HIS LAST FLING
Jan turned back to the bedroom window, and stood looking out with eyes
that saw less than ever. The window was open at the bottom; he kept a
discreet distance from the sill, but might have seen a strip of the
pavement opposite, now dappled by a sudden shower. He was as the blind,
however, until a slight crash below made him pop his head out without
thinking. Then he saw that it was raining, because Mr. Heriot had
emerged from the house, and broken into a run instead of returning for
his umbrella.
The only thought Jan gave him was a twinge of wonder that he could go
his ways so briskly with the virtual head of his house lying under
sentence of expulsion in the spare room. Heriot was mighty keen on his
house, keenly critical and appreciative of every fellow in it, but
keener yet on a corporate entity, mysteriously independent of the
individuals that made it up, which expressed itself in Jan’s mind as
“the house itself.” He too had felt like that about the house cricket
and the school Eleven; the best bat got measles, and it was no good
giving him another thought. And yet somehow it made Jan himself feel
bitterly small to see Heriot gadding about his business like that in the
rain.
Otherwise the sight did him good, in liberating his mind from the
overload of new ideas that weighed it down. Always a great talker, that
poor old Chips had told him so much in such quick time that it was
impossible to keep his outpourings distinct and apart from each other;
they were like the blots of rain on the pavement, spreading, joining,
overlapping into a featureless whole. But the shower ceased even as Jan
looked down; the pavement began to dry before all semblance of design
was obliterated; and the fusion of fresh impressions suffered an
analogous arrest.
Evan dried by himself....
Jan brought a cane chair to the window, and sat down to think about
Evan, to be fair to old Evan at all costs. It was easy to be down on
him, to feel he had been guilty of unpardonable perfidy; but had he? Was
there any great reason why he should not have told Chips—Chips whom he
knew of old, and whom he had seen with Jan? Surely it was the most
natural confidence in the world; and then it was the only one, even
Chips thought that, though Jan was not so sure when he recalled the bold
scorn of Sandham and some others in the Eleven—their indistinguishable
whispers and their unmistakable looks. But, even so! Had he ever asked
Evan to keep his secret? Had not Evan, on the other hand, kept it on the
whole unasked? Was it not due to him first and last that the whole
school had not got hold of it? Chips might say what he liked about
Heriot, but no master could impose secrecy upon a boy against the boy’s
will. Evan’s will towards Jan must always have been of the best. It was
Jan’s own fault if he had imagined himself under an inconceivable
obligation; it only showed what a simpleton he had always been about
Evan Devereux. That was it! He was far too simple altogether; even now
he could not shake off all his unreasonable disappointment because Evan
had been a trifle less loyal to him, in the very beginning, than he had
chosen to flatter himself all these years.
It was a comfort to turn to the other side of the account. Thank
goodness he had been able to do something for Evan in the end! He did
owe it to him, whatever Chips chose to say or think. Chips was a jealous
old fool; there was no getting away from that. Jan only hoped he had not
given Chips an inkling of the real facts of the case. He did not think
he had. It had been a happy thought to pretend that Evan’s connection
with his downfall was that of the feeble accomplice whom he and not
Sandham had led astray; it really made expulsion too good for him, so
Chips would be under no temptation to let it out or to drag in Evan’s
name at all. In any case he had promised. He was a man of his word. He
was the soul of honour and integrity, old Chips ... so at least Jan had
always thought him down to this very afternoon. Simpleton again!
Chips, of all people, not always any better than he should have been....
Jan could not get that out of his head; it was another disappointment to
his simplicity. He had thought he knew the worst of Chips, his
touchiness, his jealousy, taking too much notice of himself and
sometimes thinking that other people did not take enough. A bit
weak-minded and excitable, Jan would have called him, thinking of the
morbid and emotional side of his friend’s character which had certainly
shown itself that day. But what enthusiasm, what a heart, and what a
head too in its way! It only showed that you knew very little, really,
about anybody else, even your intimate house-mate; but it might also
have shown Jan that he was slow to think evil, slow to perceive the
worst side of the life around him, and not only simple but pure in heart
in spite of all those years about the stables.
He supposed he had not the same temptations as other fellows. Here were
his two friends, as opposite to each other as they were to him, the
three of them as far apart as the points of an equilateral triangle.
Each of the other two had gone wrong in his way. And yet perhaps neither
of them would have touched money that did not belong to him, on any
pretext or in any circumstances whatsoever!
The money took Jan back to the wood; the wood led him straight to
Mulberry; and suddenly he wondered whether Evan had really heard the
last of that vagabond. The very thought of a doubt about it made Jan
uneasy. Had he frightened the blackmailer sufficiently as such? He had
gone away without his money; that might or might not be mere drunken
forgetfulness. Jan, however, would have felt rather more certain of his
man if he had put himself more in the wrong by actually taking every
penny he could get; that and the very drastic form of receipt—never
signed—had been the pivot of his scheme for scotching Mulberry. If it
were to miscarry after all, in its prime object of saving Evan from
persecution and disgrace; if appearances should still be doubted and
Mulberry be bribed or frightened into telling the truth; why, then—good
Lord!—_then_ he himself might yet be reinstated—at Evan’s expense!
