BOOKS BY E. W. HORNUNG

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

The Raffles Series

FATHERS OF MEN

Copyright, 1912, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published February, 1912

CONTENTS

FATHERS OF MEN

CHAPTER I
BEHIND THE SCENES

The two new boys in Heriot’s house had been suitably entertained at his table, and afterwards in his study with bound volumes of Punch. Incidentally they had been encouraged to talk, with the result that one boy had talked too much, while the other shut a stubborn mouth tighter than before. The babbler displayed an exuberant knowledge of contemporary cricket, a more conscious sense of humour, and other little qualities which told their tale. He opened the door for Miss Heriot after dinner, and even thanked her for the evening when it came to an end. His companion, on the other hand, after brooding over Leech and Tenniel with a sombre eye, beat a boorish retreat without a word.

Heriot saw the pair to the boys’ part of the house. He was filling his pipe when he returned to the medley of books, papers, photographic appliances, foxes’ masks, alpen-stocks and venerable oak, that made his study a little room in which it was difficult to sit down and impossible to lounge. His sister, perched upon a coffin-stool, was busy mounting photographs at a worm-eaten bureau.

“How I hate our rule that a man mayn’t smoke before a boy!” exclaimed Heriot, emitting a grateful cloud. “And how I wish we didn’t have the new boys on our hands a whole day before the rest!”

“I should have thought there was a good deal to be said for that,” remarked his sister, intent upon her task.

“You mean from the boys’ point of view?”

“Exactly. It must be such a plunge for them as it is, poor things.”

“It’s the greatest plunge in life,” Heriot vehemently agreed. “But here we don’t let them make it; we think it kinder to put them in an empty bath, and then turn on the cold tap—after first warming them at our own fireside! It’s always a relief to me when these evenings are over. The boys are never themselves, and I don’t think I’m much better than the boys. We begin by getting a false impression of each other.”

Heriot picked his way among his old oak things as he spoke; but at every turn he had a narrow eye upon his sister. He was a lanky man, many years her senior; his beard had grown grey, and his shoulders round, in his profession. A restless energy marked all his movements, and was traceable in the very obstacles to his present perambulations; they were the spoils of the inveterate wanderer from the beaten track, who wanders with open hand and eye. Spectacles in steel rims twinkled at each alert turn of the grizzled head; and the look through the spectacles, always quick and keen, was kindly rather than kind, and just rather than compassionate.

“I liked Carpenter,” said Miss Heriot, as she dried a dripping print between sheets of blotting-paper.

“I like all boys until I have reason to dislike them.”

“Carpenter had something to say for himself.”

“There’s far more character in Rutter.”

“He never opened his mouth.”

“It’s his mouth I go by, as much as anything.”

Miss Heriot coated the back of the print with starch, and laid it dexterously in its place. A sheet of foolscap and her handkerchief—an almost unfeminine handkerchief—did the rest. And still she said no more.

“You didn’t think much of Rutter, Milly?”

“I thought he had a bad accent and——”

“Go on.”

“Well—to be frank—worse manners!”

“Milly, you are right, and I’m not sure that I oughtn’t to be frank with you. Let the next print wait a minute. I like you to see something of the fellows in my house; it’s only right that you should know something about them first. I’ve a great mind to tell you what I don’t intend another soul in the place to know.”

Heriot had planted himself in British attitude, heels to the fender.

Miss Heriot turned round on her stool. She was as like her brother as a woman still young can be like a rather elderly man; her hair was fair, and she had not come to spectacles; but her eyes were as keen and kindly as his own, her whole countenance as sensible and shrewd.

“You can trust me, Bob,” she said.

“I know I can,” he answered, pipe in hand. “That’s why I’m going to tell you what neither boy nor man shall learn through me. What type of lad does this poor Rutter suggest to your mind?”

There was a pause.

“I hardly like to say.”

“But I want to know.”

“Well—then—I’m sure I couldn’t tell you why—but he struck me as more like a lad from the stables than anything else.”

“What on earth makes you think that?” Heriot spoke quite sharply in his plain displeasure and surprise.

“I said I couldn’t tell you, Bob. I suppose it was a general association of ideas. He had his hat on, for one thing, when I saw him first; and it was far too large for him, and crammed down almost to those dreadful ears! I never saw any boy outside a stable-yard wear his hat like that. Then your hunting was the one thing that seemed to interest him in the least. And I certainly thought he called a horse a 'hoss’!”

“So he put you in mind of a stable-boy, did he?”

“Well, not exactly at the time, but he really does the more I think about him.”

“That’s very clever of you, Milly—because it’s just what he is.”

Heriot’s open windows were flush with the street, and passing footfalls sounded loud in his room; but at the moment there were none; and a clock ticked officiously on the chimneypiece while the man with his back to it met his sister’s eyes.

“Of course you don’t mean it literally?”

“Literally.”

“I thought his grandfather was a country parson?”

“A rural dean, my dear; but the boy’s father was a coachman, and the boy himself was brought up in the stables until six months ago.”

“The father’s dead, then?”

“He died in the spring. His wife has been dead fourteen years. It’s a very old story. She ran away with the groom.”

“But her people have taken an interest in the boy?”

“Never set eyes on him till his father died.”

“Then how can he know enough to come here?”

Heriot smiled as he pulled at his pipe. He had the air of a man who has told the worst. His sister had taken it as he hoped she would; her face and voice betokened just that kind of interest in the case which he already felt strongly. It was a sympathetic interest, but that was all. There was nothing sentimental about either of the Heriots; they could discuss most things frankly on their merits; the school itself was no exception to the rule. It was wife and child to Robert Heriot—the school of his manhood—the vineyard in which he had laboured lovingly for thirty years. But still he could smile as he smoked his pipe.

“Our standard is within the reach of most,” he said; “there are those who would tell you it’s the scorn of the scholastic world. We don’t go in for making scholars. We go in for making men. Give us the raw material of a man, and we won’t reject it because it doesn’t know the Greek alphabet—no, not even if it was fifteen on its last birthday! That’s our system, and I support it through thick and thin; but it lays us open to worse types than escaped stable-boys.”

“This boy doesn’t look fifteen.”

“Nor is he—quite—much less the type I had in mind. He has a head on his shoulders, and something in it too. It appears that the vicar where he came from took an interest in the lad, and got him on as far as Cæsar and Euclid for pure love.”

“That speaks well for the lad,” put in Miss Heriot, impartially.

“I must say that it appealed to me. Then he’s had a tutor for the last six months; and neither tutor nor vicar has a serious word to say against his character. The tutor, moreover, is a friend of Arthur Drysdale’s, who was captain of this house when I took it over, and the best I ever had. That’s what brought them to me. The boy should take quite a good place. I should be very glad to have him in my own form, to see what they’ve taught him between them. I confess I’m interested in him; his mother was a lady; but you may almost say he never saw her in his life. Yet it’s the mother who counts in the being of a boy. Has the gentle blood been hopelessly poisoned by the stink of the stables, or is it going to triumph and run clean and sweet? It’s a big question, Milly, and it’s not the only one involved.”

Heriot had propounded it with waving pipe that required another match when he was done; through the mountain tan upon his face, and in the eager eyes behind the glasses, shone the zeal of the expert to whom boys are dearer than men or women. The man is rare; rarer still the woman who can even understand him; but here in this little room of books and antique lumber, you had the pair.

“I’m glad you told me,” said Miss Heriot, at length. “I fear I should have been prejudiced if you had not.”

“My one excuse for telling you,” was the grave rejoinder. “No one else shall ever know through me; not even Mr. Thrale, unless some special reason should arise. The boy shall have every chance. He doesn’t even know I know myself, and I don’t want him ever to suspect. It’s quite a problem, for I must keep an eye on him more than on most; yet I daren’t be down on him, and I daren’t stand up for him; he must sink or swim for himself.”

“I’m afraid he’ll have a bad time,” said Miss Heriot, picking a print from the water and blotting it as before. Her brother had seated himself at another bureau to write his letters.

“I don’t mind betting Carpenter has a worse,” he rejoined without looking up.

“But he’s so enthusiastic about everything?”

“That’s a quality we appreciate; boys don’t, unless there’s prowess behind it. Carpenter talks cricket like a Lillywhite, but he doesn’t look a cricketer. Rutter doesn’t talk about it, but his tutor says he’s a bit of a bowler. Carpenter beams because he’s got to his public school at last. He has illusions to lose. Rutter knows nothing about us, and probably cares less; he’s here under protest, you can see it in his face, and the chances are all in favour of his being pleasantly disappointed.”

Heriot’s quill was squeaking as he spoke, for he was a man with the faculty of doing and even thinking of more than one thing at a time; but though his sister continued mounting photographs in her album with extreme care, her mind was full of the two young boys who had come that night to live under their roof for good or ill. She wondered whether her brother was right in his ready estimate of their respective characters. She knew him for the expert that he was; these were not the first boys that she had heard him sum up as confidently on as brief an acquaintance; and though her knowledge had its obvious limitations, she had never known him wrong. He had a wonderfully fair mind. And yet the boy of action, in whom it was possible to stimulate thought, would always be nearer his heart than the thoughtful boy who might need goading into physical activity. She could not help feeling that he was prepared to take an unsympathetic view of the boy who had struck her as having more in him than most small boys; it was no less plain that his romantic history and previous disadvantages had already rendered the other newcomer an object of sympathetic interest in the house-master’s eyes. The material was new as well as raw, and so doubly welcome to the workman’s hand. Yet the workman’s sister, who had so much of his own force and fairness in her nature, felt that she could never like a sulky lout, however cruel the circumstances which had combined to make him one.

She felt a good deal more before the last print was in her album; in the first place that she would see really very little of these two boys until in years to come they rose to the Sixth Form table over which she presided in hall. Now and then they might have headaches and be sent in to keep quiet and look at the Punches; but she would never be at all in touch with them until they were big boys at the top of the house; and then they would be shy and exceedingly correct, of few words but not too few, and none too much enthusiasm, like all the other big boys. And that thought drew a sigh.

“What’s the matter?” came in an instant from the other bureau, where the quill had ceased to squeak.

“I was thinking that, after all, these two boys have more individuality than most who come to us.”

“One of them has.”

“Both, I think; and I was wondering how much will be left to either when we run them out of the mould in five years’ time!”

Heriot came to his feet like an exasperated advocate.

“I know where you get that from!” he cried with a kind of jovial asperity. “You’ve been reading some of these trashy articles that every wiseacre who never was at a public school thinks he can write about them now! That’s one of their stock charges against us, that we melt the boys down and run them all out of the same mould like bullets. We destroy individuality; we do nothing but reduplicate a type that thinks the same thoughts and speaks the same speech, and upholds the same virtues and condones the same vices. As if real character were a soluble thing! As if it altered in its essence from the nursery to the cemetery! As if we could boil away a strong will or an artistic temperament, a mean soul or a saintly spirit, even in the crucible of a public school!”

His breezy confidence was almost overwhelming; but it did not overwhelm his hearer, or sweep her with him to his conclusion. She had her own point of view; more, she had her own coigne of observation. Not every boy who had passed through the house in her time was the better for having been there. She had seen the weak go under—into depths she could not plumb—and the selfish ride serenely on the crest of the wave. She had seen an unpleasant urchin grow into a more and more displeasing youth, and inferiority go forth doubly inferior for the misleading stamp—that precious stamp—which one and all acquired. She loved the life as she saw it, perforce so superficially; it was a life that appealed peculiarly to Miss Heriot, who happened to have her own collegiate experience, an excellent degree of her own, and her own ideas on education. But from the boys in her brother’s house she held necessarily aloof; and in her detachment a clear and independent mind lay inevitably open to questionings, misgivings, intuitions, for which there was little time in his laborious days.

“But you admit it is a crucible,” she argued. “And what’s a crucible but a melting-pot?”

“A melting-pot for characteristics, but not for character!” he cried. “Take the two boys upstairs: in four or five years one will have more to say for himself, I hope, and the other will leave more unsaid; but the self that each expresses will be the same self, even though we have turned a first-rate groom into a second-rate gentleman. 'The Child,’ remember, and not the school, 'is father of the Man.’”

“Then the school’s his mother!” declared Miss Heriot without a moment’s hesitation.

Heriot gave the sudden happy laugh which his house was never sorry to hear, and his form found the more infectious for its comparative rarity.

“Does she deny it, Milly? Doesn’t she rub it into every one of them in Latin that even they can understand? Let’s only hope they’ll be fathers of better men for the help of this particular alma mater!”

The house-master knocked out his pipe into a wooden Kaffir bowl, the gift of some exiled Old Boy, and went off to bid the two new boys good-night.

CHAPTER II
CHANGE AND CHANCE

Rutter had been put in the small dormitory at the very top of the house. Instead of two long rows of cubicles as in the other dormitories, in one of which he had left Carpenter on the way upstairs, here under the roof was a square chamber with a dormer window in the sloping side and a cubicle in each of its four corners. Cubicle was not the school word for them, according to the matron who came up with the boys, but “partition,” or “tish” for short. They were about five feet high, contained a bed and a chair apiece, and were merely curtained at the foot. But the dormitory door opened into the one allotted to Rutter; it was large enough to hold a double wash-stand for himself and his next-door neighbour; and perhaps he was not the first occupant whom it had put in mind of a loose-box among stalls.

