THE FUN OF THE FAIR
There were three days in the year when the venerable market-place was
out of bounds, all but the draggled ribbon of pavement running round it
and the few shops opening thereon. The rest was monopolised and profaned
by the vans and booths of a travelling fair, which reached the town
usually about the second week in March. The school took little notice of
the tawdry encampment and its boorish revels; but the incessant strains
of a steam merry-go-round became part of the place for the time being,
and made night especially hideous in the town houses nearest the scene.
Nearest of all was Heriot’s house, and greatest of all sufferers the
four boys in the little top room with the dormer window over the street.
Jan was still one of them, and Bingley another. But Joyce had left, and
Crabtree had taken charge of one of the long dormitories overlooking the
quad. Chips Carpenter and a new boy had succeeded to their partitions;
and if in one case the intellectual loss was irreparable, in the other
that of an incorrigible vocabulary was perhaps less to be deplored.
But Jan’s was still the silent corner; even to Chips he would have
little to say before the other two; for in this his fifth term he had
fallen on another evil time. It had nothing to do with his work,
however, and neither could he curse his luck for a split hand or a
maligned heart. He had played football every day of his second winter
term—not brilliantly, for he was never quite quick enough on the
ball—but with a truculent tenacity which had been rewarded with the
black trimmings of the Second Lower Upper. In form he was no longer a
laughing-stock; and his form was now the Middle Fifth, where one began
to cope with Greek iambics as well as Latin elegiacs. But all three
Fifths were beds of roses after the Middle Remove, and Dudley Relton an
angel of forbearance after that inhuman old Haigh.
Dudley Relton, however, besides being man enough to take the Middle
Fifth on his accession to the staff, was that pioneer of cricket masters
who had made a note of Jan’s name at the valued instigation of A. G.
Swallow. He had also watched Jan bowling in the one game in which he had
played on the Upper, thanks to the departed Sprawson, and he had his eye
on the young left-hander with the queer individual action. But it was
the cool eye of a long-headed cricketer, and Jan never read it for an
instant. Chips might have done so if he had been in the form, but he was
now in the Upper Fifth, and his sanguine prophecies were neither
remembered nor renewed. Jan only wished that Relton would not look at
him, sometimes, almost as though he knew all about a fellow; and it
rather bothered him to get off lighter than he deserved for a false
concord in his prose or a vile copy of verses.
But that was not his trouble on the nights when the steam merry-go-round
enlivened the small dormitory with “Over the Garden Wall” and
“Lardy-dah,” those egregious ditties of their day. It was the first
round of the All Ages Mile that kept Jan from sleeping either night
until the steam tunes stopped.
On the strength of his performance the year before and of several inches
since added to his stature, Jan had found himself seriously fancied for
a place in the Mile. The dash of premature notoriety, combined with a
superfluity of sage advice, made him sadly self-conscious and
over-anxious before the event, which ended in a complete fiasco so far
as he was concerned. It was his fate to meet the ultimate winner (down
with his eyes the year before) in the very first heat. Jan dogged him as
gratuitously advised, instead of making the running as flesh and blood
implored. And having no spurt he was not only badly beaten, but failed
even to come in third, and was thus out of the running in the first
round.
That was bad enough; hardy enemies of the Shockley type took care to
make it worse. They became suddenly alive to an alleged “roll” put on by
Jan in anticipation of his success; and Jan was sufficiently down on
himself to take their remarks for once to heart. He felt still more the
silence of many who had believed in him; even the cheery sympathy of a
few only aggravated his sense of failure; and as for the loquacious
Chips, and his well-meant efforts to keep the dormitory talk to any
other topic, they were almost as maddening as the steam merry-go-round,
that filled every pause with its infernal “Lardy-dah.” That tenacious
tune had supplied the accompaniment to his hopes and fears of the night
before; it had run in his head throughout the fatal race; and now it
made merry over his utterly idiotic and unpardonable failure.
It will be seen that the robust Jan had grown a crop of sensibilities
almost worthy of his friend Carpenter, except that Jan’s were wholly and
grimly inarticulate. But he was now sixteen, and that is the age of
surprises in a boy. It took Jan in more ways than one. It made him long
to do startling things, and it made him do some foolish ones instead;
hence his hard training for the mile, and his actual running when the
time came. It made him feel that he had done less than nothing at school
so far, that he was less than nobody, and yet that there was more in him
than anybody knew; and now he wanted them to know it; and now he didn’t
care a blow what happened to him, or what was thought, at a school to
which he had been sent against his will. There was no forgetting that at
a time like this. If he was a failure, if he went on failing, well, at
any rate it would be a score off those who had sent him there, and never
gave him enough pocket money, or wrote him an unnecessary line.