Once more Jan despised himself for harbouring any such thought for a
single moment; he kicked it out like a very Mulberry of the mind, and
saw it in the mental gutter as a most unlikely contingency. He
considered his own handling of the creature, the motive given him for
revenge, the dexterous promptitude with which revenge had been taken.
No; such an enemy, so made, would never willingly avow a very
inspiration of low cunning....
The mossy, wrinkled roofs of the old tiled houses opposite Heriot’s
stood out once more against a cloudless sky; the pavement underneath was
dry as a bone; the little town was basking in the sleepy sunshine of the
Sunday afternoon. Suddenly those irrepressible chapel bells broke out
with their boyish clangour.
Boyish they are and always will be while there are boys to hear them;
they ring in the veins after thirty years, and make old blood pelt like
young. Surely there is no such hearty, happy peal elsewhere on earth! It
got into Jan’s blood though he was only leaving next morning, and would
never, never be able to come down as an authorised Old Boy. So he would
never be allowed in chapel again, unless he stole in when nobody was
about, some day, a bearded bushman “home for a spell.” It seemed hard.
There went the bells again! They might have let him obey their kindling
call for the last time; it might have made some difference to his life.
How could they stop him? Could they stop him? Would they if they could?
The questions followed each other almost as quickly as the three bright
bells; they got into his blood as well. And it was blood always
susceptible to a sudden impulse; that was a thing Jan did not see in
himself, though all his escapades came of that hereditary drop of pure
recklessness. It did not often come to a bubble, but when it did the
precipitate was some rash act.
Already the street was “alive with boys and masters,” like another more
famous but not more dear; masters in silken hoods, masters in humble
rabbit-skins, and boys in cut-away coats, boys in Eton jackets. Jan had
put on his Sunday tails as usual; it had never occurred to him not to
dress that morning as a member of the school still subject to the rules.
His school cap was already packed, a sad memento filled with collars. He
had it out in an instant, and the collars strewed the floor, for he was
going to chapel whether they liked it or not. They would never make a
scandal by turning him out, but he must slip in at the last moment after
everybody else, and the last bell had not begun yet. Jan was waiting for
it in great excitement, touching up his hair in the dressing-room, when
the landing shook to a familiar stride and the bedroom door opened
unceremoniously for the second time that afternoon.
“Rutter! Where are you, Rutter?”
Heriot, of course, when he was least wanted! Jan slipped behind the
dressing-room door, and saw him through the crack as he looked in
hastily. Luckily there was no time for an exhaustive search. Heriot gave
it up, the door below drowned the opening strokes of the last bell, and
Jan had shut it softly in his turn before they stopped.
The fellows went into chapel there in droves under gowned and hooded
shepherds. Jan so timed matters as to enter in the wake of the last lot,
but well before the appearance of Mr. Thrale and his chaplain. Not being
in the choir, his place in chapel, where the seats were allotted on a
principle unknown to the boys, was mercifully unexalted, and he reached
it with no worse sign or portent than the raised eyebrows and whispered
welcome of his immediate neighbours. A congregation of four hundred
persons absorbs even a Captain of Cricket more effectually than he
thinks. And a voluntary, bright and exhilarating as all the music in
that chapel, gave him heart and hope until the arrival of the
officiating pair afforded an ineffable sense of security and relief.
Jan stood up with the rest, not quite at his full height, yet with his
eyes turned in sheer fascination towards the little old Head Master. He
looked very pale and stern, but his eyes could not have been fixed more
steadfastly in front of him if he himself had been marching to his doom.
In his left hand he held something that Jan was glad to see; it was dear
old Jerry’s purple and embroidered sermon-case, a gift no doubt, and yet
almost an incongruous vanity in that uncompromising hand.
Jan sank down and breathed his thanks for the last mercy of this
service, for his perhaps undeserved escape from open humiliation and
public shame. It was not to be seen through his forcible composure, but
the glow of momentary victory filled every cell of a heart which the
bells had first expanded. And he had never joined in the quick and
swinging psalms with a zest more grateful to himself or so distressing
to one or two of his hypercritical neighbours; there could not have been
much wrong with Rutter, either physically or morally, these opined; or
else he had been let off, and was already wallowing in an indecent odour
of sanctity.
Wallowing he was, but for once only in the present, without dwelling on
old days or on the wrath already come. This was not the house of wrath,
but of brightness and light; he was not going to darken it for the last
time with cheap memories and easy phantoms. Any fool could think of his
first Sunday, and recall his first impressions of chapel; it was rather
Jan’s desire so to receive his last impression as to have something
really worth recalling all the days of his life; but even that was a
vague and secondary consideration, whereas the present recompense was
certain, vivid, and acute.