He noted everything with an eye singularly sardonic for fourteen, and as singularly alive to detail. The common dressing-table was in the dormer window. The boy had a grim look at himself in the glass. It was not a particularly pleasant face, with its sombre expression and stubborn mouth, but it looked brown and hard, and acute enough in its dogged way. It almost smiled at itself for the fraction of a second, but whether in resignation or defiance, or with a pinch of involuntary pride in his new state of life, it would have been difficult even for the boy to say. Certainly it was with a thrill that he read his own name over his partition, and then the other boys’ names over theirs. Bingley was the fellow next him. Joyce and Crabtree were the other two. What would they be like? What sort of faces would they bring back to the glass in the dormer window?

Rutter was not conscious of an imagination, but somehow he pictured Joyce large and lethargic, Crabtree a humorist, and Bingley a bully of the Flashman type. He had just been reading Tom Brown by advice. He wondered would the humorist be man enough to join him in standing up to the brutes, and whether pillow-fights were still the fashion; he did not believe they were, because Master Evan had never mentioned them; but then Master Evan had only been at a preparatory school last spring, and he might have found it quite otherwise at Winchester. The new boy undressed with an absent mind. He was wondering what it would have been like if he had been sent to Winchester himself, and there encountered Master Evan on equal terms. He had never done so much wondering in his life; he found a school list in the dormitory, and took it to bed with him, and lay there doing more.

So there was an Upper Sixth and a Lower Sixth, and then a form called the Remove; and in the Remove, by the way, was friend Joyce of the corner opposite. Then came the Fifths—three of them—with Crabtree top of the Lower Fifth. Clever fellow, then, Crabtree! The bully Bingley was no doubt notoriously low in the school. The Middle Remove came next, and through each column of strange names the boy read religiously, with a fascination he could not have explained, here and there conjuring an incongruous figure from some name he knew. He had got down to the Middle Fourth when suddenly his breath was taken as by a blow.

Heriot came in to find a face paler than it had looked downstairs, but a good brown arm and hand lying out over the coverlet, and a Midsummer List tightly clutched. The muscles of the arm were unusually developed for so young a boy. Heriot saw them relax under his gaze as he stood over the bed.

“Got hold of a school list, have you?”

“Yessir,” said Rutter with a slurring alacrity that certainly did not savour of the schoolroom. Heriot turned away before he could wince; but unluckily his eyes fell on the floor, strewn with the litter of the new boy’s clothes.

“I like the way you fold your clothes!” he laughed.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but where am I to put them?”

It was refreshingly polite; but, again, the begging-pardon opening was not the politeness of a schoolboy.

“On this chair,” said Heriot, suiting the action to the word. The boy would have leapt out of bed to do it himself. His shyness not only prevented him, but rendered him incapable of protest or acknowledgement; and the next moment he had something to be shy about. Mr. Heriot was holding up a broad and dirty belt, and without thinking he had cried, “What’s this?”

Rutter could not answer for shame. And Heriot had time to think.

“I can sympathise,” he said with a chuckle; “in the holidays I often wear one myself. But we mustn’t betray each other, Rutter, or we shall never hear the last of it! I’ll give you an order for a pair of braces in the morning.”

“I have them, sir, thanks.”

“That’s right.” Heriot was still handling the belt as though he really longed to buckle it about himself. Suddenly he noticed the initials, “J. R.”

“I thought your name was Ian, Rutter?”

“So it is, sir; but they used to call me Jan.”

Heriot waited for a sigh, but the mouth that appealed to him was characteristically compressed. He sat a few moments on the foot of the bed. “Well, good-night, and a fair start to you, Jan! The matron will put out the gas at ten.”

The lad mumbled something; the man looked back to nod, and saw him lying as he had found him, still clutching the list, only with his face as deep a colour as his arm.

“Have you come across any names you know?”

“One.”

“Who’s that?”

“He won’t know me.”

They were the sullen answers that had made a bad impression downstairs; but they were strangely uttered, and Rutter no longer lay still.

“He must have a name,” said Heriot, coming back into the room.

No answer.

“I’m sorry you’re ashamed of your friend,” said Heriot, laughing.

“He’s not my friend, and——”

“I think that’s very likely,” put in Heriot, as the boy shut his lips once more. “What’s in a name? The chances are that it’s only a namesake after all.”

He turned away without a sign of annoyance or of further interest in the matter. But another mumble from the bed intercepted him at the door.

“Name of Devereux,” he made out.

“Devereux, eh?”

“Do you know him, sir?”

“I should think I do!”

“He’ll not be in this house?”

Rutter was holding his breath.

“No, but he got my prize last term.”

“Do you know his other name?”

It was a tremulous mumble now.

“I’m afraid I don’t. Wait a bit! His initials are either E. P. or P. E. He only came last term.”

“He only would. But I thought he was going to Winchester!”

“That’s the fellow; he got a scholarship and came here instead, at the last moment.”

The new boy in the top dormitory made no remark when the matron put out the gas. He was lying on his back with his eyes wide open, and his lips compressed out of sight, just as Heriot had left him. It was almost a comfort to him to know the worst for certain; and now that he did know it, beyond all possibility of doubt, he was beginning to wonder whether it need necessarily be the worst after all. It might easily prove the best. He had always liked Master Evan; that was as much as this boy would admit even in his heart. The fact would have borne a warmer recognition. Best or worst, however, he knew it as well as though Evan Devereux had already come back with the rest of the school, and either cut him dead or grasped his hand. The one thing not to be suspected for an instant was that the lean oldish man, with the kind word and the abrupt manner, could possibly know the secret of a new boy’s heart, and have entered already into his hopes and fears.

It was very quiet in the top dormitory. Rutter wondered what it would be like when all the boys came back. Carpenter’s dormitory was downstairs, but they were all within earshot of each other. He wondered what it would have been like if Master Evan had been in that house, in that little dormitory, in the partition next his own. Master Evan! Yet he had never thought of him as anything else, much less addressed him by any other name. What if it slipped out at school! It easily might; indeed, far more easily and naturally than “Devereux.” That would sound very like profanity, in his ears, and on his lips.

The new boy grinned involuntarily in the dark. It was all too absurd. He had enjoyed ample opportunity of picking up the phraseology of the class to which he had been lately elevated: “too absurd” would certainly have been their expression for the situation in which he found himself. He tried to see it from that point of view. He was not without a wry humour of his own. He must take care not to magnify a matter which nobody else might think twice about. A public school was a little world, in which two boys in different houses, even two of an age, might seldom or never meet; days might elapse before Evan as much as recognised him in the throng. But then he might refuse to have anything to do with him. But then—but then—he might tell the whole school why!

“He was our coachman’s son at home!”

The coachman’s son heard the incredible statement as though it had been shouted in his ear. He felt a thousand eyes on his devoted face. He knew that he lay blushing in the dark. It took all his will to calm him by degrees.

“If he does,” he decided, “I’m off. That’s all.”

But why should he? Why should a young gentleman betray a poor boy’s secret? Rutter was the stable-boy again in spirit; he might have been back in his trucklebed in the coachman’s cottage at Mr. Devereux’s. The transition of standpoint at any rate was complete. He had always liked Master Evan; they had been very good friends all their lives. Incidents of the friendship came back in shoals. Evan had been the youngest of a large family, and that after a gap; in one sense he had been literally the only child. Often he had needed a boy to play with him, and not seldom Jan Rutter had been scrubbed and brushed and oiled to the scalp in order to fill the proud position of that boy. He must have known how to behave himself as a little kid, though he remembered as he grew older that the admonition with which he was always dispatched from the stables used to make it more difficult; there were so many things to “think on” not to do, and somehow it was harder not to do them when you had always to keep “thinking on.” Still, he distinctly remembered hearing complimentary remarks passed upon him by the ladies and gentlemen, together with whispered explanations of his manners. It was as easy to supply as to understand those explanations now; but it was sad to feel that the manners had long ago been lost.

And, boy as he was, and dimly as may be, he did feel this: that in the beginning there had been very little to choose between Evan and himself, but that afterwards the gulf had been at one time very wide. He could recall with shame a phase in which Master Evan had been forbidden, and not without reason, to have anything to do with Jan Rutter. There was even a cruel thrashing which he had received for language learnt from the executioner’s own lips; and it was characteristic of Jan that he had never quite forgiven his father for that, though he was dead, and had been a kind father on the whole. Later, the boy about the stables had acquired more sense; the eccentric vicar had taken him in hand, and spoken up for him; and nothing was said if he bowled to Master Evan after his tea, or played a makeshift kind of racquets with him in the stable-yard, so long as he kept his tongue and his harness clean. So the gulf had narrowed again of late years; but it had never again been shallow.

It was spanned, however, by quite a network of mutual offices. In the beginning Evan used to take all his broken toys to Jan, who was a fine hand at rigging ships and soldering headless horsemen. Jan’s reward was the reversion of anything broken beyond repair, or otherwise without further value to its original owner. Jan was also an adept at roasting chestnuts and potatoes on the potting-shed fire, a daring manipulator of molten lead, a comic artist with a piece of putty, and the pioneer of smoking in the loft. Those were the days when Evan was suddenly forbidden the back premises, and Jan set definitely to work in the stables when he was not at the village school. Years elapsed before the cricket stage that drew the children together again as biggish boys; in the interim Jan had imbibed wisdom of more kinds than one. On discovering himself to be a rude natural left-hand bowler, who could spoil the afternoon at any moment by the premature dismissal of his opponent, he was sagacious enough to lose the art at times in the most sudden and mysterious manner, and only to recover it by fits and starts when Evan had made all the runs he wanted. And as Jan had but little idea of batting, there was seldom any bad blood over the game. But in all their relations Jan took care of that, for he had developed a real devotion to Evan, who could be perfectly delightful to one companion at a time, when everything was going well.

And then things had happened so thick and fast that it was difficult to recall them in their chronological order; but the salient points were that Rutter the elder, that fine figure on a box, with his bushy whiskers and his bold black eyes, had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia after a bout of night-work in the month of February, and that the son of an ironmaster’s coachman by a northern town awoke to find himself the grandson of an East Anglian clergyman whose ancient name he had never heard before, but who sent for the lad in hot haste, to make a gentleman of him if it was not too late.

The change from the raw red outworks of an excessively modern and utilitarian town, to the most venerable of English rectories, in a countryside which has scarcely altered since the Conquest, was not appreciated as it might have been by Jan Rutter. He had nothing against the fussy architecture and the highly artificial garden of his late environment; on the contrary, he heartily preferred those familiar immaturities to the general air of complacent antiquity which pervaded his new home. That was the novelty to Jan, and there was a prejudice against it in his veins. It was the very atmosphere which had driven his mother before him to desperation. Her blood in him rebelled again; nor did he feel the effect the less because he was too young to trace the cause. He only knew that he had been happier in a saddle-room that still smelt of varnish than he was ever likely to be under mellow tiles and mediæval trees. The tutor and the strenuous training for a public school came to some extent as a relief; but the queer lad took quite a pride in showing no pride at all in his altered conditions and prospects. The new school and the new home were all one to him. He had not been consulted about either. He recognised an authority which he was powerless to resist, but there the recognition ended. There could be no question of gratitude for offices performed out of a cold sense of duty, by beings of his own blood who never so much as mentioned his father’s death, or even breathed his mother’s name. There was a tincture of their own pride even in him.

He had heard of public schools from Evan, and even envied that gilded child his coming time at one; but, when his own time came so unexpectedly, Jan had hardened his heart, and faced the inevitable as callously as any criminal. And then at its hardest his heart had melted within him: an arbitrary and unkind fate held out the hope of amends by restoring to his ken the one creature he really wished to see again. It was true that Jan had heard nothing of Evan since the end of the Christmas holidays; but then the boys had never exchanged a written word in their lives. And the more he thought of it, the less Jan feared the worst that might accrue from their meeting on the morrow or the day after. Not that he counted on the best: not that his young blood had warmed incontinently to the prospect which had chilled it hitherto. Master Evan as an equal was still an inconceivable figure; and the whole prospect remained grey and grim; but at least there was a glint of excitement in it now, a vision of depths and heights.

So the night passed, his first at a public school. The only sounds were those that marked its passage: the muffled ticking of his one treasure, the little watch under his pillow, and the harsh chimes of an outside clock which happened to have struck ten as he opened the Midsummer List. It had since struck eleven; he even heard it strike twelve. But life was more exciting, when he fell asleep soon after midnight, than Jan Rutter had dreamt of finding it when he went to bed.

CHAPTER III
VERY RAW MATERIAL

It was all but a summer morning when Jan got back into the trousers without pockets and the black jacket and tie ordained by the school authorities. Peculiarly oppressive to Jan was the rule about trouser pockets; those in his jacket were so full in consequence that there was barely room for his incriminating belt, which he rolled up as small as it would go, and made into a parcel to be hidden away in his study when he had one. This was his last act before leaving the dormitory and marching downstairs at an hour when most of the household were presumably still in bed and asleep; but Jan was naturally an early riser, and he had none of the scruples of conventionality on the score of an essentially harmless act. He was curious to see something of his new surroundings, and there was nothing like seeing for oneself.

At the foot of the lead-lined stairs, worn bright as silver at the edges, there was a short tiled passage with a green baize door at one end and what was evidently the boys’ hall at the other. The baize door communicated with the master’s side of the house, for the new boys had come through it on their way up to dormitory. The hall was a good size, with one very long table under the windows and two shorter ones on either side of the fireplace. On the walls hung portraits of the great composers, which Jan afterwards found to be house prizes in part-singing competitions discontinued before his time; at the moment, however, he took no kind of interest in them, and but very little in the two challenge cups under the clock. What did attract him was the line of open windows, looking like solid blocks of sunlight and fresh air. On the sill of one a figure in print was busy with her wash-leather, and she accosted Jan cheerily.