So Jan came back to a very early position of his, only trailing the
accumulated grievances of a year and a half; and by the third and last
night of the fair he had the whole collection to brood upon, in gigantic
array, in proportion the more colossal and grotesque because he could
not and would not speak of them to a soul. And there was that fool
Chips, jawing away as usual to anybody who would listen, about anything
and everything except the sports.
“I shall be jolly glad when that beastly old fair moves on,” quoth Chips
after an interval of “Over the Garden Wall.”
Jan agreed so heartily that he could scarcely hold his tongue.
“I don’t know that I shall,” said the new boy in Crabtree’s corner. “It
sounds rather jolly when you’re dropping off.”
Jan could have pulled every stitch off the little brute’s bed. But the
remark was very properly ignored.
“I suppose you know,” said Bingley, “that two fellows were once bunked
for going to it?”
“Going to what?” asked Chips.
“This very fair.”
“They must’ve been fools!” said Jan, raising his voice at last.
“I thought you were asleep?” cried the new boy, who had no sense.
“You keep your thoughts to yourself,” growled Jan, “or I’ll come and
show you whether I am or not.”
“They were fools,” assented Bingley, “but they were rather sportsmen
too. They got out of one of the hill houses at night, and came down in
disguise, in bowlers and false beards! But they were spotted right
enough, and they’d got to go.”
“And serve them jolly well right!” said Jan, cantankerously.
“I don’t call it such a crime, Tiger.”
“Who’s talking about crimes? You’ve got ’em on the brain, Bingley.”
“I thought you said they deserved to be bunked?”
“So they did—for going and getting cobbed.”
“Oh, I see! You’d’ve looked every master in the face, I suppose, without
being recognised?”
“I wouldn’t’ve made them look twice at me, by sticking on a false
beard,” snorted Jan, stung by the tone he had been the first to employ.
Chips understood his mood, and liked him too much to join in the
discussion. But Bingley had been longer in the school than either of
them, and he was not going to knuckle under in a minute.
“It’s a pity you weren’t here, Tiger,” said he, “to show them how to do
it.”
“It’s a thing any fool could do if he tried,” returned Jan. “I’d back
myself to get out of this house in five minutes.”
“Not you, old chap!” said Chips, making an unfortunate entry into the
discussion after all.
“I would so,” declared Jan hot-headedly. “I’d do it to-morrow if the
fair wasn’t going away.”
Bingley began to jeer.
“I like that, when you jolly well know it is going!”
“I’ll go to-night, if you say much more, you fool!”
Jan’s springs twanged and wheezed as he sat bolt upright in his bed.
“You know you won’t be such a silly idiot,” said Chips, in an earnest
voice.
“Of course he does!” jeered Bingley. “Nobody knows it quite so well.”
There was an instant’s pause, filled by a sounding blast from the
market-place, and then the thud of bare feet planted on the floor.
“Surely you’re not going to let him dare you——”
“Not he; don’t you worry!”
It was Bingley who cut Chips short, and Jan thanked him as he slid into
his trousers in the dark. His voice was strange, and not without the
tremor of high excitement. There was a jingle of curtain rings across
the dormitory. Carpenter was out of his partition in defiance of the
rules; he appeared dimly at the foot of Jan’s, into which Bingley was
already peering over the partition.
“Are you off your chump?” demanded Chips.
“Not he,” said Bingley again. “He’s only bunging us up!”
Bingley might have been an infant Mephistopheles; but he was really only
an incredulous, irritated, and rather excited schoolboy.
“You’ll see directly,” muttered Jan, slipping his braces over his
night-shirt.
“You’ll be caught to a certainty, and bunked if you’re caught!”
That was Chips, in desperation now.
“And a good job too! I’ve had about enough of this place.”
That was the Jan of their first term together.
“And it’s raining like the very dickens!”
This was the child in Crabtree’s corner, an insensible little sinner,
who seemed to take the imminent enormity as an absolute matter of
course.
“So much the better,” said Jan. “I’ll take a brolly and run all the less
risk of being seen, and you see if I don’t bring you all something from
the fair.”
“It’s something he’s gone and got to-day,” whispered Bingley for Chips’s
consolation. “It’s all a swizzle, you’ll see.”
“You look out of the window in about five minutes,” retorted Jan from
the door, “and p’r’aps _you’ll_ see!”
And out he actually stole, carrying the clean boots that he had brought
up to dormitory in readiness for first school, and leaving Chips in
muzzled consternation on the threshold.
