THE EXTREME PENALTY
It is not to be pretended that a cloud of live young eye-witnesses make
quite so much of these excitements as the historian old or young; they
may yell themselves hoarse in front of the pavilion, but the beads are
not wiped from their heroes’ brows before the question is, “What shall
we do till lock-up?” It is only the Eleven who want to talk it all over
in that sanctum of swelldom, the back room at Maltby’s, and only its
latest member who has a tremendous telegram to send to his people first.
And then it so happens that he does not join them; neither does the
Captain of Cricket, though for once in his captaincy he would be really
welcome.
Evan had retired to his house, and not a bit as though the school
belonged to him, but with curiously little of the habitual strut (now
that he had something to strut about) in his almost unsteady gait. Jan,
too, was ensconced in Heriot’s, and quite unnecessarily prepared to
dodge Evan at any moment, or to protect himself with a third person if
run to ground. The third person was naturally Chips Carpenter, who had
gone mad on the ground, and was now working off the fit in a parody of
“The Battle of Blenheim” in place of an ordinary prose report of the
latest and most famous of all victories.
Though there was no sign of Evan, and after an hour or so little
likelihood of his appearance, still Jan kept dodging in and out of the
Editor’s study, like an uneasy spirit. And once he remarked that there
was an awful row in the lower passage, apparently suggesting that Chips
ought to go down and quell it. But Chips had never been a Crabtree in
the house, and at present he was too deep in his rhyming dictionary to
hear either the row or Jan.
Lock-up at last. The little block of ivy-mantled studies became a
manufactory of proses and verses, all Latin but Chips’s, and the Greek
iambics of others high up in the school, and all but the English effort
to be signed by Mr. Heriot after prayers that night or first thing in
the morning, to show that the Sabbath had not been broken by secular
composition. Nine o’clock and prayers were actually approaching; and yet
Jan still sat, or stood about, unmolested in his disorderly study; and
yet the heavens had not fallen, or earth trembled with the wrath of
Heriot or anybody else. Could it be that for the second time Jan was to
be let off by the soft-heartedness of a master who knew enough to hang
him?
Hardly! Haigh, of all men! Yet he had been most awfully decent about it
all; it was a revelation to Jan that there was so much common decency
after all in his oldest enemy....
Now he would soon know. Hark at the old harsh bell, rung by Morgan
outside the hall, across the quad!
Prayers.
Jan had scarcely expected to go in to prayers again, and as he went he
remembered his first impressions of the function at the beginning of his
first term. He remembered the small boy standing sentinel in the flagged
passage leading to the green-baize door, and all the fellows armed with
hymn-books and chatting merrily in their places at table. That small boy
was a big fellow at the Sixth Form table now, and the chat was more
animated but less merry than it had seemed to Jan then. Something was in
the air already. Could it have leaked out before the sword descended?
No; it must be something else. Everybody was eager to tell him about it,
as he repeated ancient history by coming in almost last.
“Have you heard about Devereux?”
“Have you heard, Rutter?”
“_Haven’t_ you heard?”
His heart missed a beat.
“No. What?”
“He’s down with measles!”
“That all?” exclaimed Jan, tingling with returning animation.
If his own downfall had been in vain!
“It’s bad enough,” said the big fellow who had stood sentinel four years
ago. “They say he must have had them on him when he was in, and the
whole thing may make him jolly bad.”
“Who says so?”
“Morgan; he’s just heard it.”
Poverty of detail was eked out by fertile speculation. Jan was hardly
listening; he could not help considering how far this new catastrophe
would affect himself. Evan was as strong as a horse, and that moreover
with the strength which had never been outgrown; besides, he would have
his magnificent century to look back upon from his pillow. That was
enough to see anybody through anything. And now there would be no fear
of mental complication, no question of his coming forward and owning up:
for who was going to carry a school scandal into the Sanatorium, even if
the school ever learnt the rights?