“You are down early, sir!”

“I always am,” remarked Jan, looking for a door into the open air.

“You’re not like most of the gentlemen, then,” the maid returned, in her cheerful Cockney voice. “They leaves it to the last moment, and then they 'as to fly. You should 'ear ’em come down them stairs!”

“Is there no way out?” inquired Jan.

“You mean into the quad?”

“That’s the quad, is it? Then I do.”

“Well, there’s the door, just outside this door; but Morgan, 'e keeps the key o’ that, and I don’t think 'e’s come yet.”

“Then I’m going through that window,” announced the new boy, calmly; and carried out his intention without a moment’s hesitation.

Had his object been to run away on his very first morning, before his house-master was astir, as the maid seemed to fear by the way she leant out of her window to watch him, the next step would have taxed all Jan’s resources.

Heriot’s quad was a gravel plot very distinctively enclosed, on the left by the walls of buildings otherwise unconnected with the house, on the right by the boys’ studies. At the further extremity were twin gables over gothic arches which left the two interiors underneath open at one end to all the elements; never in his life had Jan beheld such structures; but he had picked up enough from his tutor to guess that they were fives-courts, and he went up to have a look into them. To the right of the fives-courts was an alley ending at a formidable spiked gate which was yet the only obvious way of escape, had Jan been minded to make his. But nothing was further from his thoughts; indeed, there was a certain dull gleam in his eyes, and a sallow flush upon his face, which had not been there the previous evening. At all events he looked wider awake.

The studies interested him most. There was a double row of little lattice windows, piercing a very wall of ivy, like port-holes in a vessel’s side. Not only were the little windows deep-set in ivy, but each had its little window-box, and in some of these still drooped the withered remnant of a brave display. Jan was not interested in flowers, or for that matter in anything that made for the mere beauty of life; but he peered with interest into one or two of the ground-floor studies. There was little to be seen beyond his own reflection broken to bits in the diamond panes. Between him and the windows was a border of shrubs, behind iron palings bent by the bodies and feet of generations, and painted green like the garden seats under the alien walls opposite. On the whole, and in the misty sunlight of the fine September morning, Jan liked Heriot’s quad.

“You’re up early, sir!”

It was not the maid this time, but a bearded man-servant whom the boy had seen the previous night. Jan made the same reply as before, and no sort of secret of the way in which he had got out into the quad. He added that he should like to have a look at the studies; and Morgan, with a stare and a smile quite lost on Jan, showed him round.

They were absurdly, deliciously, inconceivably tiny, the studies at Heriot’s; each was considerably smaller than a dormitory “tish,” and the saddle-room of Jan’s old days would have made three or four of them. But they were undeniably cosy and attractive, as compact as a captain’s cabin, as private as friar’s cell, and far more comfortable than either. Or so they might well have seemed to the normal boy about to possess a study of his own, with a table and two chairs, a square of carpet as big as a bath-sheet, a book-shelf and pictures, and photographs and ornaments to taste, fretwork and plush to heart’s content, a flower-box for the summer term, hot-water pipes for the other two, and above all a door of his own to shut at will against the world! But Jan Rutter had not the instincts of a normal schoolboy, nor the temperament favourable to their rapid growth. He had been brought up too uncomfortably to know the value of comfort, and too much in the open air to appreciate the merits of indoor sanctuary. Artistic impulse he had none; and the rudimentary signs of that form of grace, to be seen in nearly all the studies he was shown, left him thoroughly unimpressed.

“Is it true,” he asked, “that every boy in the school has one of these holes?”

“Quite true,” replied Morgan, staring. “You didn’t say 'holes,’ sir?”

“I did,” declared Jan, enjoying his accidental hit.

“You’d better not let Mr. Heriot hear you, sir, or any of the gentlemen either!”

“I don’t care who hears me,” retorted Jan, boastfully; but it must not be forgotten that he had come to school against his will, and that this was his first opportunity of airing a not unnatural antagonism.

“You wait till you’ve got one of your own,” said the well-meaning man, “with a nice new carpet and table-cloth, and your own family portraits and sportin’ picters!”

“At any rate I should know a horse from a cow,” returned Jan, examining something in the nature of a sporting print, “and not hang up rot like that!”

“You let Mr. Shockley hear you!” cried Morgan, with a laugh. “You’ll catch it!”

“I’ve no doubt I shall do that,” said Jan, grimly. He followed Morgan into an empty study, and asked if it was likely to be his.

“Not unless you take a pretty high place in the school. It’s only the top dozen in the house that get these front studies upstairs. You can make up your mind to one at the back, and be glad if it’s not downstairs, where everybody can see in and throw in stones.”

Jan felt he had not made a friend of Morgan; and yet in his heart he was more favourably impressed with what he had seen than his peculiar temperament permitted him to show. Little as their adventitious attractions might appeal to him, there was something attractive to Jan about this system of separate studies. It appealed, and not without design, to that spirit of independence which happened to be one of his stronger points. Moreover he could conceive a very happy intimacy between two real friends in one of these little dens; and altogether he brought a brighter face to the breakfast-table than he had shown for an instant overnight. Heriot glanced at it with an interested twinkle, as though he had been at the explorer’s elbow all the morning; but whatever he might have known, he betrayed his knowledge neither by word nor sign.

After breakfast the two boys sallied forth with orders signed by Heriot for a school cap apiece; and saw the long old-fashioned country street for the first time in broad daylight. It gave the impression of a street with nothing behind it on either side, the chance remnant of a vanished town. Nothing could have been more solid than the fronts of the drab stone houses, and nothing more startling than the glimpses of vivid meadowland like a black-cloth close behind. The caps were procured from the cricket professional, a maker of history whose fame provided Carpenter with a congenial topic on the way, but sat sadly on the failing giant who was there to serve them in the little shop. The caps were black but not comely, as Carpenter more than once remarked; they were a cross between a cricket-cap and that of a naval officer, with the school badge in red above the peak. Jan chose the biggest he could find, and crammed it over his skull as though he was going out to exercise a horse.

The day was fully occupied with the rather exhaustive examination designed to put the right boy in the right form. There were no fewer than three papers in the morning alone. There was, however, a short break between each, which Carpenter was inclined to spend in boring Rutter with appreciative comments upon the striking mural decorations of the great schoolroom in which the examination was held. There were forty-two new boys, some of them hulking fellows of fifteen or more, some quite small boys in Eton jackets; and the chances are that none among them was more impressed than Carpenter by the reproductions of classical statuary hung upon the walls of Pompeian red, or by the frieze of ancient and modern authors which a great mind had planned and a cunning hand had made; but it is certain that none thought less of them than Jan Rutter. To pacify his companion he did have a look at the frieze, but it was exactly the same look as he had cast into the studies before breakfast. The two had more in common when they compared notes on the various papers.

“I didn’t mind the Latin grammar and history,” said Jan. “I’ve had my nose in my grammar for the last six months, and you only had to answer half the history questions.”

Jan’s spirits seemed quite high.

“But what about the unseen?” asked Carpenter.

“I happened to have done the hardest bit before,” said Jan, chuckling consumedly; “and not so long since, either!”

Carpenter looked at him.

“Then it wasn’t unseen at all?”

“Not to me.”

“You didn’t think of saying so on your paper?”

“Not I! It’s their look-out, not mine,” chuckled Jan.

The other made no comment. It was the long break in the middle of the day, and the pair were on their way back to Heriot’s for dinner.

“I wish they’d set us some verses,” said Carpenter. “They’d be my best chance.”

“Then you’re a fool if you take it,” put in a good-humoured lout who had joined them in the street.

“But it’s the only thing I can do at all decently,” explained the ingenuous Carpenter. “I’m a backward sort of ass at most things, but I rather like Latin verses.”

“Well, you’re another sort of ass if you do your best in any of these piffling papers.”

“I see! You mean to make sure of a nice easy form?”

“Rather!”

“There’s no fagging over the Upper Fourth, let me tell you, even for us.”

“Perhaps not, but there’s more kinds of fagging than one, you take my word for it; and I prefer to do mine out of school,” said the big new boy, significantly, as their ways parted.

Carpenter wanted to discuss his meaning, but Jan took no interest in it, and was evidently not to be led into any discussion against his will. He had in fact a gift of silence remarkable in a boy and not a little irritating to a companion. Yet he broke it again to the extent of asking Heriot at table, and that à propos of nothing, when the other boys would “start to arrive.”

“The tap will be turned on any minute now,” said Heriot, with a look at his sister. “In some houses I expect it’s running already.”

“Which house is Devereux in?” asked Rutter, always direct when he spoke at all.

“Let me think. I know—the Lodge—the house opposite the chapel with the study doors opening into the quad.”

Carpenter’s silence was the companion feature of this meal.

The boys had time for a short walk afterwards, and more than a hint to take one. But they only went together because they were thrown together; these two had obviously as little else in common as boys could have; and yet, there was something else, and neither dreamt what a bond it was to be.

“Do you know Devereux?” Carpenter began before they were out of their quad.

“Why? Do you know him?”

Jan was not unduly taken aback; he was prepared for anything with regard to Devereux, including the next question long before it came.

“We were at the same preparatory school, and great pals there,” replied Carpenter, wistfully. “I suppose you know him at home?”

“I used to, but only in a sort of way,” said Jan, warily. “I don’t suppose we shall see anything of each other here; he mayn’t even recognise me, to start with.”

“Or me, for that matter!” cried Carpenter, with less reserve. “He’s never written to me since we left, though I wrote to him twice last term, and once in the holidays to ask him something.”

It was on the tip of Jan’s tongue to defend the absent Evan with injudicious warmth; but he remembered what he had just said, and held his tongue as he always could. Carpenter, on the other hand, apparently regretting his little show of pique, changed the subject with ingenuous haste and chattered more freely than ever about the various school buildings that they passed upon their way. There was a house at the end of the street with no fewer than three tiers of ivy-covered study windows; but it had no quad. There were other houses tucked more out of sight; but Carpenter knew about them, and which hero of the Cambridge eleven had been at this, that, or the other. His interest in his school was of the romantic and imaginative order; it contrasted very favourably with Jan’s indifference, which grew the more perversely pronounced as his companion waxed enthusiastic. It appeared that Carpenter was following a number of youths from his part of the world, who had been through the school before him, and from whom he had acquired a smattering of its lore. The best houses of all, he had heard, were not in the town at all, but on the hill a quarter of a mile away. The pair went to inspect, and found regular mansions standing back in their own grounds, their studies and fives-courts hidden from the road; for the new boys trespassed far enough to see for themselves; and Rutter at once expressed a laconic preference for the hill houses, whereat Carpenter stood up as readily for the town.

“There’s no end of rivalry between the two,” he explained, as they trotted down into the valley, pressed for time. “I wouldn’t be in a hill house for any money, or in any house but ours if I had my choice of all the lot.”

“And I wouldn’t be here at all,” retorted Jan, depriving his companion of what breath he had as they hurried up the hill towards the town. By turning to the left, however, in the wake of other new boys in a like hurry, they found themselves approaching the chapel and the great schoolroom by a shorter route. It led through a large square quad with study doors opening upon it down two sides, and nothing over these studies but their own roof.

“There’s plenty of time,” said Jan, with rather a furtive look at a little gold lady’s watch that he pulled out in his fist. “I wonder if this is the Lodge?”

“No—it’s the next—opposite the chapel. This is the School House. Do come on!”

The School House and the Lodge were like none of the other houses. Instead of standing by themselves in the town or on the hill, each formed a part of the distinctive group of which the chapel and the great schoolroom were the salient features. Their quadrangles not only adjoined, but there was no line of demarcation to show where one began or the other ended. In both the study doors opened straight into the fresh air; but in neither was a boy to be seen as Carpenter and Rutter caught up the flying remnant of the forty-two.

“Let’s go back by the Lodge,” said Jan, when at last they were let out for good. But now the scene was changing. Groups of two and three were dotted about in animated conversation, some still in their journey hats, others in old school caps with faded badges, but none who took the smallest notice of the new boys with the new badges, which they had still to learn to crease correctly over the peak.

And now it was that Rutter horrified his companion by accosting with apparent coolness a big fellow just emerged from one of the Lodge studies.

“Do you mind telling us if a boy they call Devereux has got back yet?” asked Jan, with more of his own idioms than he had often managed to utter in one breath.

“I haven’t seen him,” the big fellow answered civilly enough. But his stare followed the retreating couple, one of whom had caught the other by the arm.

“I shouldn’t talk about 'a boy,’ if I were you,” Carpenter was saying as nicely as he could.

But Rutter was quite aware of his other solecisms, though not of this one, and was already too furious with himself to brook a gratuitous rebuke.

“Oh! isn’t it the fashion? Then I’ll bet you wouldn’t!” he cried, as he shook off the first arm which had ever been thrust through his by a gentleman’s son.

A ball like a big white bullet was making staccato music in Heriot’s outer fives-court; two school caps were bobbing above the back wall; and a great thick-lipped lad of sixteen or seventeen, who was hanging about the door leading to the studies, promptly asked the new boys their names.

“What’s your gov’nor?” he added, addressing Carpenter first.

“A merchant.”

“A rag-merchant, I should think! And yours?”