One wonders whether any fellow ever loved a public-school chapel as much
as Jan loved his that afternoon, and not from the conscious promptings
of reverence and piety, but purely as a familiar place of peace and
comfort which he might never see again. The circumstances were probably
unique, and they gave him that new eye for an old haunt which had been
opened on the pitch the day before. But then he had been as a dying man,
and now he was as the dead come sneaking back to life for an hour or
less; the defiant enjoyment of forbidden fruit was among the springs of
his infinite exaltation.
The great east window made the first impress on his sensitised film of
vision; he had not been at the school four years, on a cricketer’s easy
footing with so many of the masters, without hearing that window frankly
depreciated; but it was light and bright, and good enough for Jan. Then
there were the huge brass candelabra in the chancel, pyramids of light
on winter evenings, trees of gold this golden afternoon; for the summer
sun came slanting in over everybody’s right shoulder, as all sat in rows
facing the altar, and not in the long opposing lines of other school
chapels. Tablets to Old Boys who had lived great lives or died gallant
deaths brought a sigh of envy for the first time. They were the only
sight that reminded Jan sorely of himself, until he looked up and saw
dear old Jerry standing in his marble pulpit for the last time. The hymn
ceased. The organ purred like a cat until the last stop had been driven
in. Jan supposed it must have done it always. A sparrow chirped outside,
and Mr. Thrale pronounced the invocation in that voice which knew no
lip-service, but prayed and preached as it taught and thundered, from
the heart.
“He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for
my sake shall find it.”
That was his text; and many there were present, boys and Old Boys,
masters and masters’ wives, who reverenced the preacher before all
living men, yet knew what was coming and faced it with something akin to
resignation. Life was the first word in his language, if not his last.
It meant so much to him. He never used it in the narrow sense. True Life
was his simple watchword; where the noun was, the adjective was never
far away, and together the two rolled out like noble thunder. The
corporate life, the life of a nation, the life of that school, it was
into those great streams that he sought to pour the truth that was in
him—sometimes at the expense of the individual ripple. Boys do not
listen to abstractions; abstract truths are better read than heard by
boy or man. Mr. Thrale was too elusive, perhaps too deep, for ordinary
ears; in his daily teaching he was direct, concrete, and dramatic, but
from his pulpit he soared above heads of all ages. Yet that earnest
voice and noble mien, which had so impressed Jan on his very first
Sunday in the school, were as the voice from Sinai and the face of God
to him to-day.
He began by drinking in every syllable; but again it was too soon the
look and tone rather than the words that thrilled him. He began
listening with eyes glued to that noble countenance in its setting of
silver hair; but soon they drooped to the edge and corners of the purple
sermon-case, to the leaves that rose and fell, at regular intervals,
under that strong, unrelenting, and yet most tender hand. Jan could feel
its farewell grip again; he was back in the study full of garden smells
and midges in the lamplight.... Goodness! He really had been back there
for an instant; it was the old trouble of keeping awake at this time of
the afternoon. It had struck him painfully in others, on his very first
Sunday in the school; but almost ever since he had felt it himself, say
after a long walk; and he simply could not help feeling it after an
almost sleepless night and that condemned man’s allowance of beer....
I say! It was incredible, it was contemptible, unpardonable in Jan of
all the congregation that sunny afternoon. But it would not happen
again; something had awakened him once and for all.
It was something in the old man’s voice. His voice had changed, his
manner had changed, he was no longer reading from the purple case, but
speaking directly and dramatically as was his wont elsewhere. His hands
were clasped upon his manuscript. He was looking steadfastly before
him—just a trifle downward—looking indeed Jan’s way, in clear-sighted
criticism, in gentle and yet strong rebuke.
“... There is the life of the individual too. 'He that findeth his life
shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.’
But let him be sure for whose sake he would lose his life; let him not
take his own life, on any provocation or under temptation
whatsoever—not even to save his dearest friend—for Christ did not make
and cannot countenance such a sacrifice. No soldier of Christ can die by
his own hand, even to save his comrade; he must think of the army, think
of those to whom his own life is valuable and dear, before he throws it
away from a mistaken or unbalanced sense of sacrifice. I will have no
false or showy standards of self-sacrifice in this school; I will have
no moral suicides. Suicide is a crime, no matter the motive; evil is
evil, good cannot come of it, and to step in between a friend and his
folly is to stand accessory after the fact. And yet—_humanum est
errare_! And he who errs only to save an erring brother has the divine
spark somewhere in his humanity: may it light his brain as well as fire
his heart, give him judgment as well as courage, and burn out of him the
Upas growth of wrong-headed self-sacrifice. You cannot rob Peter to pay
Paul, just because you happen to be Peter yourself. Has Paul the first
or only claim upon you? Yet my heart goes out to the boy or man who can
pick his own pocket, ay, or shed his own blood for his friend! Blame him
I do, but I honour him, and I forgive him.”
In such parables spake their Master to those who sat daily at his feet;
not often so to the school in chapel, nor was it to them that he was
speaking now. Yet few indeed knew that he was addressing Jan Rutter, who
sat spellbound in his place, chidden and yet shriven, head and heart
throbbing in a flood of light and warmth.