The rain pelted on the skylight over the stairs. It had been a showery
day, but it was a very wet night, and Jan was almost as glad of it as he
had just professed himself. He saw a distant complication of wet
clothes, but as a mere umbrella among umbrellas he stood a really fair
chance of not being seen. It was still only a chance; but that was half
the fun. And fun it was, though a terrifying form of fun, and though Jan
was already feeling a bit unsound about the knees, he had to go on with
it; there was as yet no question in his mind about that, and hardly any
looking back at the ridiculous combination of taunt and impulse which
had committed him to this mad adventure.
Conversation had ceased in the top long dormitory; in the one below a
dropping fire was still maintained; and the intervening flight of
lead-lined stairs, taken one at a time, with terrible deliberation, and
in his socks, struck a chill to the adventurer’s marrow. He began to
think he really was a fool; but he would look a bigger one if he went
back now. So he gained the foot of the second flight in safety, and
paused to consider his next move. The flags were colder than the leaden
stairs; so he sat on the slate table while he put on his boots; and the
slate table was colder than the flags.
His first idea had been to get out into the quad, as he had got out into
it his very first morning in the place, through the hall windows. But
the rain rather spoilt that plan; the rain was not an unmixed blessing
after all. The umbrellas, now he came to think of it, were kept in the
lower study passage; and how was he to break in there? Of course the
outer doors would be locked; and he might get wet through in the quad,
before effecting an entry into the lower studies, and even then leaving
a dripping trail behind him.
No; if he wanted an umbrella he must borrow old Bob Heriot’s. That was a
paralysing alternative, but it was the only one to returning humiliated
to dormitory. After all, the hat-stand was only just on the other side
of the green baize door under which Jan could see the thinnest thread of
light from Heriot’s outer hall. And dear old Bob sat up till all hours;
that was notorious; and his study was beyond the dining-room, leading
out of it, so that in all probability there would be two shut doors
between the intruder and the unsuspecting master of the house.
But the long lean figure of Robert Heriot, smoking his pipe in the inner
sanctuary, cocking a quick ear at the furtive footstep on his side of
the house, and finally confronting the audacious offender, with
bristling beard and flashing spectacles, made all at once the most
portentous picture in Jan’s mind. Heriot of all men! The one master with
whom the boldest boy never dared to take a liberty; the one whose good
opinion was best worth having, and perhaps hardest to win; why had he
not thought of Heriot before? To think of him now so vividly was to
abandon the whole adventure in a panic. Better the scorn of fifty
Bingleys, for the rest of the term, than the wrath of one Heriot for a
single minute such as he had just gone through in a paroxysm of the
imagination.
Jan found himself creeping upstairs more gingerly than ever in his
boots, climbing nearer and nearer to the dropping voices in the lower
dormitory. That was Shockley’s guttural monologue. It was Shockley who
had said the hardest thing to Jan about his running, in just that
hateful voice. It was Shockley who would have the most and the worst to
say if it came to his ears, as no doubt it would, that one of his
special butts had made such a feeble fool of himself as Jan knew that he
was making now. And then life would be duller even than it had been
before, and school a rottener place, and himself a greater nonentity
than ever. Nay, all these changes for the worse had already taken place
in the last minute of ignominious retreat. But a minute ago, yes, a
minute ago there had been some excitement in life, and a fellow had felt
somebody for once!
“I’m blowed if I do,” said Jan deliberately to himself; and down he went
with equal deliberation to the green baize door. It opened with scarcely
a sound. A light was burning in the little entrance hall beyond. And the
dining-room door was providentially shut.
Here was Heriot’s umbrella; and it was wet. Hanging over it was an Irish
tweed cape, a characteristic garment, also a bit wet about the hem. Old
Bob Heriot had been out, but he had come in again, and it could not be
quite eleven. Unless tradition lied he was safe in his den for another
hour.
From his fit of cowardice Jan had flown to the opposite extreme of
foolhardy audacity. What better disguise than Heriot’s coat and even
Heriot’s hat, the soft felt one that was also rather wet already? Jan
had them on in a twinkling, drunk as he was already with the magnitude
of his impudence. It would give them something to talk about, whether he
was caught or not. That was Jan’s way of expressing to himself his
intention of contributing to the annals of the school, whatever
happened.
The front door had not been locked up for the night, and it never was by
day. Heriot had his happy-go-lucky ways, but the town as a rule was as
quiet as the sleepiest hollow. Jan managed to shut the door almost
noiselessly behind him, never thinking now of his return. Out in the
rain the umbrella went up at once; like an extinguisher, he jammed it
down about his ears; and the instinct of further concealment drove his
left hand deep into a capacious pocket. It came upon one of old Heriot’s
many pipes. Next instant the pipe was between the madman’s teeth, and
Jan, on the opposite pavement of a dripping and deserted street, was
flourishing the umbrella and pointing out the pipe to three white faces
at a window in the shiny roof.