Jan was not embarrassed by the question; he was best prepared at all his most vulnerable points. But his natural bluntness had so recently caused him such annoyance with himself, that he replied as politely as he possibly could:

“My father happens to be dead.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” cried the other with a scowl. “Well, if you happen to think it funny to talk about 'happening’ to me, you may jolly soon happen to wish you were dead yourself!”

The tap had indeed been turned on, and the water was certainly rather cold; the more fortunate for Rutter that his skin was thick enough to respond with a glow rather than a shiver.

CHAPTER IV
SETTLING IN

Jan’s impressions were not the less vivid for his determination not to be impressed at all; for no attitude of mind is harder to sustain than one of deliberate indifference, which is not real indifference at all, but at best a precarious pose. Jan was really indifferent to a large extent, but not wholly, and the leaven of sensibility rendered him acutely alive to each successive phase of his experience; on the other hand, the fact that he was not too easily hurt was of immense value in keeping his wits about him, and his whole garrison of senses at attention. Sensitive he was, and that to the last degree, on a certain point; but it was a point no longer likely to arise that night. And meanwhile there was quite enough to occupy his mind.

There was the long-drawn arrival of the house, unit by unit, in bowler hats which changed as if by magic into old school caps, and even in “loud” ties duly discarded for solemn black. Then there was tea, with any amount of good cheer in hall, every fellow bringing in some delicacy of his own, and newcomers arriving in the middle to be noisily saluted by their friends. Nobody now took the slightest notice of Jan, who drifted into a humble place at the long table, which was still far from full, and fell to work upon the plain bread and butter provided, until some fellow pushed a raised pie across the table to him without a word. The matron dispensed tea from a gigantic urn, and when anybody wanted another cup he simply rattled it in his saucer. Jan could have made even more primitive use of his saucer, for the tea was hot if not potent. But fortunately there were some things it was not necessary for Carpenter to tell him, for that guide and counsellor was not in hall; he had gone out to tea with another new boy and his people, who knew something about him at home.

Jan was allowed to spend the evening in an empty study which he might or might not be able to take over next day, according to the place assigned to him in the school; meanwhile the bare boards, table, Windsor chair, and book-shelf, with an ironically cold hot-water pipe, and the nails with which the last occupant had studded the walls, looked dismal enough in the light of a solitary candle supplied by Morgan. The narrow passage resounded with shouts of laughter and boyish badinage from the other studies; either the captain of the house had not come back, or he was not the man to play the martinet on the first night of the term; and Jan, left as severely alone as even he could have wished, rose with alacrity when one in passing pounded on his door and shouted that it was time for prayers. He was in fact not sorry to mingle with his kind again in the lighted hall, where the fellows were already standing in their places at table, armed with hymn-books but chatting merrily, while one of the small fry stood sentinel in the flagged passage leading to the green baize door. Jan had scarcely found a place when in flew this outpost with a sepulchral “hush!” In the ensuing silence came Miss Heriot followed by her brother, who began by giving out the hymn which she played on the piano under the shelf with the cups, and which the house sang heartily enough.

It was one of the many disadvantages of Jan’s strange boyhood that he had been brought up practically without religion. Mention has been made of an eccentric clergyman who was the first to take an interest in Jan’s intellectual welfare; unhappily, his eccentricities had been of such a character as almost to stultify his spiritual pretensions; and in his new home the boy had encountered another type of clerical example which had been but little better in its effect upon his mind. Prayer had never been to him the natural practice which it is to young English schoolboys of all shades of character and condition. So he paid very little attention to the prayers read by Heriot, at this first time of hearing; but even so the manly unaffected voice, and a few odd phrases on which it dwelt in gentler tones, were not altogether lost upon Jan. Nevertheless, when he went up to dormitory, after biscuits (which he heard called “dog-rocks”) and milk, and another dreary half-hour in the empty study, the last thing he feared or thought about was the kind of difficulty which had beset little Arthur in a certain chapter of Tom Brown which had not appealed to Jan. And all this may be why he was so much impressed by what happened in the little dormitory at the top of the house, when he and his three companions were undressing for bed.

Joyce, the captain of the dormitory, who proved to be a rather delicate youth with a most indelicate vocabulary, suddenly ceased firing, as it were, and commanded silence for “bricks.”

“Know what 'bricks’ are?” asked Bingley, who occupied the “tish” adjoining Jan’s, and turned out to be a boy of his own age, instead of the formidable figure of his imagination.

“It’s your prayers,” said Joyce, with such an epithet that Jan could not possibly believe him.

“You are a brute, Joyce!” cried Crabtree, poking a clever red head through his curtains.

“Nevertheless, my boy,” rejoined Joyce, imitating a master through his nose, “I know what bricks are, and I say them.”

“Obvious corruption of prex,” began Crabtree, in didactic fashion, when Joyce cut him short with a genial malediction, and silence reigned for the best part of a minute.

Jan went on his knees with the others, though he had not done so the night before, and his lips moved through the Lord’s Prayer; but in his heart he was marvelling at the language of the nice tall fellow in the far corner. It was the kind of language he had often heard in the stables, but it was the last kind that he had expected to hear in a public school; and somehow it shocked him, for the first time in his life. But on the whole he was thankful to find himself in such pleasant company in dormitory, and it came to him to express his thankfulness while he was on his knees.

Nothing occurred, as they lay talking in the dark, to modify the new boy’s feeling on this point; nor had he subsequent occasion to revise a triple opinion which might well have proved premature in one case or the other. It revealed on the contrary an unusually sound instinct for character. Joyce’s only foible was his fondness for free language. He had a redeeming sense of humour, and it was in treatment rather than in choice of subject that he erred. Crabtree was irreproachable in conversation, and a kindly creature in his cooler moods; but he suffered from the curse of intellect, was precociously didactic and dogmatic, and had a temperament as fiery as his hair. Bingley was a lively, irresponsible, curly-headed dog, who enjoyed life in an insignificant position both in and out of school. The other two had nicknames which were not for the lips of new boys; but Jan called Bingley “Toby” after the first night.

Prayers were in houses on the first morning of the term, and nothing else happened before or after breakfast until the whole school assembled in the big schoolroom at ten o’clock to hear the new school order. Jan pulled his cap over his eyes as he found himself wedged in a crowd from all the houses, converging at the base of the worn stone spiral stair up and down which he had trotted at his ease between the papers of the previous day. Now he was slowly hoisted in the press, the breath crushed from his body, his toes only occasionally encountering a solid step, a helpless atom in a monster’s maw. At the top of the stone stairs, however, and through the studded oak door, there was room for all; but here it was necessary to uncover face and head; and yet none that he knew of old was revealed to Jan’s close though furtive scrutiny.

Carpenter, who had come with him, and squeezed into the next seat, watched the watcher in his turn, and then whispered:

“He’s not come back yet.”

“Who’s not?”

“Evan Devereux. I asked a fellow in his house.”

“What made you think of him now?”

“Oh, nothing. I only thought you might be looking to see if he was here.”

“Well, perhaps I was,” said Jan, with grumpy candour. “But I’m sure I don’t care where he is.”

“No more do I, goodness knows!” said Carpenter.

And between three and four hundred chattered on all sides with subdued but ceaseless animation; the præpostors keeping order more or less, but themselves chatting to each other as became the first morning of the term. Then suddenly there fell an impressive silence. The oak door opened with a terrible click of the latch, like the cocking of a huge revolver, and in trooped all the masters, cap in hand and gown on shoulders, led by a little old man with a kindly, solemn, and imperious air. And Jan felt that this could only be Mr. Thrale, the Head Master, but Carpenter whispered:

“That’s Jerry!”

“Who?”

“Old Thrale, of course, but everybody calls him Jerry.”

And Jan liked everybody’s impudence as Mr. Thrale took his place behind a simple desk on the dais, and read out the new list, form by form, as impressively as Holy Writ.

The first names that Jan recognised were those of Loder, the captain of his house, and Cave major, its most distinguished representative on tented field; they were in the Upper and Lower Sixth respectively. Joyce was still in the Remove, as captain of the form, but Crabtree had gained a double remove from the Lower to the Upper Fifth. Next in Jan’s ken came Shockley—the fellow who had threatened to make him wish he was dead—and then most thrillingly—long before either expected it—Carpenter’s name and his own in quick succession.

“What form will it be?” whispered Jan into the other’s ear.

“Middle Remove,” purred Carpenter. “And we don’t have to fag after all!”

Devereux was the next and the last name that Jan remembered hearing: it was actually in the form below his!

The new boys had already learnt that it was customary for the masters to take their forms in hall in their own houses; they now discovered that Mr. Haigh, the master of the Middle Remove, had just succeeded to the most remote of all the hill houses—the one house in fact on the further slope of the hill. Thither his new form accordingly repaired, and on the good ten minutes’ walk Carpenter and Rutter had their heads violently knocked together by Shockley, for having the cheek to get so high and to escape fagging their first term.

“But you needn’t think you have,” he added, ominously. “If you young swots come flying into forms it takes the rest of us two years to get to—by the sweat of our blessed brows—by the Lord Harry you shall have all the swot you want! You’ll do the construe for Buggins and me and Eyre major every morning of your miserable lives!”

Buggins (who rejoiced in a real name of less distinction, and a strong metropolitan accent) was climbing the hill arm-in-arm with Eyre major (better known as Jane), his echo and his shadow in one distended skin. Buggins embroidered Shockley’s threats, and Eyre major contributed a faithful laugh. But Jan heard them all unmoved, and thought the less of Carpenter when his thinner skin changed colour.

Mr. Haigh gave his new form a genial welcome, vastly reassuring those who knew least about him by laughing uproariously at points too subtle for their comprehension. He was a muscular man with a high colour and a very clever head. His hair was turning an effective grey about the temples, his body bulging after the manner of bodies no longer really young and energetic. Energy he had, however, of a spasmodic and intemperate order, though he only showed it on this occasion by savagely pouncing on a rather small boy who happened to be also in his house. Up to that moment Carpenter and Rutter were ready to congratulate themselves and each other upon their first form-master; but, though he left them considerately alone for a day or two, they were never sure of Mr. Haigh again.

This morning he merely foreshadowed his scheme of the term’s work, and gave out a list of the new books required; but some of these were enough to strike terror to the heart of Jan, and others made Carpenter look solemn. Ancient Greek Geography was not an enticing subject to one who had scarcely beheld even a modern map until the last six months; and to anybody as imperfectly grounded as Carpenter declared himself to be, it was an inhuman jump from somebody’s Stories in Attic Greek to Thucydides and his Peloponnesian War.

“I suppose it’s because I did extra well at something else,” said Carpenter with unconscious irony on their way down the hill. “What a fool I was not to take that fat chap’s advice! Why, I’ve never even done a page of Xenophon, and I’m not sure that I could say the Greek alphabet to save my life!”

“I only hope,” rejoined Jan, “that they haven’t gone and judged me by that unseen!”

But their work began lightly enough, and that first day the furnishing of their studies was food for much more anxious thought, with Carpenter at any rate. As for Jan, he really was indifferent to his surroundings, but the excitable enthusiasm of his companion made him feign even greater indifference than he felt. He was to retain the back upstairs study in which he had spent the previous evening, and Carpenter had the one next it; after dinner Heriot signed orders for carpet, curtains, candles and candlesticks, a table-cloth and a folding arm-chair apiece, as well as for stationery and a quantity of books; and Carpenter led the way to the upholsterer’s at a happy trot. He was an age finding curtains, carpet and table-cloth, of a sufficiently harmonious shade of red; and no doubt Jan made all the more point of leaving the choice of his chattels entirely to the tradesman.

“Send me what you think,” he said. “It’s all one to me.”

Carpenter rallied him in all seriousness on their way back to the house.

“I can’t understand it, Rutter, when you have an absolute voice in everything.”

“I hadn’t a voice in coming here,” replied Rutter, so darkly as to close the topic.

“I suppose I go to the other extreme,” resumed Carpenter, with a reflective frankness which seemed a characteristic. “I shall have more chairs than I’ve room for if I don’t take care. I’ve bought one already from Shockley.”

“Good-night!” cried Jan. “Whatever made you do that?”

“Oh, he would have me into his study to have a look at it; and there were a whole lot of them there—that fellow Buggins, and Jane Eyre, and the one they call Cranky—and they all swore it was as cheap as dirt. There are some beasts here!” added Carpenter below his breath.

“How much was it?”

“Seven-and-six; and I didn’t really want it a bit; and one of the legs was broken all the time!”

“And,” added Jan, for his only comment, “the gang of them are in our form and all!”

They met most of the house trooping out of the quad, with bats and pads, but not in flannels. They were going to have a house-game on the Middle Ground, as the September day was warmer than many of the moribund summer, and there was no more school until five o’clock. Nor did it require the menaces of Shockley to induce the new pair to turn round and accompany the rest; but their first game of cricket was not a happy experience for either boy. Cave major, who was in the Eleven, was better employed among his peers on the Upper. Loder, who was no cricketer, picked up with a certain Shears major, who was not much of one. Nobody took the game in the least seriously except a bowler off whom the unlucky Carpenter managed to miss two catches. The two new men were chosen last on either side. They failed to make a run between them, and of course had no opportunity of showing whether they could bowl. Both were depressed when it was all over.

“It served me right for dropping those catches,” said Carpenter, however, with the stoicism of a true cricketer at heart.

“I only wish it was last term instead of this!” muttered Jan.