And yet somehow Jan felt as though a loophole had been stopped at the
back of his brain; and an inquiry within made him ashamed to discover
what the loophole had been. Evan would have found out, and never have
let him bear the brunt; in the end Evan’s honesty would have saved them
both, because nothing paid like honesty with dear old Thrale. That was
what Jan saw, now that seeing it could only make him feel a beast! It
was almost a relief to realise that Evan would still be ruined if the
truth leaked out through other lips, and that a friend’s were thus
sealed closer than before.
The Heriots were very late in coming in. Why was that? But at last the
sentinel showed an important face, fulminating “Hush!” And sister and
brother entered in the usual silence.
Miss Heriot took her place at the piano under the shelf bearing the now
solitary cup of which Jan might almost be described as the solitary
winner; at any rate the present house eleven consisted, like the
historic Harrow eleven, of Rutter “and ten others.” The ten, nay, the
thirty others then present could not have guessed a tenth or a thirtieth
part of all that was in their bowler’s mind that night.
Mr. or Miss Heriot always chose a good hymn; to-night it was No. 22,
Ancient and Modern; a simple thing, and only appropriate to the time of
year, but still rather a favourite of Jan’s. He found himself braying
out the air from the top of the Sixth Form table, as though nothing
could happen to him, while Chips Carpenter lorded it like every captain
of that house, with his back to the empty grate, and fondly imagined
that he was singing bass. Neither friend and contemporary would ever
have done much credit to the most musical school in England, and now
only one of them would be able to go about saying that he had ever been
there!
Unless ... and there was no telling from Heriot’s voice.
It was the same unaffected, manly voice which had appealed to Jan on his
very first night in hall; the prayers were the same, a characteristic
selection only used in that house; but whereas a few phrases had struck
Jan even on that occasion, now he knew them all off by heart, but
listened with no less care in order to remember them if possible at the
ends of the earth.
“O Lord, Who knowest our peculiar temptations here, help us by Thy Holy
Spirit to struggle against them. Save us from being ashamed of Thee and
of our duty. Save us from the base and degrading fear of one
another....” Jan hoped he had stood up sufficiently to the other old
choices in the Eleven; he could not help an ungodly feeling that he had;
but he had been very down on his luck earlier in the term.
“Grant, O Lord, that we may always remember that our bodies are the
temple of the living God, and that we may not pollute them by evil
thoughts or evil words.... Give us grace never to approve or by consent
to sanction in others what our consciences tell us is wrong, but to
reprove it either by word or by silence. Let us never ourselves act the
part of tempter to others, never place a stumbling-block in our
brother’s way, or offend any of our companions, for Jesus Christ’s sake.
Amen.”
Well, he had never played the tempter or placed stumbling-blocks,
whatever else he had done; it was not for that that he would have to go;
but he was not so sure about evil words. He had said some things,
sometimes, which might have earned him his now imminent fate, if they
had reached some ears; so perhaps he had little to complain about after
all. Not that foul language had ever been his habit; but he had never
been so particular as Chips, for example, now so devout in the Lord’s
Prayer at the other end of the Sixth Form table. Old Chips in his early
days had gone to the foolhardy and (in him) futile length of reproof by
word; even now he was rising from his knees as though he had been really
praying; but Jan had only been thinking his own thoughts, though
kneeling there without doubt for the last time.
And yet a second moment’s doubt did thrill him as Heriot took up his
usual stand in front of the grate, and some of the fellows made a dash
for milk and dog-rocks at the bottom of the long table, but more
clustered round the fireplace to hear Heriot and Jan discuss the match.
They actually did discuss it for a minute or two; but Heriot was dry as
tinder in spite of his intentions; and when he suddenly announced that
he would sign all verses in the morning, but would just like to speak to
Rutter for a minute, Jan followed him through into the private part with
a stabbing conviction that all was over with him.
“I’ve heard Mr. Haigh’s story,” said Heriot very coldly in his study.
“Do you wish me to hear yours?”
“No, sir.”