He would not have cared, at that moment, if he had known that he was
going to be caught the next. But nobody was abroad just then in that
rain to catch him. And not further down the street than Jan could have
jerked a fives-ball, the glare of the market-place lit up the stone
front and archway of the Mitre. And the blare of the steam
merry-go-round waxed fast and furious as he marched under Heriot’s
umbrella into the zone of light.
“He wears a penny flower in his coat—
Lardy-dah—
And a penny paper collar round his throat—
Lardy-dah—
In his hand a penny stick,
In his tooth a penny pick,
And a penny in his pocket—
Lardy-dah—lardy-dah—
And a penny in his pocket—
Lardy-dah!”
Jan had picked up the words from some fellow who used to render such
rubbish to a worse accompaniment on the hall piano; and they ran in his
head with the outrageous tune. They reminded him that he had scarcely a
penny in his own pocket, thanks to his munificent people in Norfolk, and
for once it was just as well. Otherwise he would certainly have had a
ride, in Heriot’s well-known foul-weather garb, on one of “COLLINSON’S
ROYAL RACING THOROUGHBREDS, THE GREATEST AND MOST ELABORATE MACHINE NOW
TRAVELLING.”
Last nights are popular nights, and the fair was crowded in spite of the
rain. Round and round went the wooden horses, carrying half the young
bloods of the little place, with here and there an apple-cheeked son or
daughter of the surrounding soil. Jan tilted his umbrella to have a look
at them; their shouts were drowned by the shattering crash of the steam
organ, but their flushed faces caught fresh fire from a great naked
light as they whirled nearest to where Jan stood. One purple countenance
he recognised as the pace slackened; it was Mulberry, the local
reprobate of evil memory, swaying in his stirrups and whacking his
wooden mount as though they were in the straight.
The deafening blare sank to a dying whine; the flare-light sputtered
audibly in the rain, and Jan jerked his umbrella forward as the dizzy
riders dismounted within a few yards of him. Jan turned his back on
them, and contemplated the cobbles under his nose, and the lighted
puddles that ringed them round, like meshes of liquid gold. He watched
for the unsteady corduroys of Mulberry, and withdrew at their approach.
But there was no certain escape short of immediate departure from the
fair, which occupied little more than the area of a full-sized lawn
tennis court, and covered half of that with the merry-go-round, and
another quarter with stalls and vans.
One of the stalls displayed a legend which seemed to Jan to deserve more
custom than it attracted.
Rings Must Lie to Win
Watch-la!
2 Rings 1d.
ALL YOU RING YOU HAVE.
The watches lay in open cardboard boxes on a sloping board. There was a
supply of wooden rings that just fitted round the boxes. Jan watched one
oaf run through several coppers, his rings always lying between the
boxes or on top of one. Jan felt it was a case for a spin, and he longed
to have a try with that cunning left hand of his. But he had actually
only twopence on him, and the first necessity was two-pennyworth of
evidence that he had really been to the fair. Yet what trophy could
compare with one of those cheap watches in its cardboard box?
It so happened that Jan had a watch of his own worth everything on sale
at this trumpery fair; but he could almost have bartered it for one of
these that would show the top dormitory, at any rate, the kind of chap
he was. And yet he was not the kind who often saw himself in heroic
proportions; but an abnormal mood was at the back and front of this
whole adventure; and perhaps no more fitting climax could have inflamed
a reeling mind. He produced his pennies with sudden determination, yet
with a hand as cool as his brain was hot, and as cool a preliminary
survey to make sure that Mulberry was not already dogging him.
“Two rings a penny,” said the fur-capped custodian of the watches,
handing the rings to Jan. “An’ wot you rings you 'aves.”
Jan stood alone before the sloping board, kept a few feet off by an
intervening table, and he poised his first ring as the steam fiend broke
out again with “Over the Garden Wall.” A back-handed spin sent it well
among the watches, and it went on spinning until it settled at an angle
over one of the boxes, as though loth to abandon the attempt to ring it
properly.
“Rings must lie _flat_ to win,” said the fellow in the fur cap, with a
quick squint at Jan. “Try again, mister; you’ll do better with less
spin.”
Jan grinned dryly as he resolved to put on a bit more. He had heard his
father drive hard bargains in the Saturday night’s marketing aforetime.
