; on his knees he was down in
another bully, smelling the muddy ball, thirsting to feel it at his feet
again.
It chanced to be a mathematical morning, and Jan felt thankful as he
went his way after prayers; for he was not in Haigh’s mathematical, but
in the Spook’s; and the Spook was a peculiarly innocuous master, who had
a class-room in his quarters in the town, but not a house.
“The Thirteenth Proposition of the First Book of Euclid,” sighed the
Spook, exactly as though he were giving out a text in Chapel. “Many of
you seem to have found so much difficulty over this that I propose to
run over it again, if you will kindly hold your tongues. Hold your
tongue, Kingdon! Another word from _you_, Pedley, and you’ll have
whipping in front of you—or rather behind you!”
The little joke was a stock felicity of the Spook’s, and it was received
in the usual fashion. At first there was a little titter, but nothing
more until the Spook himself was seen to wear a sickly smile; thereupon
the titter grew into a roar, and the roar rose into a bellow, and the
bellow into one prolonged and insolent guffaw which the cadaverous but
smiling Spook seemed to enjoy as much as the smallest boy in his
mathematical. Jan alone did not join in the derisive chorus; to him it
sounded almost as though it were in another room; and the figure of the
Spook, standing before his blackboard, holding up a piece of chalk for
silence, had become a strangely nebulous and wavering figure.
“'The angles that one straight line makes with another straight line,’”
began the Spook at last, in a voice that Jan could hardly hear, “'are
together equal ... together equal ... together equal ...’”
Jan wondered how many more times he was to hear those two words; his
head swam with them; the Spook had paused, and was staring at him with
fixed eyes and open mouth; and yet the words went on ringing in the
swimming head, fainter and fainter, and further and further away, as Jan
fell headlong into the unfathomable pit of insensibility.
He came to earth and life on a dilapidated couch in the Spook’s study,
where the Spook himself was in the act of laying him down, and of
muttering in sepulchral tones, “A little faint, I fear!”
Jan had never fainted before, and in his heart he was rather proud of
the achievement; but he was thankful that he had chosen the one first
school of the week that was given over to mathematics. He would have
been very sorry to have come to himself in the arms of Haigh. The Spook
was a man who had obviously mistaken his vocation; but it was least
obvious when mere kindness and goodness were required of him. Jan was
detained in his study half the morning, and regaled with tea and toast
and things to read. Heriot also looked in before second school, but was
rather brusque and unsympathetic (after the Spook) until Jan ventured to
say he hoped he would be allowed to play football that afternoon, as he
had never felt better in his life. Heriot said that was a question for
the doctor, who would be in to see Jan during the forenoon.
The doctor came, and Jan could not remember the last time a doctor had
been to see him. This one sat over him with a long face, felt his pulse,
peered into his eyes, looked as wise as an owl at the other end of his
stethoscope, and then began asking questions in a way that put Jan very
much on his guard.
“So you’ve been playing football for your house?”
“Yessir—Under Sixteen.”
“I suppose you played football before you came here?”
“No, sir,” said Jan, beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Weren’t you allowed?”
This question came quickly, but Jan took his time over it as coolly as
he could. Obviously the doctor little dreamt that this was his first
school. On no account must he suspect it now. And it was true, as it
happened, that his father had once and for all forbidden Jan to play
football with Master Evan, because he played so roughly.
“No, sir.”
“You were not allowed?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you know why?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I think I do,” said the doctor, rising. “And you mustn’t play
here, either, at any rate for the present.”
Jan shot upright on the sofa.
“Your heart isn’t strong enough,” said the doctor.
“My heart’s all right!” cried Jan, indignantly.
“Perhaps you’ll allow me to be the best judge of that,” returned the
doctor. “You may go back to your house, and I shall send a line to Mr.
Heriot. There’s no reason why you should lie up; this is Saturday,
you’ll be quite fit for school on Monday; but no football, mind, until I
give you leave.”
Jan tried to speak, but he had tied his own tongue. He could not explain
to the doctor, he could not explain to Heriot. He did not know why he
had fainted for the first time in his life that morning; he only knew
that it was not his heart, that he had never felt better than after
yesterday’s match. And now he was to be deprived of the one thing he
liked at school, the one thing he was by way of getting good at, his one
chance of showing what was in him to those who seemed to think there was
nothing at all! And another Under Sixteen house-match would be played
next week, perhaps against Haigh, who had also won their tie. And all he
would be able to do would be to stand by yelling “Reds!” and having his
shins lashed by some beastly præpostor, and hearing himself bracketed
with Chips as a “sham” and a “sloper”—and knowing it was true!
That was the worst of it. His heart was all right. It was all a complete
misunderstanding and mistake. It was a mistake that Jan knew he could
have set right by going to Heriot and explaining why he had never played
football before, and why it was barely true to say that he had not been
allowed.
But Jan was not going to anybody to say anything of the kind.