There was another thing that disappointed both boys. The Lodge happened to be playing a similar game on an adjacent pitch. But Devereux was not among the players, and Carpenter heard somebody say that he was not coming back till half-term. Jan’s heart jumped when he heard it in his turn: by half-term he would have settled down, by half-term many things might have happened. Yet the deferred meeting was still fraught in his mind with opposite possibilities, that swung to either extreme on the pendulum of his mood; and on the whole he would have been glad to get it over. At one moment this half-term’s grace was a keen relief to him; at another, a keener disappointment.

CHAPTER V
NICKNAMES

The ready invention and general felicity of the public-school nickname are points upon which few public-school men are likely to disagree. If it cannot be contended that either Carpenter or Rutter afforded a supreme example, at least each was nicknamed before he had been three days in the school, and in each case the nickname was too good an accidental fit to be easily repudiated or forgotten. Thus, although almost every Carpenter has been “Chips” in his day, there was something about a big head thrust forward upon rather round shoulders, and a tendency to dawdle when not excited, that did recall the most dilatory of domestic workmen. Chips Carpenter, however, albeit unduly sensitive in some things, had the wit to accept his immediate sobriquet as a compliment. And in the end it was not otherwise with Rutter; but in his case there were circumstances which made his nickname a secret bitterness, despite the valuable stamp it set upon his character in the public eye.

It happened that on the Saturday afternoon, directly after dinner, the majority of the house were hanging about the quad when there entered an incongruous figure from the outer world. This was a peculiarly debased reprobate, a local character of pothouse notoriety, whose chief haunt was the courtyard of the Mitre, and whom the boys in the quad saluted familiarly as “Mulberry.” And that here was yet another instance of the appropriate nickname, a glance was enough to show, for never did richer hue or bigger nose deface the human countenance.

The trespasser was only slightly but quite humorously drunk, and the fellows in the quad formed a not unappreciative audience of the type of entertainment to be expected from a being in that precise condition. Mulberry, however, was not an ordinary stable sot; it was obvious that he had seen better days. He had ragged tags of Latin on the tip of a somewhat treacherous tongue: he inquired quite tenderly after the binominal theororum, but ascribed an unpleasant expression correctly enough to a lapsus linguae.

“I say, Mulberry, you are a swell!”

“We give you full marks for that, Mulberry!”

“My dear young friends,” quoth Mulberry, “I knew Latin before any of you young devils knew the light.”

“Draw it mild, Mulberry!”

“I wish you’d give us a construe before second school!”

Jan remembered all his days the stray strange picture of the debauched intruder in the middle of the sunlit quad, with the figures of young and wholesome life standing aloof from him in good-natured contempt, and more fresh faces at the ivy-mantled study windows. Jan happened to be standing nearest Mulberry, and to catch a bloodshot eye as it flickered over his audience in a comprehensive wink.

“You bet I wasn’t always a groom,” said Mulberry; “an’ if I had ha’ been, there are worse places than the stables, ain’t there, young fellow?”

Jan looked as though he only wished the ground would open and engulf him; and the look did not belie his momentary feeling. But he had a spirit more easily angered than abased, and the brown flush which swept him from collar to cap was not one of unmixed embarrassment.

“How should I know?” he cried in a voice shrill with indignation.

“He seems to know more about it than he’ll say,” observed Mulberry, and with another wink he fastened his red eyes on Jan, who had his cap pulled over his eyes as usual, and arms akimbo for the want of trousers pockets. “Just the cut of a jock!” added Mulberry, in quite a complimentary murmur.

“You’re an ugly blackguard,” shouted Jan, “and I wonder anybody can stand and listen to you!”

It was at this point that Heriot appeared very suddenly upon the scene, took the intruder by either shoulder, and had him out of the quad in about a second; in another Heriot rejoined the group in the sun, with a pale face and flashing spectacles.

“You’re quite right,” he said sharply to Jan. “I wonder, too—at every one of you—at every one!”

And he turned on his heel and was gone, leaving them stinging with his scorn; and Jan would have given a finger from his hand to have gone as well without more words; but he found himself hemmed in by clenched fists and furious faces, his back to the green iron palings under the study windows.

“You saw Heriot coming!”

“You said that to suck up to him!”

“The beastly cheek, for a beastly new man!”

“But we saw through it, and so did he!”

“Trust old Heriot! You don’t find that sort o’ thing pay with him.”

“I never saw him,” said Jan steadily, despite a thumping heart, “so you can say what you like.”

And he took a heavy buffet from Shockley without wincing.

“And why should you lose your wool with poor old Mulberry?” that worthy demanded with a fine show of charity. “One would think there was something in what he said.”

“You fairly stink of the racing-stables,” said Buggins. “You know you do, you brute!”

And Eyre major led a laugh.

“Racing-stables!” echoed Shockley. “There’s more of the stable-boy about him than the jock.”

Jan folded his arms and listened stoically.

“Ostler’s lad,” said one satirist.

“Nineteenth groom,” from another.

“The tiger!” piped a smaller boy than Jan. “The tiger that sits behind the dog-cart—see how he folds his arms!”

And the imp folded his at the most untimely moment; for this was more than Jan was going to stand. Submission to superior force was a law of nature which his common sense recognised and his self-control enabled him to keep; but to take from a boy inches shorter than himself what had to be taken from one as many inches taller, just because they were all against him, was further than his forbearance would go. His flat left hand flew out as the smaller boy folded his arms, and it fell with a resounding smack upon the side of an undefended head.

Within the fewest possible moments Jan had been pinned against the palings by the bigger fellows, his arm twisted, his person violently kicked, his own ears soundly boxed and filled with abuse. This was partly because he fought and kicked as long as he had a free leg or arm. But through it all the satisfaction of that one resounding smack survived, and kept the infuriated Jan just sane enough to stop short of tooth and nail when finally overwhelmed.

“Tiger’s the word,” panted Shockley, when they were about done with him. “But if you try playing the tiger here, ever again, you son of a gun, you’ll be killed by inches, as sure as you’re blubbing now! So you’d better creep into your lair, you young tiger, and lie down and die like a mangy dog!”

It had taken some minutes to produce the tears, but the tears did not quench the fierce animosity of the eyes that shed them, and they were dry before Jan gained his study and slammed the door. And there you may picture him in the chair at the table, on the still bare boards: hot, dishevelled, aching and ashamed, yet rejoicing in his misery at the one shrewd left-hand smack he had somehow administered upon an impudent though defenceless head.

He could hear it for his consolation all the afternoon!

The studies emptied; it was another belated summer’s day, and there was a game worth watching on the Upper. Soon there was no sound to be heard but those from the street, which came through the upper part of the ground-glass window, the only part of the back study windows that was made to open; but Jan sat staring at the wall before his eyes, as though the fresh air was nothing to him, as though he had not been brought up in his shirtsleeves in and out of the open air in all weathers.... And so he was still sitting when a hesitating step came along the passage, paused in the next study, and then, but not for a minute or two, at Jan’s door.

“What do you want?” he demanded rudely, when he had responded to a half-hearted knock by admitting Chips Carpenter. Now, Chips had witnessed just the bitter end of the scene in the quad, but Jan did not know he had been there at all.

“Oh, I don’t exactly want anything. I can clear out if you’d rather, Rutter.”

“All right. I’d rather.”

“Only I thought I’d tell you it’s call-over on the Upper in half-an-hour.”

“I’m not going to call-over.”

“What?”

“Damn call-over.”

Carpenter winced: he did not like swearing, and he did like Rutter well enough to wince when he swore. But the spirit of the oath promptly blotted the letter from his mind. Carpenter was a law-abiding boy who had been a few terms at a good preparatory school; he could scarcely believe his ears, much less a word of Rutter’s idle boast. Rutter certainly looked as though he meant it, with his closed lid of a mouth, and his sullen brooding eyes. But his mad intention was obviously not to be carried out.

“My dear man,” said Carpenter, “it’s one of the first rules of the school. Have you read them? You’d get into a frightful row!”

“The bigger the better.”

“You might even get bunked,” continued Chips, who was acquiring the school terminology as fast as he could, “for cutting call-over on purpose.”

“Let them bunk me! Do you think I care? I never wanted to come here. I’d as soon’ve gone to prison. It can’t be worse. At any rate they let you alone—they got to. But here ... let them bunk me! It’s the very thing I want. I loathe this hole, and everything about it. I don’t care whether you say it’s one of the best schools going, or what you say!”

“I say it’s the best. I know I wouldn’t swop it for any other—or let a little bullying put me against it. And I have been bullied, if you want to know!”

“Perhaps you’re proud of that?”

“I hate it, Rutter! I hate lots of things more than you think. You’re in that little dormitory. You’re well off. But I didn’t come here expecting to find it all skittles. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else if it was twenty times worse than it is!”

Rutter looked at the ungainly boy with the round shoulders and the hanging head; for the moment he was improved out of knowledge, his flat chest swelling, his big head thrown back, a proud flush upon his face. There was a touch of consciousness in the pride, but it was none the less real for that, and Jan could only marvel at it. He could not understand this pride of school; but he could see it, and envy it in his heart, even while a fresh sneer formed upon his lips. He wished he was not such an opposite extreme to Carpenter: he could not know that the other’s attitude was possibly unique, that few at all events came to school with such ready-made enthusiasm for their school, if fewer still brought his own antagonism.

But, after all, Carpenter did not understand, and never would.

“You weren’t in the quad just now,” said Jan, grimly.

Chips looked the picture of guilt.

“I was. At the end. And I feel such a brute!”

“You? Why?” Jan was frowning at him. “You weren’t one of them?”

“Of course I wasn’t! But—I might have stood by you—and I didn’t do a thing!”

The wish to show some spirit in his turn, the envious admiration for a quality of which he daily felt the want, both part and parcel of one young nature, like the romantic outlook upon school life, were equally foreign and incomprehensible to the other. Jan could only see Carpenter floundering to the rescue, with his big head and his little wrists; and the vision made him laugh, though not unkindly.

“You would have been a fool,” he said.

“I wish I had been!”

“Then you must be as big a one as I was.”

“But you weren’t, Rutter! That’s just it. You don’t know!”

“I know I was fool enough to lose my wool, as they call it.”

“You mean man enough! I believe the chaps respect a chap who lets out without thinking twice about it,” said Carpenter, treading on a truth unawares. “I should always be frightened of being laughed at all the more,” he added, with one of his inward glances and the sigh it fetched. “But you’ve done better than you think. The fellows at the bottom of the house won’t hustle you. I heard Petrie telling them he’d never had his head smacked so hard in his life!”

Jan broke into smiles.

“I did catch him a warm 'un,” he said. “I wish you’d been there.”

“I only wish it had been one of the big brutes,” said Chips, conceiving a Goliath in his thirst for the ideal.

“I don’t,” said Jan. “He was trading on them being there, and by gum he was right! But they didn’t prevent me from catching him a warm 'un!”

And in his satisfaction the epithet almost rhymed with harm.

Nevertheless, Jan looked another and a brighter being as he stood up and asked Carpenter what his collar was like.

Carpenter had to tell him it was not fit to be seen.

Jan wondered where he could find the matron to give him a clean one.

“Her room’s at the top of the house near your dormitory. I daresay she’d be there.”

“I suppose I’d better go and see. Come on!”

“Shall we go down to the Upper together?” Chips asked as they reached the quad.

“I don’t mind.”

“Then I’ll wait, if you won’t be long.”

And the boy in the quad thought the other had quite forgotten his mad idea of cutting call-over—which was not far from the truth—and that he had not meant it for a moment—which was as far from the truth as it could be. But even Carpenter hardly realised that it was he who had put Rutter on better terms with himself, and in saner humour altogether, by the least conscious and least intentional of all his arguments.

Jan meanwhile was being informed upstairs that he was not supposed to go to his dormitory in daytime, but that since he was there he had better have a comfortable wash as well as a clean collar. So he came down looking perhaps smarter and better set-up than at any moment since his arrival. And at the foot of the stairs the hall door stood open, showing a boy or two within looking over the new illustrated papers; and one of the boys was young Petrie.

Jan stood a moment at the door. Either his imagination flattered him, or young Petrie’s right ear was still rather red. But he was a good type of small boy, clear-skinned, bright-eyed, well-groomed. And even as Jan watched him he cast down the Graphic, stretched himself, glanced at the clock, and smiled quite pleasantly as they stood face to face upon the threshold.

“I’m sorry,” said Jan, not as though he were unduly sorry, but yet without a moment’s thought.

“That’s all right, Tiger!” replied young Petrie, brightly. “But I wouldn’t lose my wool again, if I were you. It don’t pay, Tiger, you take my tip.”

CHAPTER VI
BOY TO BOY

The match on the Upper, although an impromptu fixture on the strength of an Indian summer’s day, was exciting no small interest in the school. It was between the champion house at cricket and the best side that could be got together from all the other houses; and the interesting point was the pronounced unpopularity of the champions (one of the hill houses), due to the insufferable complacency with which they were said to have received the last of many honours. The whole house was accused of having “an awful roll on,” and it was the fervent hope of the rest of the school that their delegates would do something to diminish this offensive characteristic. Boys were lying round the ground on rugs, and expressing their feelings after almost every ball, when Chips and Jan crept shyly upon the scene. But within five minutes a bell had tinkled on top of the pavilion; the game had been stopped because it was not a real match after all; and three or four hundred boys, most of them with rugs over their arms, huddled together in the vicinity of the heavy roller.

