How far too sweet for school he seemed to me;
How ripe for combat with the wits of men;
How childlike in his manhood.--_Ionica, II._
It must not be supposed that life was uniformly dark to Tim in these
early days at Eton. He had sources of happiness quite distinct from his
glimpses of Carol, which had certainly turned out less satisfactory than
his hopes. After the dormice episode he was shyer and more constrained
in the presence of his fag-master than ever. But he had found and always
kept a marvellously kind understanding and tender friend in his tutor,
whose manly gentle soul went forth to this forlorn little specimen of
suffering humanity; he readily guessed that the path of such a baby
could not but be thorny, and though he was necessarily obliged, for many
reasons, to ignore much of what he knew, and the whole of what he
suspected, he managed in a hundred small ways to soften the existence of
the youngest and dreariest of his pupils. If I do not say much of Tim’s
Eton tutor, and the large part he filled in his history, it is because,
while among several thousand boys who have passed through the school in
the last twenty years, to describe two or three is fairly safe, it were
quite otherwise to draw anything like an accurate picture of one of the
comparatively few men who have filled the post of tutor there during the
same period. So I may only note in passing the fact of his untiring and
thoughtful kindness, and the grateful affection it elicited in return.
His study was a haven of refuge to Tim on many a rainy after-four, while
the employment said by Dr. Watts to be provided for that class of member
was busily occupying numerous pairs of idle hands in other parts of the
house. There or on the banks of the kind old river in the shady
playing-fields he spent long happy hours with Scott or Shakespeare for
companion. Mr. Ebbesley was liberal in the matter of pocket-money, and
as Tim’s tastes were not as a rule expensive, he was able to revel in
delightful books. Had his examinations been in authors of his own
selection I have no doubt he would have attained the highest honours.
Another favourite resort of his was the old chapel in the Castle at
Windsor: the grand quiet of the place, with its dim, coloured light and
ghostly armorial flags ranged overhead, soothed and comforted him after
many a bitter childish trial; but the highest pleasure came from the
pealing organ and the pure true voices of one of the best of English
choirs. To Tim, whose soul was full of melody, but whose only experience
of sacred music had been the not very perfect performances in the
village church at home, the grand outbursts of song which the great
musicians had given from their hearts to the worship of God, were as
waters in the desert. The first time he heard the beautiful prayer that
Mendelssohn has wedded to immortal music, the yearning for doves’ wings
to fly away and be at rest, rendered by a fresh boy’s voice, the tears
gathered in his eyes, and he forgot where he was, standing wrapped in an
ecstasy, his soul afloat on the wings of the music. It seemed to him as
if he and this other boy no older than himself were somehow one, that
the pearly notes he was listening to did not come from the shiny
emotionless little chorister whose mouth was moving, but from the inmost
depths of his own heart.
Tim could not really sing a note, though he would dearly have liked to;
but he often had this feeling afterwards, in the following winter, when
he joined the musical society and used to sit silent and happy between
two deep-lunged little monsters, and have all the sensation of pouring
forth his being in song. Carol, who had a lusty baritone, and a fondness
for music of the more robust and cheerful order, having been ordered to
recruit trebles at his tutor’s, and finding the lower boys for the most
part unwilling to display their accomplishments, had had recourse in
despair to his fag, who was of course enchanted with the prospect.
‘I’m afraid I shan’t be much use, but I should like to come,’ he said
modestly, and come he did with exemplary punctuality.