Jan did not wince at Heriot’s tone, but Heriot did at his. The one was
to be expected, the other almost brazen in its unblushing alacrity.
“You have nothing whatever to say for yourself, after all these years,
after——”
Heriot pulled himself up—as on his haunches—with a jerk of the
grizzled head and a fierce flash of the glasses.
“But from all I hear I’m not surprised,” he added with bitter
significance. “I find I’ve been mistaken in you all along.”
Yet Jan did not see his meaning at the time, and the bitterness only
enabled him to preserve apparent insensibility.
“There’s nothing _to_ say, sir. I was shamming right enough, and I
suppose Mr. Haigh has told you why.”
“He has, indeed! The matter has also been reported to the Head Master,
and he wishes to see you at once. I need hardly warn you what to expect,
I should think.”
“No, sir. I expect to go.”
“Evidently you won’t be sorry, so I shan’t waste any sympathy upon you.
But I must say I think you might have thought of the house!”
The matter had not presented itself in that light to Jan; now that it
did, he felt with Heriot on the spot, and did not perceive an unworthy
although most human element in the man’s outlook. The house would not be
ruined for life. On the other hand, in his determination to put a stiff
lip on every phase of his downfall, and beyond all things not to betray
himself by ever breaking down, Jan had over-acted like most unskilled
histrions, and had already created an impression of coarse bravado on a
mind prepared to stretch any possible point in his favour.
But it was no time to think about the accomplished interview with Bob
Heriot, with truly terrific retribution even now awaiting him at the
hands of the redoubtable old Jerry. About a hundred yards of the soft
summer night, and he would stand in that awful presence for the last
time. And it was all very well for Jan to call him “old Jerry” in his
heart up to the last, and to ask himself what there was, after all, to
fear so acutely from a man of nearly seventy who could not eat him; his
heart quaked none the less, and if he had been obliged to answer himself
it would have been with a trembling lip.
He dared to dawdle on the way, rehearsing his scanty past relations with
the great little old man. There was the time when he was nearly flogged,
after the Abinger affair. Well, the old man might have been far more
severe than he really was on that occasion. There was that other early
scene when Jan was told that another time he would not sit down so
comfortably, and Chips’s story about his friend Olympus. It was all grim
humour that appealed to this delinquent; but it was a humour that became
terrible when the whole school were arraigned and held responsible for
some individual vileness, pronounced inconceivable in a really sound
community; for then they were all dogs and curs together, and, that
demonstrated, it was “Dogs, go to your kennels!” And go they would,
feeling beaten mongrels every one; never laughing at the odd old man,
never even reviling him; often loving but always fearing him.
Jan feared him now the more because of late especially he had been
learning to love Mr. Thrale. Though still only in the Lower Sixth, as
Captain of Cricket he had come in for sundry _ex officio_ honours, in
the shape of invitations to breakfast and audiences formal and informal.
On all such occasions Jan had been embarrassed and yet braced, puzzled
by parables but enlightened in flashes, stimulated in soul and sinew but
awed from skin to core; and now the awe was undiluted, crude, and
overwhelming. He felt that every word from that trenchant tongue would
leave a scar for life, and the scorn in those old eyes haunt him to his
grave.
Sub-consciously he was still thinking of the judge and executioner in
his gown of office, on his carved judgment seat, as the day’s crop of
petty offenders found and faced him after twelve. In his library Jan had
seldom before set foot, never with the seeing eye that he brought
to-night; and the smallness and simplicity of it struck him through all
his tremors when the servant had shown him in. It was not so very much
larger than the large studies at Heriot’s. Only a gangway of floor
surrounded a great desk in a litter after Jan’s own heart; garden smells
came through an open lattice, and with them a maze of midges to dance
round the one lamp set amid the litter; and in the light of that lamp, a
pale face framed in silvery hair, wide eyes filled with heart-broken
disgust, and a mouth that might have been closed for ever.