Old Rutter had known how to take care of himself across any stall or
barrow, even when his gait was like Mulberry’s on the way home; and Jan
had a sense of similar capacity as he poised his second ring against the
voluminous folds of Mr. Heriot’s cape. Thence it skimmed with graceful
trajectory, in palpable gyrations; had circled one of the square boxes
before he knew it, and was spinning down it like a nut on a bolt, when
the man in the fur cap whipped a finger between the ring and the table.
“That’s a near one, mister!” cried he. “But it don’t lie flat.”
Nor did it. The ring had jammed obliquely on the cardboard box, a
finger’s breadth from the board.
“It would’ve done if you’d left it alone!” shouted Jan above the steam
fiend’s roar.
“That it wouldn’t! It’s a bit o’ bad luck, that’s wot it is; never knew
it to 'appen afore, I didn’t; but it don’t lie straight, now do it?”
“It would’ve done,” replied Jan through his teeth. “And the watch is
mine, so let’s have it.”
Whether he said that more than once, or what the fur-capped foe replied,
Jan never knew. The merry-go-round robbed him of half that passed
between them, and all that was to follow blurred the rest as soon as it
had taken place. One or two salient moments were to stand out in his
mind like rocks. He was sprawling across the intervening table, he had
seized the watch that he had fairly won, and the ruffian in the cap had
seized his wrist. That horny grip remained like the memory of a
handcuff. The thing developed into a semi-recumbent tug-of-war, in which
Jan more than held his own. The watches in their boxes came sliding down
the sloping board, the fur-cap followed them, and a head like a fluffy
melon hung a-ripening as the blood rushed into it. Jan beheld swelling
veins in a stupor of angry satisfaction, and without a thought of his
own position until a rap on the back went through him like a stab.
It was only a country policeman in streaming leggings; but he had not
arrived alone upon the scene; and Jan felt the flooded cobble-stones
heaving under him, as he relinquished his prize at once, and recoiled
from the gaze of countless eyes.
Yet the policeman for one was not looking at him. The policeman was
levelling an open hand at the melon-headed rogue, and reiterating a
demand which only added to Jan’s embarrassment.
“You give this young feller what he fairly won. _I_ saw what you did.
I’ve had my eye on you all night. You give him that watch, or you’ll
hear a bit more about it!”
Jan tried to raise his voice in cowardly repudiation, but his tongue
refused the base office. The lights of the fair were going round and
round him. The policeman, the rogue, and three or four more, had been
joined by the drunken Mulberry, who was staring and pointing and trying
to say something which nobody could understand. The policeman sent him
about his business with a cuff, and Jan began to breathe. He felt the
watch put into his unwilling hand. He heard a good-humoured little
cheer. He saw the policeman looking at him strangely, and he wondered if
a tip was expected of him. Even at that moment Jan felt a bitter wave of
resentment against those who sent him to school, against his will, with
half-a-sovereign for a whole term’s pocket-money. He could only thank
the policeman with a stutter and a gulp, and slink from the scene like
the beaten dog he felt.
Luckily his legs were cooler than his head; they carried him down the
street in the opposite direction to his house and the school buildings;
and he had not taken many strides on the comparatively dark and quite
deserted pavement, when his mind began to recover tone rapidly. It
recovered more tone than it had lost. He had given himself up, and now
he realised that he was not only safe so far, but successful beyond his
wildest dreams. Not only had he been to the fair, but thanks to the
policeman (whom he wished more than ever to reward substantially) he had
come away with a silver watch to show for the adventure. What would they
have to say to _that_ in the small dormitory? They would never be able
to keep it to themselves; it would get about the school, and make him
somebody after all. He would acquire, perhaps, undying fame as the
fellow who got out at a moment’s notice, and went to the fair in a
master’s hat and coat, and won a prize at watch-la, and brought it back
in triumph to dormitory, at Heriot’s of all houses in the school!
He would probably tell Heriot before he left. Old Bob was just the man
to laugh over such an escapade, more heartily perhaps if one kept it
till one came down as an Old Boy. Jan felt ridiculously brave again
under old Bob’s umbrella, which he had dropped for a moment during the
fracas at the fair. That, of course, was why he had also lost his head.
But now he was as bold as any lion, and particularly determined to do
something at school after all, so that he might come down as an Old Boy
to recount this very adventure.
Not that he had the egotistical temperament, even to the extent that
(for instance) poor old Chips had it. But this was that abnormal mood
which had only been interrupted by a minute of pure panic at the fair.
And now the swimming pavement floated under his feet like air.
Still airier was an overtaking stride which Jan never so much as heard
until a strong arm slid through his, and a voice that he heard every day
addressed him in every-day tones.