His relations with his contemporaries were still, for the most part,
lacking in cordiality. He had no gift of making himself known to them,
and they were not sufficiently interested in him to take trouble in
getting to know him. The discovery at the beginning of the Michaelmas
half that he was forbidden to play football, set the finishing touch to
the contempt his house-fellows were inclined to entertain for him, and
except in school or at the musical society he came in contact with no
boys but such as boarded at his tutor’s. There was one youth, however,
who, contrary to all likelihood, took a desultory interest in Tim, and
that was Tommy Weston. The episode of the dormice had disclosed to Tommy
certain things about Tim that lay outside the range of his daily
observation of life and character, and being of an inquiring turn of
mind, he determined to frequent this new specimen of boy, taking at
first a purely analytic and microscopic view of him, with which, as the
weeks went by, something of a kindlier and more human sentiment began to
mingle. I don’t know what has become of Tommy Weston since, but in those
days he promised to be a very remarkable man. He possessed indomitable
tenacity and strength of purpose, coupled with a mercurial gaiety of
temperament, endless patience, entire disregard of public opinion,
immense courage, a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a composure and
self-possession on which the most trying circumstances were powerless to
produce any effect. To Tim he was a most marvellous outcome. At first
the little boy was rather alarmed by this remarkable phenomenon, though
humbly grateful for his attentions, but by degrees he came to be more at
home with him, and Tommy was the only person to whom he ever confided
some part of his feeling for Carol; only a very little and in moments of
rare expansion, for Tommy was not sentimental, and regarded subjective
conversation as more or less profitless. But the shy revelations of
character made by Tim struck him, as I have said, as a ‘queer start,’
and as such were regarded by him with a wonder which that youth was glad
to mistake for sympathy. ‘It is certainly not on the principle of Mary
and the lamb,’ he said to himself, ‘that Skinny’s partiality can be
explained, for Darley don’t “love the lamb, you know.” Fancy Skinny
wandering into tutor’s upper set at private, and Villidge and all of ’em
hollering out in pupil-room, “What makes the lamb love Curly so?”’ and
he was so tickled by the weirdness of this notion that he accosted Tim
as ‘lambkin’ next time he saw him, and chuckled to himself, remarking
generally, ‘What rot nursery rhymes were,’ in a manner calculated to
mystify that simple-minded young person. Indeed, he was in such high
good-humour that he invited him into his room, an apartment decorated
with all manner of ingenious inventions from designs of Tommy’s own;
such as an elaborate apparatus in which the poker was involved for
shutting the window without leaving bed, and another by which water was
discharged on any assailant who might attempt to turn the sleeping
inhabitant up in that piece of furniture. This last machine, which was
constructed with much ingenuity out of a bandbox, a broken jug, seven
yards of twine, the leg of one of his chairs (propped, in the absence of
its limb, on his hat-box), and the cover of his Gradus, was subsequently
destroyed by his tutor, after deluging the matron (Tommy swore
accidentally), who was coming to administer medicine when he stayed out
in collection-week. These and similar treasures were displayed to the
wondering eyes of Skinny, as well as a cardboard box in which he kept
the prime fetishes of his worship; his name, which it is hardly
necessary to mention was not Tommy, and the date of his birth, written
very neatly in his own blood, a sheet of broad rule completely covered
with a design in concentric and intersecting circles, of which the
object did not distinctly appear, and another, on which he had jotted
down the numbers of all the cabs he had ever ridden in, on his rare
visits to the metropolis, and reduced the added result, by some process
inscrutable by the unmathematical mind, to pounds, shillings, and pence.
Now it happened one Sunday in the Lent term when the flats around Eton
were swept by a relentless east wind, that Tommy had agreed with a
kindred soul from another house to go with him to the Ditton woods and
gather primroses; not that the ‘primrose by the river’s brim’ was
anything more to either of them than the yellow primrose it was to the
gentleman in the poem, but it lent an object to their walk, and a
delicious flavour of the illegal in the combined facts that they would
trespass, and very probably be late for lock-up, which in those days,
when chapel was at three, closed the period of Sunday afternoon leisure.
Whether Tommy’s friend was detected talking in chapel and made to stay
at home and do his Sunday questions, or merely turned lazy and preferred
to read a book by the fire, I have no means of deciding with certainty;
but the fact remains that he threw Tommy over when it was too late to
make other arrangements, to the no small disgust of Master Weston, who
was not fond of abandoning any enterprise he had once formed. In these
straits he bethought him of Tim, who was quite sure to have no
engagement, and went in search of him. Tim was writing his weekly letter
to his father, but consented readily to accompany him, if he would wait
till he had finished; and the concluding sentences were rendered even
more laborious than usual to the scribe, by the distracting behaviour of
his companion, who was occupying the interval with a sort of highland
fling, while he sang to a well-known Scottish air, just then
familiarised to Southern ears by the base uses of a comic song, these
remarkable words----
Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Oh, Jerusalem, the costermonger’s donkey.