It so happened that Heriot was call-over master of the day. He stood against the roller in a weather-beaten straw hat, rapping out the names in his abrupt, unmistakable tones, with a lightning glance at almost every atom that said “Here, sir!” and detached itself from the mass. The mass was deflating rapidly, and Jan was moistening his lips before opening them for the first time in public, when a reddish head, whose shoulders were wedged not far in front of him, suddenly caught Jan’s eye.

“Shockley.”

“Here, sir.”

“Nunn minor.”

“Here, sir.”

“Carpenter.”

“Here, sir.”

“Rutter.”

No answer. Heriot looking up with pencil poised.

“Rutter?”

“Here, sir!”

And out slips Jan in dire confusion, to join Carpenter on the outskirts of the throng; to be cursed under Shockley’s breath; and just to miss the stare of the boy with reddish hair, who has turned a jovial face on hearing the name for the second time.

“I say, Carpenter!”

“Yes?”

“Did you see who that was in front of us?”

“You bet! And they said he wasn’t coming back till half-term! I’m going to wait for him.”

“Then don’t say anything about me—see? He never saw me, so don’t say anything about me.”

And off went Jan to watch the match, more excited than when he had lost self-control in the quad; the difference was that he did not lose it for a moment now. He heard the name of Devereux called over in its turn. He knew that Carpenter had joined Devereux a moment later. He wondered whether Devereux had seen him also—seen him from the first and pretended not to see him—or only this minute while talking to Chips? Was he questioning Chips, or telling him everything in a torrent?

Jan felt them looking at him, felt their glances like fire upon his neck and ears, as one told and the other listened. But he did not turn round. He swore in his heart that no power should induce him to turn round. And he kept his vow for minutes and minutes that seemed like hours and hours.

It was just as well, for he would have seen with his eyes exactly what he saw in his mind, and that was not all there was to see. There was something else that Jan must have seen—and might have seen through—had his will failed him during the two minutes after call-over. That was the celerity with which Heriot swooped down upon Devereux and Carpenter; laid his hand upon the shoulder of the boy who had won his last term’s prize; stood chatting energetically with the pair, chatting almost sharply, and then left them in his abrupt way with a nod and a smile.

But Jan stood square as a battalion under fire, watching a game in which he did not follow a single ball; and as he stood his mind changed, though not his will. He wanted to speak to Evan Devereux now. At least he wanted Evan to come and speak to him; in a few minutes, he was longing for that. But no Evan came. And when at length he did turn round, there was no Evan to come, and no Chips Carpenter either.

The game was in its last and most exciting stage when Jan took himself off the ground; feeling ran high upon the rugs, and expressed itself more shrilly and even oftener than before; and such a storm of cheering chanced to follow Jan into the narrow country street, that two boys quite a long way ahead looked back with one accord. They did not see Jan. They were on the sunny side; he was in the shade. But he found himself following Devereux and Carpenter perforce, because their way was his. He slackened his pace; they stopped at the market-place, and separated obviously against Carpenter’s will. Carpenter pursued his way to Heriot’s. Devereux turned to the left across the market-place, into the shadow of the old grey church with the dominant spire, with the blue-faced clock that struck in the night, and so to the school buildings and his own quad by the short cut from the hill. And Jan dogged him all the way, lagging behind when his unconscious leader stopped to greet a friend, or to look at a game of fives in the School House court, and in the end seeing Devereux safely into his study before he followed and gave a knock.

Evan had scarcely shut his door before it was open again, but in that moment he had cast his cap, and he stood bareheaded against the dark background of his tiny den, in a frame of cropped ivy. It was an effective change, and an effective setting, in his case. His hair was not red, but it was a pale auburn, and peculiarly fine in quality. In a flash Jan remembered it in long curls, and somebody saying, “What a pity he’s not a girl!” And with this striking hair there had always been the peculiarly delicate and transparent skin which is part of the type; there had nearly always been laughing eyes, and a merry mouth; and here they all were in his study doorway, with hardly any difference that Jan could see, though he had dreaded all the difference in the world. And yet, the smile was not quite the old smile, and a flush came first; and Evan looked past Jan into the quad, before inviting him in; and even then he did not shake hands, as he had often done on getting home for the holidays, when Jan’s hand was not fit to shake.

But he laughed quite merrily when the door was shut. And Jan, remembering that ready laugh of old, and how little had always served to ring a hearty peal, saw nothing forced or hurtful in it now, but joined in himself with a shamefaced chuckle.

“It is funny, isn’t it?” he mumbled. “Me being here!”

“I know!” said Evan, with laughing eyes fixed none the less curiously on Jan.

“When did you get back?” inquired Jan, speedily embarrassed by the comic side.

“Only just this afternoon. I went and had mumps at home.”

“That was a bad job,” said Jan, solemnly. “It must have spoilt your holidays.”

“It did, rather.”

“You wouldn’t expect to find me here, I suppose?”

“Never thought of it till I heard your name called over and saw it was you. I hear you’re in Bob’s house?”

“In Mr. Heriot’s,” affirmed Jan, respectfully.

“We don’t 'mister’ ’em behind their backs,” said Evan, in tears of laughter. “It’s awfully funny,” he explained, “but I’m awfully glad to see you.”

“Thanks,” said Jan. “But it’s not such fun for me, you know.”

“I should have thought you’d like it awfully,” remarked Evan, still looking the new Jan merrily up and down.

“After the stables, I suppose you mean?”

Evan was more than serious in a moment.

“I wasn’t thinking of them,” he declared, with an indignant flush.

“But I was!” cried Jan. “And I’d give something to be back in them, if you want to know!”

“You won’t feel like that long,” said Evan, reassuringly.

“Won’t I!”

“Why should you?”

“I never wanted to come here, for one thing.”

“You’ll like it well enough, now you are here.”

“I hate it!”

“Only to begin with; lots of chaps do at first.”

“I always shall. I never wanted to come here; it wasn’t my doing, I can tell you.”

Evan stared, but did not laugh; he was now studiously kind in look and word, and yet there was something about both that strangely angered Jan. Look and word, in fact, were alike instinctively measured, and the kindness perfunctory if not exactly condescending. There was, to be sure, no conscious reminder, on Evan’s part, of past inequality; and yet there was just as little to show that in their new life Evan was prepared to treat Jan as an equal; nay, on their former footing he had been far more friendly. If his present manner augured anything, he was to be neither the friend nor the foe of Jan’s extreme hopes and fears. And the unforeseen mien was not the less confusing and exasperating because Jan was confused and exasperated without at the time quite knowing why.

“You needn’t think it was because you were here,” he added suddenly, aggressively—“because I thought you were at Winchester.”

“I didn’t flatter myself,” retorted Evan. “But, as a matter of fact, I should be there if I hadn’t got a scholarship here.”

“So I suppose,” said Jan.

“And yet I’m in the form below you!”

Evan was once more openly amused at this, and perhaps not so secretly annoyed as he imagined.

“I know,” said Jan. “That wasn’t my fault, either. I doubt they’ve placed me far too high.”

“But how did you manage to get half so high?” asked Evan, with a further ingenuous display of what was in his mind.

“Well, there was the vicar, to begin with.”

“That old sinner!” said Evan.

“I used to go to him three nights a week.”

“Now I remember.”

“Then you heard what happened when my father died?”

“Yes.”

“It would be a surprise to you, Master Evan?”

It had been on the tip of his tongue more than once, but until now he had found no difficulty in keeping it there. Yet directly they got back to the old days, out it slipped without a moment’s warning.

“You’d better not call me that again,” said Evan, dryly.

“I won’t.”

“Unless you want the whole school to know!”

“You see, my mother’s friends——”

“I know. I’ve heard all about it. I always had heard—about your mother.”

Jan had only heard that pitiful romance from his father’s dying lips; it was then the boy had promised to obey her family in all things, and his coming here was the first thing of all. He said as much in his own words, which were bald and broken, though by awkwardness rather than emotion. Then Evan asked, as it were in his stride, if Jan’s mother’s people had a “nice place,” and other questions which might have betrayed to a more sophisticated observer a wish to ascertain whether they really were gentlefolk as alleged. Jan answered that it was “a nice enough place”; but he pointed to a photograph in an Oxford frame—the photograph of a large house reflected in a little artificial lake—a house with a slate roof and an ornamental tower, and no tree higher than the first-floor windows.

“That’s a nicer place,” said Jan, with a sigh.

“I daresay,” Evan acquiesced, with cold complacency.

“There’s nothing like that in Norfolk,” continued Jan, with perfect truth. “Do you remember the first time you took me up to the tower?”

“I can’t say I do.”

“What! not when we climbed out on the roof?”

“I’ve climbed out on the roof so often.”

“And there’s our cottage chimney; and just through that gate we used to play 'snob’!”

Evan did not answer. He had looked at his watch, and was taking down some books. The hint was not to be ignored.

“Well, I only came to say it wasn’t my fault,” said Jan. “I never knew they were going to send me to the same school as you, or they’d have had a job to get me to come.”

“Why?” asked Evan, more stiffly than he had spoken yet. “I shan’t interfere with you.”

“I’m sure you won’t!” cried Jan, with the bitterness which had been steadily gathering in his heart.

“Then what’s the matter with you? Do you think I’m going to tell the whole school all about you?”

Jan felt that he was somehow being put in the wrong; and assisted in the process by suddenly becoming his most sullen self.

“I don’t know,” he answered, hanging his head.

“You don’t know! Do you think I’d think of such a thing?”

“I think a good many would.”

“You think I would?”

“I don’t say that.”

“But you think it?”

Evan pressed him hotly.

“I don’t think anything; and I don’t care what anybody thinks of me, or what anybody knows!” cried Jan, not lying, but speaking as he had suddenly begun to feel.

“Then I don’t know why on earth you came to me,” said Evan scornfully.

“No more do I,” muttered Jan; and out he went into the quad, and crossed it with a flaming face. But at the further side he turned. Evan’s door was still open, as Jan had left it, but Evan had not come out.

Jan found him standing in the same attitude, with the book he had taken down, still unopened in his hand, and a troubled frown upon his face.

“What’s the matter now?” asked Evan.

“I’m sorry—Devereux!”

“So am I.”

“I might have known you wouldn’t tell a soul.”

“I think you might.”

“And of course I don’t want a soul to know. I thought I didn’t care a minute ago. But I do care, more than enough.”

“Well, no one shall hear from me. I give you my word about that.”

“Thank you!”

Jan was holding out his hand.

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“Won’t you shake hands?”

“Oh, with pleasure, if you like.”

But the grip was all on one side.

CHAPTER VII
REASSURANCE

Jan went back to his house in a dull glow of injury and anger. But he was angriest with himself, for the gratuitous and unwonted warmth with which he had grasped an unresponsive hand. And the sense of injury abated with a little honest reflection upon its cause. After all, with such a different relationship so fresh in his mind, the Master Evan of the other day could hardly have said more than he had said this afternoon; in any case he could not have promised more. Jan remembered his worst fears; they at least would never be realised now. And yet, in youth, to escape the worst is but to start sighing for the best. Evan might be loyal enough. But would he ever be a friend? Almost in his stride Jan answered his own question with complete candour in the negative; and having faced his own conclusion, thanked his stars that Evan and he were in different houses and different forms.

Shockley was lounging against the palings outside the door leading to the studies; the spot appeared to be his favourite haunt. It was an excellent place for joining a crony or kicking a small boy as he passed. Jan was already preparing his heart for submission to superior force, and his person for any violence, when Shockley greeted him with quite a genial smile.

“Lot o’ parcels for you, Tiger,” said he. “I’ll give you a hand with ’em, if you like.”

“Thank you very much,” mumbled Jan, quite in a flutter. “But where will they be?”

“Where will they be?” the other murmured under his breath. “I’ll show you, Tiger.”

Jan could not help suspecting that Carpenter might be right after all. He had actually done himself good by his display of spirit in the quad! Young Petrie had been civil to him within an hour, and here was Shockley doing the friendly thing before the afternoon was out. He had evidently misjudged Shockley; he tried to make up for it by thanking him nearly all the way to the hall, which was full of fellows who shouted an embarrassing greeting as the pair passed the windows. They did not go into the hall, however, but stopped at the slate table at the foot of the dormitory stairs. It was covered with parcels of all sizes, on several of which Rutter read his name.

“Tolly-sticks—don’t drop ’em,” said Shockley, handing one of the parcels. “This feels like your table-cloth; that must be tollies; and all the rest are books. I’ll help you carry them over.”

“I can manage, thanks,” said Jan, uncomfortably. But Shockley would not hear of his “managing,” and led the way back past the windows, an ironical shout following them into the quad.

“You should have had the lot yesterday,” continued Shockley in the most fatherly fashion. “I should complain to Heriot, if I were you.”

Jan’s study had also been visited in his absence. A folding chair, tied up with string, stood against the wall, with billows of bright green creton bulging through string and woodwork; an absurd bit of Brussels carpet covered every inch of the tiny floor; and it also was an aggressive green, though of another and a still more startling shade.

“Curtains not come yet,” observed Shockley. “I suppose they’re to be green too?”

“I don’t know,” replied Rutter. “I left it to them.”

“I rather like your greens,” said Shockley, opening the long soft parcel. “Why, you’ve gone and got a red table-cloth!”

“It’s their doing, not mine,” observed Jan, phlegmatically.

“I wonder you don’t take more interest in your study,” said Shockley. “Most chaps take a pride in theirs. Red and green! It’ll spoil the whole thing; they don’t go, Tiger.”