At last it came to mobile life, and Jan heard in strangely dispassionate
tones a brief recital of all that had been heard and seen of his
proceedings in the fatal hour when pretended illness kept him from the
match. Again he was asked if he had anything to challenge or to add; for
it was Heriot’s question in other words, and Jan had no new answer; but
this time he could only shake a bowed head humbly, as he had bent it in
acknowledgment of his own writing on the envelope. Jerry was far less
fierce than he had expected, but a hundredfold more terrible in his pale
grief and scorn. Jan felt an even sorrier and meaner figure than on
coming up for judgment after the Abinger affair; so far from the support
of secret heroics, it was impossible to stand in the white light of that
nobly reproachful countenance, and even to remember that he was not
altogether the vile thing he seemed.
“If there is one form of treachery worse than another,” said Mr. Thrale,
“it is treachery in high places. The office that you have occupied,
Rutter, is rightly or wrongly a high one in this school; but you have
dragged it in the dust, and our honour stands above our cricket. On the
eve of our school matches, when we had a right to look to you to keep
our flag flying, you have betrayed your trust and forfeited your post
and your existence here; but if it were the end of cricket in this
school, I would not keep you another day.”
Jan looked up suddenly.
“Am I to go on a Sunday, sir?”
The thought of his return to the Norfolk rectory, in this dire disgrace,
had taken sudden and most poignant shape. On a Sunday it would be too
awful, with the somnolent yet captious household in a state of either
complacent indolence or sanctified fuss, assimilating sirloin or
starting for church, according to the hour of his arrival.
Mr. Thrale seemed already to have taken this into humane consideration,
for he promptly replied: “You will remain till Monday; meanwhile you are
to consider yourself a prisoner on parole, and mix no more in the
society for which you have shown yourself unfit. So far as this school
goes you are condemned to death for lying betrayal, and mock-manly
meanness. Murder will out, Rutter, but you are not condemned for any
undiscovered crime of the past. Yet if it is true that you ever got out
of your house at night——”
Jan could not meet the awful mien with which Mr. Thrale here made
dramatic pause; but he filled it by mumbling that it was quite true, he
had got out once, over two years ago.
“Once,” said Mr. Thrale, “is enough to deprive you of the previous good
character that might otherwise have been taken into consideration. I do
not say it could have saved you; but nothing can save the traitor guilty
of repeated acts of treason. A certain consideration you will receive at
Mr. Heriot’s hands, by his special request, until you go on Monday
morning. And that, Rutter, is all I have to say to you as Head Master of
this school.”
Even so is the convicted murderer handed over to the High Sheriff for
destruction; but just as other judges soften the dread language of the
law with more human utterances on their own account, so before he was
done did Mr. Thrale address himself to Jan as man to man, merely
reversing the legal order. He asked the boy what he was going to do in
life, and besought him not to look upon his whole life as necessarily
ruined. The greater the fall, the greater the merit of rising again; he
had almost said, and he would say, the greater the sport of rising! Jan
had pulled matches out of the fire; let him take life as a game, bowl
out the Devil that was in him, and pull his own soul out of Hell! Here
he enlarged upon the lust of drink, bluntly but with a tender breadth of
understanding, as a snare set alike for the just and the unjust, a curse
most accursed in its destruction of the moral fibre, as in this very
case; and Jan could not have listened more humbly if his own whole body
and soul had been already undermined. He thought he saw tears in the old
man’s eyes; he knew he had them in his own. These last words of earnest
exhortation, beginning as they did between man and man, went on and
finished almost as between father and son, with a handshake and “God
guide you!” There was even the offer of a letter which, while not
glozing the worst, would yet say those other things that could still be
said, and might stand Jan in good stead if he were man enough to show it
in Australia.
But meanwhile he had been expelled from school, expelled in his last
term, when Captain of Cricket, and on top of his one triumph in that
capacity. And on his way back to his house, Jan stopped in the starlit
street, and what do you think he did?
He laughed aloud as he suddenly remembered the actual facts of the case.