‘Oh! please, Tommy, don’t make that dreadful noise,’ said poor Tim. ‘How
can I get done?’
‘Dreadful noise, indeed! it’s a Sabbath hymn, you profane little
wretch,’ retorted the irrepressible, at the same time pulling Tim’s inky
pen upwards through his fingers, to teach him, as he said, proper
respect to his elders.
At length the epistle was concluded, and when Tommy had stuck the stamps
on wrong side up in the bottom left-hand corner (which called forth a
severe little lecture on slovenly ways in Tim’s next letter from home)
they started on their walk. Through the College and playing-fields all
went well, but once in the open fields beyond, their progress was
considerably retarded by various skirmishes with the class magnificently
lumped together by the boys, in their sublime innocent snobbishness, as
‘cads,’ and including the sons of all tradesmen, farmers, and the
labouring classes generally, who happened to inhabit the neighbourhood.
There was not a ‘cad’ within miles with whom Tommy was not on intimate
terms; he knew the Christian names, pursuits, and family history of
every old man or woman who drove into Eton for purposes of trade and
barter, the commodities in which they dealt, and the days when they
might be expected. There was one elderly lady whom he addressed as
Sarah, and to whom he invariably offered marriage, regardless of the
fact that she was a matron of many years’ standing; and an old man in a
red waistcoat, who had business relations with some one in the town,
would hang about for hours watching for an opportunity to slip unnoticed
past the window from which this awful boy had a torrent of ever-varying
chaff and nicknames ready to pour out upon him on all occasions. With
the rising generation of cad-dom, the lads of his own age or a little
older, his relations were, however, by no means so friendly. He had
fought with nearly all, and licked most; and on the few Herculean youths
who had succeeded in forcing him to beat a retreat his vengeance had
subsequently descended, when their evil stars led them to pass his
dwelling, in the form of coals, sugar, earth from his flower-box, or the
inside round of paper off the tops of raspberry jam; sometimes the pot
itself, if nearly empty of its succulent contents, would startle the
echoes of a dark night as it crashed to ruin against the palings of the
opposite house, while a muttered curse succeeded the jaunty whistling of
the passing victim.
The two boys were crossing a ploughed field where the ridges on which
they stepped crumbled beneath their feet, dry and powdery under the
March wind, when they encountered a detachment of small boys of the
class described above, headed by a youth a few years older than the
rest, who wore his hat on one side in a raffish manner, calculated to
provoke remark. Tommy inquired politely if it was stuck on with glue, or
how otherwise it retained its position.
‘Just you ‘old _your_ row, young Weston,’ retorted the insulted party;
‘I knows you’; thus implying some mysterious secret hold over Tommy,
which that youth was hasty to repudiate.
‘Take care not to come too close,’ he replied with studied moderation,
‘or I _may_ hurt you.’
‘What, _you_? You’re too young and too small; ‘it one o’ your own size,’
said the champion, and all the satellites applauded.
Tommy, feeling the moment for decisive action had arrived, made a
threatening advance, whereupon the small fry scattered and fled; and
their leader, seeing himself abandoned by his myrmidons, also retired,
but in good order, and still hurling taunts, which increased in
bitterness in proportion as the chances of pursuit seemed to grow less.
Tim, I need not say, was made very unhappy by this sort of encounter;
and what with these numerous delays and the fact that they had started
late for their walk, the brief afternoon was already far spent when they
arrived at the paling they must climb to enter the Park. Tim pulled out
his watch and looked at it doubtfully.
‘We haven’t _more_ than time to get home before lock-up,’ he said.
‘Well?’ inquired Tommy, who was already astride upon the paling, as
though Tim had started some question entirely foreign to the matter in
hand.