Jan made some show of shaking off his indifference in the face of this kindly interest in his surroundings.

“They might change it, Shockley.”

“I wouldn’t trust ’em,” said that authority, shaking and scratching a bullet head by turns. “They’re not too obliging, the tradesmen here—too much bloated monopoly. If you take my advice you’ll let well alone.”

“Then I will,” said Jan, eagerly. “Thanks, awfully, Shockley!”

“Not that it is well,” resumed Shockley, as though the matter worried him. “A green table-cloth’s the thing for you, Tiger, and a green table-cloth you must have if we can work it.”

“It’s very good of you to bother,” said Jan, devoutly wishing he would not.

Shockley only shook his head.

“I’ve got one myself, you see,” he explained in a reflective voice, as he examined the red cloth critically. “It’s a better thing than this—better taste—and green—but I’d rather do a swop with you than see you spoil your study, Tiger.”

“Very well,” said Jan, doubtfully.

Shockley promptly tucked the new table-cloth under his arm. “Let’s see your tolly-sticks!” said he, briskly.

“Tolly-sticks?”

“Candle-sticks, you fool!”

Jan unpacked them, noting as he did so that the fatherly tone had been dropped.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like a real old valuable pair instead of these meagre things?”

“No, thanks, Shockley.”

“Well, anyhow you must have a picture or two.”

“Why must I?” asked Jan. He had suddenly remembered Carpenter’s story of the seven-and-sixpenny chair.

“Because I’ve got the very pair for you, and going cheap.”

“I see,” said Jan, in his dryest Yorkshire voice.

“Oh, I don’t care whether you’ve a study or a sty!” cried Shockley, and away he went glaring, but with the new cloth under his arm. In a minute he was back with the green one rolled into a ball, which he flung in Jan’s face. “There you are, you fool, and I’m glad you like your own colour!” he jeered as he slammed the door behind him.

Neither had Jan much mercy on himself, when he had fitted two candles into the two new china sticks, and lit them with a wax match from the shilling box included in his supplies. Shockley’s table-cloth might once have been green, but long service had reduced it to a more dubious hue; it was spotted with ink and candle-grease, and in one place cut through with a knife. To Jan, indeed, one table-cloth was like another; he was only annoyed to think he had been swindled as badly as Carpenter, by the same impudent impostor, and with Carpenter’s experience to put him on his guard. But even in his annoyance the incident appealed to that prematurely grim sense of the ironic which served Jan Rutter for the fun and nonsense of the ordinary boy; and on the whole he thought it wiser to avoid another row by saying no more about it.

But he was not suffered to keep his resolution to the letter: at tea Buggins and Eyre major were obviously whispering about Jan before Buggins asked him across the table how he liked his new table-cloth.

“I suppose you mean Shockley’s old one?” retorted Jan at once. “It’ll do all right; but it’s a good bargain for Shockley.”

“A bargain’s a bargain,” remarked Buggins with his mouth full.

“And a Jew’s a Jew!” said Jan.

The nice pair glared at him, and glanced at Shockley, who was two places higher up than Jan, but deep in ingratiating conversation with a good-looking fellow on his far side.

“God help you when the Shocker hears that!” muttered Buggins under his breath.

“You’ll be murdered before you’ve been here a week, you brute!” added Eyre major with a titter.

“I may be,” said Jan, “but not by you—you prize pig!”

And, much as he was still to endure from the trio in his form and house, this was the last Jan heard directly of the matter. Whether his reckless words ever reached the ears of Shockley, or whether the truth was in them, Jan never knew. As a good hater, however, he always felt that apart from thick lips, heavy nostrils, pale eyes and straight light hair, his arch-enemy combined all the most objectionable characteristics of Jew and Gentile.

So this stormy Saturday came to a comparatively calm close, and Jan was left to wrestle in peace with a Latin prose set by Mr. Haigh at second school. On other nights everybody went back to his form-master after tea, for a bout of preparation falsely called “private work”; but on Saturdays some kind of composition was set throughout the school, was laboriously evolved in the solitude of the study, and signed by the house-master after prayers that night or on the Sunday morning. Unfortunately, composition was Jan’s weak point. By the dim light of the dictionary, with the frail support of a Latin grammar, he could grope his way through a page of Cæsar or of Virgil without inevitably plunging to perdition; but the ability to cast English back into Latin implies a point of scholarship which Jan had not reached by all the forced marches of the past few months. He grappled with his prose until head and hand perspired in the warm September evening. He hunted up noun after noun in his new English-Latin, and had a shot at case after case. And when at length his fair copy was food for Haigh’s blue pencil, and Jan leant back to survey his own two candles and his own four walls, he was conscious, in the first place, that he had been taken out of himself, and in the second that a study to oneself was a mitigating circumstance in school life.

Not that he disliked his dormitory either; there, nothing was said to him about the row in the quad, of which in fact he had heard very little since it occurred. He was embarrassed, however, by a command from Joyce to tell a story after the gas was out; stories were not at all in Jan’s line; and the situation was only relieved by Bingley’s sporting offer to stand proxy in the discharge of what appeared to be a traditional debt on the part of all new boys entering that house. Bingley, permitted to officiate as a stop-gap only, launched with much gusto and more minutiæ into a really able account of a revolting murder committed in the holidays. Murders proved to be Bingley’s strong point; his face would glow over the less savoury portions of the papers in hall; and that night his voice was still vibrating with unctuous horror when Jan got off to sleep.

The school Sunday in his time was not desecrated by a stroke of work; breakfast of course was later, and Heriot himself deliberately late for prayers, which were held in the houses as on the first day of the term, instead of in the big school-room. Chapel seemed to monopolise morning and afternoon. Yet there was time for a long walk after either chapel, and abundant time for letter-writing after dinner. Not that Jan availed himself of the opportunity; he had already posted a brief despatch to the rectory, and nowhere else was there a soul who could possibly care to hear from him. He spent the latter end of the morning in a solitary stroll along a very straight country road, and the hour after dinner over a yellow-back borrowed from Chips.

Morning chapel had been quite a revelation to Jan. He had been forced to go to church in Norfolk; he went to chapel in the stoical spirit born of chastening experience. Yet there was something in the very ringing of the bells that might have prepared him for brighter things; they were like joy-bells in their almost merry measure. The service proved bright beyond belief. The chapel itself was both bright and beautiful. It was full of sunlight and fresh air, it lacked the heavy hues and the solemn twilight which Jan associated with a place of worship. The responses came with a hearty and unanimous ring. The psalms were the quickest thing in church music that Jan had ever heard; they went with such a swing that he found himself trying to sing for the first time in his life. His place in chapel had not yet been allotted to him, and he stood making his happily inaudible effort between two tail-coated veterans with stentorian lungs. Crowning merit of the morning service, there was no sermon; but in the afternoon the little man with the imperious air grew into a giant in his marble pulpit, and impressed Jan so powerfully that he wondered again how the fellows could call him Jerry, until he looked round and saw some of them nodding in their chairs. Then he found that he had lost the thread himself, that he could not pick it up again, that everything escaped him except a transfigured face and a voice both stern and tender. But these were flag and bugle to the soldier concealed about most young boys, and Jan for one came out of chapel at quick march.

The golden autumn day was still almost at its best, but Jan had no stomach for another lonely walk. A really lonely walk would have been different; but to go off by oneself, and to meet hundreds in sociable twos and threes, with linked arms and wagging tongues, was to cut too desolate a figure before the world. Carpenter apparently had found a friend; at least Jan saw him obviously waiting for one after chapel; yet hardly had he settled to his novel, than a listless step was followed by the banging of the study door next his own.

“I thought you’d gone for a walk,” said Jan, when he had gained admission by pounding on Carpenter’s door.

“Did you! You thought wrong, then.”

Carpenter smiled as though to temper an ungraciousness worthier of Jan, but the effort was hardly a success. He was reclining in a chair with a leg-rest, under the window opposite the door. He had already put up a number of pictures and brackets, and photograph frames in the plush of that period. Everything was very neat and nice, and there was a notable absence of inharmonious or obtrusive shades.

“How on earth did you open the door from over there?” asked Jan.

“Lazy-pull,” said Carpenter, showing off a cord running round three little walls and ending in a tassel at his elbow. “You can buy ’em all ready at Blunt’s.”

“You have got fettled up,” remarked Jan, “and no mistake!”

Carpenter opened his eyes at the uncouth participle.

“I want to have a good study,” he said. “I’ve one or two pictures to put up yet, and I’ve a good mind to do them now.”

“You wouldn’t like to come for a walk instead?”

The suggestion was very shyly made, and as candidly considered by Chips Carpenter.

“Shall I?” he asked himself aloud.

“You might as well,” said Jan without pressing it.

“I’m not sure that I mightn’t.”

And off they went, but not with linked arms, or even very close together; for Chips still seemed annoyed at something or other, and for once not in a mood to talk about it or anything else. It was very unlike him; and a small boy is not unlike himself very long. They took the road under the study windows, left the last of the little town behind them, dipped into a wooded hollow, and followed a couple far ahead over a stile and along a right-of-way through the fields; and in the fields, bathed in a mellow mist, and as yet but thinly dusted with the gold of autumn, Carpenter found his tongue. He expatiated on this new-found freedom, this intoxicating licence to roam where one would within bounds of time alone, a peculiar boon to the boy from a private school, and one that Jan appreciated as highly as his companion. It was not the only thing they agreed about that first Sunday afternoon. Jan was in a much less pugnacious mood than usual, and Carpenter less ponderously impressed with every phase of their new life. They exchanged some prejudices, and compared a good many notes, as they strolled from stile to stile. Haigh came in for some sharp criticism from his two new boys; the uncertainty of his temper was already apparent to them; but Heriot, as yet a marked contrast in that respect, hardly figured in the conversation at all. A stray remark, however, elicited the fact that Carpenter, who had disappeared in the morning directly after prayers, had actually been to breakfast with Heriot on the first Sunday of his first term.

Jan was not jealous; from his primitive point of view the master was the natural enemy of the boy; and he was not at the time surprised when Carpenter dismissed the incident as briefly as though he were rather ashamed of it. He would have thought no more of the matter but for a chance encounter as they crossed their last stile and came back into the main road.

Swinging down the middle of the road came a trio arm-in-arm, full of noisy talk, and so hilarious that both boys recognised Evan Devereux by his laugh before they saw his face. Evan, on his side, must have been almost as quick to recognise Carpenter, who was first across the stile, for he at once broke away from his companions.

“I’m awfully sorry!” he cried. “I quite forgot I’d promised these fellows when I promised you.”

“It doesn’t matter a bit,” said Carpenter, in a rather unconvincing voice.

“You didn’t go waiting about for me, did you?”

“Not long,” replied Carpenter, dryly.

“Well, I really am awfully sorry; but, you see, I’d promised these men at the end of last term, and I quite forgot about it this morning at Heriot’s.”

“I see.”

“I won’t do it again, I swear.”

“You won’t get the chance!” muttered Carpenter, as Devereux ran after his companions. He looked at his watch, and turned to Jan. “There’s plenty of time, Rutter. Which way shall we go?”

Jan came out of the shadow of the hedge; he had remained instinctively in the background, and had no reason to think that Evan had seen him. Certainly their eyes had never met. And yet there had been something in Evan’s manner, something pointed in his fixed way of looking at Carpenter and not beyond him, something that might have left a doubt in Jan’s mind if a greater doubt had not already possessed it.

“Which way shall we turn?” Carpenter repeated as Jan stood looking at him strangely.

“Neither way, just yet a bit,” said Jan, darkly. “I want to ask you something first.”

“Right you are.”

“There are not so many here that you could say it for, so far as I can see,” continued Jan, the inscrutable: “but from what I’ve seen of you, Carpenter, I don’t believe you’d tell me a lie.”

“I’d try not to,” said the other, smiling, yet no easier than Jan in his general manner.

“That’s good enough for me,” said Jan. “So what did Devereux mean just now by talking about 'this morning at Heriot’s’?”

“Oh, he had breakfast with Heriot, too; didn’t I tell you?”

“No; you didn’t.”

“Well, I never supposed it would interest you.”

“Although I told you I knew something about him at home!”

The two were facing each other, eye to eye. Those of Jan were filled with a furious suspicion.

“I wonder you didn’t speak to him just now,” remarked Carpenter, looking at his nails.

“He never saw me; besides, I’d gone and said all I’d got to say to him yesterday in his study.”

“I see.”

“Didn’t Devereux tell you I’d been to see him?”

“Oh, I think he said he’d seen you, but that was all.”

“At breakfast this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Did Heriot ask him anything about me?”

“No.”

“Has he told you anything about me at home, Chips?”

“Hardly anything.”

“How much?”

“Only that he hardly knew you; that was all,” declared Carpenter, looking Jan in the face once more. “And I must say I don’t see what you’re driving at, Rutter!”

“You’d better go and ask Devereux,” said Jan, unworthily; but, as luck would have it, he could not have diverted his companion’s thoughts more speedily if he had tried.

“Devereux? I don’t go near him!” he cried. “He promised to wait for me after chapel, and he cut me for those fellows we saw him with just now.”

“Although you were friends at the same private school?”

“If you call that friendship! He never wrote to me all last term, though I wrote twice to him!”

“I suppose that would be why Heriot asked you both to breakfast,” said Jan, very thoughtfully, as they began walking back together. “I mean, you both coming from the same school.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course it was.”