‘If we go on, we shall be late,’ persisted Tim.
‘Oh! is _that_ all?’ said Tommy, who had a sublime contempt for law when
it interfered in any way with what he proposed to himself to do. As I
have said, the primroses were less than nothing to him, but having
started to pick primroses, primroses he would pick, and a lion in the
path would not have deterred him for a moment. Now Tim had, on the
contrary, profound respect for law and order, and if he unwittingly
transgressed the most formal of little school-rules, felt unhappy and
criminal for days afterwards.
‘I think I shall go back,’ he said after a pause.
‘You may do as you please,’ said his companion; ‘_I_’m going to get
primroses,’ and therewith he slid down on the other side of the paling
and was lost to view. ‘Are you coming?’ he shouted back.
Tim still stood irresolute: he was alone. Tommy having vanished, it
seemed easier to withstand his influence than when under that cold eye
from the top of the fence. He was cold; he did not want to be out late;
he did not want to get a pœna; above all, he did not want to shirk
fagging.
‘I shall go back,’ he persisted, and he went.
‘Give my love to tutor,’ Tommy called from within, ‘and tell him not to
worry about me; I shall most likely be back for early school to-morrow.’
Tim had a dreary walk homewards; the wind, which had before been with
them, was now in his face, and he had to butt at it, head down, and
hands deep in his trouser-pockets. Discomforts became prominent which
had before only made a scarcely noticed background to Tommy’s enlivening
conversation, and the somewhat perilous excitement of his passages of
wit with the passers-by. Tim began to wonder vaguely, not without
terror, whether he would fall into any of the wasps’ nests that his
companion had so successfully stirred up as they came along. Visions of
angry cads, still smarting with a sense of unavenged insults, flitted
through his uneasy mind, and caused him to hug the hedgerows rather than
launch across the bare fields, where his figure would be a more
conspicuous object. He tried to determine on a course of action in case
of attack. Tommy, he had observed, advanced boldly in such cases,
assumed the aggressive attitude, and the assailants fled; it seemed to
him a fresh proof of the unsatisfactoriness with which matters were
arranged in this world, that the people who seemed to possess the knack
of coming scot-free out of awkward situations were precisely those to
whom it was of least importance to do so. Something told him that it
would be in vain for _him_ to attempt the same line as Tommy; some
irresolution or faltering at the last minute would be sure to betray
him, and his assumed boldness would only make his position the less
pleasant. The conviction was forced in upon him that to make your
antagonist unwilling to fight, _you_ must be genuinely anxious to do
so. ‘And in _that_ case,’ reasoned he, ‘there would be no pleasure, but
the reverse, in seeing the other fellow sheer off.’ All of which seemed
to him mysterious and unkind. ‘It would surely have been as easy to
settle human nature on a plan that should enable each individual to
obtain what he wanted.’ Nor were his apprehensions altogether
groundless.
As he passed along one of the leafless hedges a hard object whizzed by
him, and rattled on the frozen turf beside him; there was little or no
doubt it was a stone. Through the hedge, which was thick and tangled,
though the leaves were off, he could dimly detect moving forms and
smothered laughter. He tried to persuade himself that the thrower had
only aimed at something in the hedge, and that if he kept quiet they
would pass on without noticing him; so he crouched down as close to the
bank as possible, and kept very still.
I am compelled as a truthful biographer to admit that physical courage
was not a characteristic of my hero, and as he held his breath in the
undignified attitude he had assumed, he could hear his heart beat loud
with apprehension. There was a pause, and then a muttered conference,
and presently another stone followed the first. Placed as he was, Tim
was pretty safe, and two or three succeeding missiles passed innocently
over him. Then came another pause; the attacking party were surprised
that no attempt was made to return fire, and they feared an ambush.
The fact was that he of the hat had joined forces with some other lads
of his own size, discarding the crew of weaklings who had deserted him
in his hour of need, and they had taken up a position in which to waylay
Tommy on his return to Eton, and seize an unique opportunity of wiping
off old scores by humiliating their enemy without doing him any great
injury. It is only fair to them to state that there is no good ground
for supposing that they deliberately attacked Tim knowing him to be
alone; they probably thought his warlike friend was with him, and the
stones were only meant to open the affair, and force Tommy to disclose
himself. Having debated among themselves, they could think of no better
plan than to fire another volley, which they accordingly did, and Tim
had closed his eyes and given himself up for lost when he heard
unmistakable signs of terror and confusion behind the hedge, and then
the sound of a general stampede of hastily retreating footsteps.
The next minute some one cleared the hedge and alighted close to him,
and a well-known voice exclaimed, ‘The brutes! they were rocking a
little fellow; I wish to goodness I’d caught one of them. Hullo!
Ebbesley, is that you? Why, how the deuce did _you_ get into this sort
of row?’
Tim hardly yet realised that it was Carol who had dropped, as it were,
out of the gray sky for his deliverance, and who now stood before him,
with cheeks flushed by wind and running, holding out large kind hands to
pull him on to his feet again. He felt relieved and grateful, and yet
somewhat ashamed of the position in which he had been discovered, and
began hastily to explain--
‘I had gone to walk with Weston, and he said something to that fellow,
and he didn’t like it, and Weston went after him, and he ran away; and
then we separated, because I wanted to get back----’
‘And our friend meanwhile conceived the brilliant plan of lying in wait
for you, and shying stones at you from behind a hedge. What
distinguished bravery!’ interrupted Villidge minor, who had been with
Carol, and who now joined the party through an adjacent gap.
‘What an infernal coward!’ cried Darley, whose eyes flashed with martial
ardour.
‘He is, luckily for him, beyond the reach of chastisement for the
present,’ rejoined the more phlegmatic Villidge; ‘though I flatter
myself that a well-directed pebble was not altogether without effect on
the calf of his leg. You’d better cut home, Ebbesley, if you want to be
in time for lock-up, and thank your stars Darley and I happened to come
along when we did.’ Tim would have liked to thank them, but found no
words, so trotted off as fast as his legs would carry him.
‘It’s just as I thought, Curly,’ continued Villidge, as he and Carol
followed at a more leisurely pace; ‘it’s that little monster Weston who
has brought your unhappy fag into the scrape in which we found him. I
saw them together the other day, and reflected that collapse must sooner
or later be the fate of such a frail little vessel in the same stream
with such an iron pot as Master Tommy.’
But Carol did not at once answer; he was watching the queer little
figure scudding along in front of them, and the sight of that small form
buffeted by the bitter weather somehow suggested to him how unfit such a
creature must be to fight his way through the rough places of lower-boy
life.
‘Do you remember,’ Villidge continued, also looking at Tim, ‘how much
exercised you were when Ebbesley first came as to what you could do for
him, in the way of looking after him, and that sort of thing? I’m
thinking that this piece of knight-errantry of yours in his behalf comes
most happily to solve the difficulty; you could hardly have done him a
better turn, or looked after him to more purpose than by snatching him
from the fate of the first martyr.’
‘There’s not much knight-what’s-his-name in having a lot of lubberly
beasts run away when you look at ’em,’ replied Carol modestly.
‘Seriously though, it had just occurred to me that perhaps I hadn’t done
all I might have to make that poor little fellow’s life easy to him.’
‘I can’t see that it is incumbent on you to act dry-nurse to all my
tutor’s scugs; you might keep a piece of pumice-stone in your room to
take the ink off their grimy little hands, or save up the rough copies
of your verses to stuff your young friend’s hat, and keep it a
hair’s-breadth or two higher above his ears, but I really don’t see what
else you could do for him.’
‘Don’t you think such a boy as that must be rather bullied among the
small fellows?’
‘Oh! I daresay not a bit more than is good for him; and besides, if
Tommy’s taken him up he’ll be all right; for though he’ll probably land
him in rows with the beaks, he’s an oracle among the lower boys, and if
he says he’s a good sort, they’ll all discover they always said so. So
don’t make yourself unhappy about him.’
And as Carol was not fond of making himself unhappy, he took the
advice.