Jan threw one narrow look over his shoulder.

“Of course it was!” he agreed, and walked on nodding to himself.

“But he didn’t know Evan Devereux, or he’d have known that an old friend was nothing to him!”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” said Jan with gentle warmth. “I wouldn’t be too sure, if I were you.”

CHAPTER VIII
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.

CHAPTER IX
CORAM POPULO

On the notice-board in the colonnade there was a sudden announcement which no new boy could understand. It was to the effect that Professor Abinger would pay his annual visit on the Monday and Tuesday of the following week. Neither Carpenter nor Rutter had ever heard his name before, and, on the way up the hill to second school, they inquired of Rawlinson, the small fellow in his own house whom Haigh had begun reviling on the first morning of the term.

“Who’s Abinger?” repeated Rawlinson. “You wait and see! You’ll love him, Tiger, as much as I do!”

“Why shall I?” asked Jan, who liked Rawlinson, and only envied him his callous gaiety under oppression.

“Because he’ll get us off two days of old Haigh,” said Rawlinson, capering as though the two days would never end.

“Don’t hustle!”

“I’m not hustling. I take my oath I’m not. Grand old boy, Abinger, besides being just about the biggest bug alive on elocution!”

“Who says so?”

“Jerry, for one! Anyhow he comes down twice a year, and takes up two whole days, barring first school and private work; that’s why Abinger’s a man to love.”

“But what does he do? Give us readings all the time?” asked Chips, one of whose weaknesses was the inane question.

“Give us readings? I like that!” cried Rawlinson, shouting with laughter. “It’s the other way about, my good ass!”

“Do we have to read to him?”

“Every mother’s son of us, before the whole school, and all the masters and the masters’ wives!”

Chips went on asking questions, and Jan was only silent because he took a greater interest in the answers than he cared to show. The ordeal foreshadowed by Rawlinson was indeed rather alarming to a new boy with an accent which had already exposed him to some contumely. Yet his ear, sharpened by continual travesties of his speech, informed Jan that he was by no means the only boy in the school whose vowels were of eccentric breadth. It was a point on which he was not unduly sensitive, but, in his heart, only too willing to improve. He was, however, more on his guard against the outlandish word and the rustic idiom, which still cropped up in his conversation, but could not possibly affect his reading aloud. The result of the last reflection was that Jan subdued his fears, and rejoiced with Rawlinson at the prospect of a break in the term’s work.

Their joy was enhanced by the obvious exasperation of Haigh, who scarcely concealed from his form his own opinion of Professor Abinger and the impending function. Many were his covert sneers, and loud his angry laughter, as he hit upon something for the Middle Remove to declaim piecemeal between them. The chosen passage was taken almost at random from one of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, which for some reason formed a standard work throughout the school, and which drew from Haigh the next thing to a personal repudiation of the volume in his hands. It was at least plain that means and end shared his cordial disapproval, but outward loyalty clipped the spoken word, and the form were not surprised when he finished with a more satisfying fling at Jan.

“Some of you fellows in Mr. Heriot’s house,” said Haigh, “may perhaps find time to rehearse Rutter in the few words that are likely to fall to his tender mercies. Otherwise we may trust him to disgrace us before everybody.”

Indignant glances were cast at Jan’s hangdog head by those who wished to stand well with Haigh; one within reach dealt him a dexterous kick upon the shins; and Jan took it all with leaden front, for that was his only means of getting the least bit even with his adult tormentor. Nevertheless, on the Sunday evening, when one could sit in another’s study after lock-up by special leave, and Jan and Chips had availed themselves of the privilege, Hans Andersen was the author that each had open before him, as the pair munched their way through a bag of biscuits bought with their Saturday allowance.

They were not disappointed in the elderly gentleman who opened his campaign next morning. He had an admirable platform presence, and a fine histrionic face in a cascade of silvery hair. Nor had he made many of his opening observations—in a voice like a silver bell—before the youngest of his new hearers perceived that Professor Abinger was really as distinguished as he looked. He was evidently the companion of even more distinguished men. He spoke of the statesmen and the judges whom he had specially coached for the triumphs of their political and forensic careers. He mentioned a certain Cabinet Minister as a particularly painstaking pupil in his younger days. He laid the scene of a recent personal experience in a ducal mansion, and that led him into an indiscreet confession involving an even more illustrious name. Professor Abinger seemed quite embarrassed by his inadvertence; and the Head Master, who had taken a side seat on his own platform, might have been seen frowning at his watch, which he closed with a very loud snap. But the two new boys in the Middle Remove saw how difficult it must be for a member of such exalted circles to avoid all mention of his most intimate acquaintance. And when Rawlinson looked at them and laughed, they nodded their complete agreement with his estimate of the eminent professor.

“When I look about me in this schoolroom,” concluded Mr. Abinger somewhat hastily, as he beamed upon the serried ranks before him, “and when I see the future generals and admirals, bishops and statesmen, lawyers and physicians of high standing—men of mark in every sphere—even Peers of the Realm itself—who hear me now, whom I myself am about to hear in my turn—when I dip into your futures far as human eye can see—then I realise afresh the very wide responsibility—the—the imperial importance—of these visits to this school!”

There might have been applause; a certain amount of sly merriment there was; but Mr. Thrale prevented the one, and cut the other mighty short, by sternly summoning the Upper Fourth.

There was a scraping and shambling of feet in the rows behind the Middle Remove, and up to the platform trooped the pioneer force. Jan could only think of the narrowness of his escape—he had heard that the forms were called up in any order—and he was wondering whether there was so much to fear after all, from such a perfect gentleman and jolly old boy, when Evan Devereux passed quite close to him with the other pioneers. And Evan’s ears were red to the tip—Evan who looked neat and dapper enough to stand up before the world—Evan who was a gentleman if there was one in the school!

The Upper Fourth huddled together on the platform, each boy with a fat blue volume of Hans Christian Andersen open at the fatal place. Then, at a sign from the Head Master, the captain of the form took a step forward, threw out his chest like a man, and plunged into the middle of one of the tales with a couple of sentences that made the rafters ring. The professor stood smiling his approval at the intrepid youth’s side, and Mr. Thrale nodded his head as he called for the second boy in form’s order. The successful performer sidled to the end of an empty bench immediately below the platform, and sat down against the wall. His place was taken by one bent on following his good example, but in too great a hurry to get it over. “'A myrtle stood in a pot in the window,’” he had begun in a breath, when the Head Master exclaimed “Three o’clock!” in portentous tones, and the second performer melted from the platform like a wraith.

“That’s the worst he does to you,” whispered Carpenter, who had been making his usual inquiries. “It only means coming in at three for another shot with the other failures.”

Meanwhile the professor was pointing out the second boy’s mistake. He laid it down as the first of first principles that a distinct pause must separate the subject of any sentence from its predicate; he added that he had preached that doctrine in that place for so many years that he had hoped it was unnecessary to begin preaching it again; but perhaps he had never had the advantage of meeting his young friend before? His young friend had to rise in his place of premature retirement, next but one to the wall, and confess with burning cheeks that such was not the case. And when the point had been duly laboured, proceedings were resumed by a lad who cleared the obstacle with an audaciously protracted pause after the word “myrtle.”

It was an obstacle at which many fell throughout the morning, the three o’clock sentence being promptly pronounced upon each; but there were other interludes more entertaining to the audience and more trying to the temporary entertainer. There were several stammerers who were made to beat time and to release a syllable at each beat; and there was more than one timid child to be paternally conducted by the professor to the very far end of the huge room, and made to call out, “Can you hear my voice?” until the Head Master at his end signified that he could. (“No, I can’t!” he replied very sternly on one occasion.) There were even a few mirthful seconds supplied by Devereux, of all fellows, over something which Jan quite failed to follow, but which made him almost as hot and miserable as Evan had turned upon the platform.

Devereux, however, had looked rather nervous all the time; as he waited his turn at Abinger’s elbow he seemed uncomfortably conscious of himself, and he stepped into the breach at last as though the cares of the school were on his insignificant shoulders. Jan felt for him so keenly as to hold his breath. Evan had to utter an extravagant statement about a bottle, but his reading was no worse than nervous until he came to the word “exhilarated.” He said “exhilyarated.” The professor invited him to say it again, and with the request his paternal smile broadened into a grin of less oppressive benevolence. It was a very slight change of expression, which had occurred more than once before, but on this occasion it filled Jan with a sudden revulsion of feeling towards Professor Abinger. Then Evan said “ex-hill-yarated,” making a mountain of the hill, and a stern voice cried “Three o’clock!” The unlucky culprit looked utterly wretched and crestfallen, and yet so attractive in his trouble that the professor himself was seen to intercede on his behalf. But a still sterner voice reiterated “Three o’clock!”

That was all, and it was so quickly over that Devereux was himself again before the Upper Fourth returned in a body to their place. Indeed, he came back smiling, and with a jaunty walk, as some criminals foot it from the dock. But Jan could not catch his eye, though his own were soft with a sympathy which he longed to show, but only succeeded in betraying to Carpenter.

“I might have known you were hustling,” Jan said to Rawlinson, as they got out nearly an hour later than from ordinary second school. “I say, though, I do bar that old brute—don’t you?”

“What! When he’s coached a Cabinet Minister, and been staying as usual with the same old dukes and dukesses?”

“If he ever did,” said Jan, his whole mind poisoned by the treatment meted out to Evan. “It’s easy enough for him to stand up there scoring off chaps. I’d like to score off him!”

“Well, you wouldn’t be the first. He was properly scored off once, by a chap called Bewicke in the Upper Sixth. Come my way,” said Rawlinson, “and I’ll tell you. Bewicke had heard that opening speech about the Cabinet Minister, and all the rest of it, so often that he knew the whole thing by heart, and used to settle down to sleep as soon as old Abinger got a start. So one time Jerry catches him safe in the arms of Morpheus, and says, 'Bewicke, be good enough to get up and repeat to the school the substance of Professor Abinger’s last remarks.’ So Bewicke gets up, blinking, not having heard a blooming word, and begins: 'The other day, when I had the privilege of being an honoured guest of his Grace the Duke of ——’ 'Three o’clock!’ says Jerry, and they say Bewicke was jolly near bunked. It was before my time, worse luck! I wish I’d heard it, don’t you? I say, we were lucky to escape this morning, weren’t we? But I’m not sure I don’t wish we’d got it over, myself.”

Four of the lower forms had been polished off between ten and twelve-thirty, and three more followed in the hour-and-a-half of third school; but the Middle Remove was not one of the three. There remained only second school on the second day—a half-holiday—and Carpenter had heard that much of the morning would be devoted to a Sixth Form Competition for the Abinger Medal. He had also learnt for a fact that all the forms were not always called upon, and Jan agreed that in that case they were beginning to stand an excellent chance of being missed out. However, no sooner were the proceedings resumed on a pink and frosty morning, than the bolt fell for the Middle Remove.

The big schoolroom looked abnormally big as Jan took a shy peep down from the platform. It seemed to contain four thousand boys instead of four hundred. It felt as cold as an empty church. The Head Master’s fingers looked blue with a joiner’s pencil poised between them over a school list; and as he sat with bent head and raised ear his breath was just visible against his sombre gown. But Professor Abinger in black spats and mittens was brisker and crisper and more incisive than on the previous day; his paternal smile broke more abruptly into the grin of impaired benevolence; his flowing mane looked merely hoary, and his silvery voice had rather the staccato ring of steel.

He might almost have heard Haigh’s opinion of him, he was so hard upon that form. The passage which Haigh had chosen was from a story called “The Mermaid,” and the very first reader had to say “colossal mussel shells”—perhaps a better test of sobriety than of elocution—but Abinger would have it repeated until a drunken man could have done it better and the whole school was in a roar. Jan set his teeth at the back of the little knot upon the platform: he knew what he would do rather than make them laugh like that. But no one else made them laugh like that, though Buggins was asked whether he had been born within sound of Bow Bells, and created some amusement by the rich intonation of his denial. Gradually the little knot melted, and the bench below the platform filled up. Jan began reading over and over to himself the sentences that seemed certain to fall to him, as he was still doing when Carpenter left his side and lurched into the centre of the platform.

Now, poor Chips happened to have had a bad night with his tiresome malady, but on his speech it had the effect of a much more common disorder.

“The bleached bodes of bed,” he began, valiantly, and was still making a conscientious pause after the subject of the sentence when a hand fell on his shoulder and the wretched Chips was looking Professor Abinger in the face.

“Have you got a cold?” inquired the professor, with his most sympathetic smile.

“Yes, sir,” said Carpenter, too shy to explain the permanent character of the cold by giving it its proper name.

“Then stand aside, and blow your nose,” said the professor, grinning like a fatherly fiend, “while the next boy reads.”

Jan was the next boy, and the last; and he strode forward too indignant on his friend’s account to think of himself, and cut straight into the laugh at Carpenter’s expense. Nothing, in fact, could have given Jan such a moral fillip at the last moment. He cried out his bit aggressively at the top of his voice, but forgot none of the rules laid down, and even felt he had come through with flying colours. He saw no smile upon the sea of faces upturned from the body of the schoolroom. Not a syllable fell from the Head Master on his right. Yet he was not given his dismissal, and was consequently about to begin another sentence when Professor Abinger took the book from Jan’s hand.

“I think you must hear yourself as others hear you,” said he. “Have the goodness to listen to me.” And he read: “‘The bleached bawnes of men who had perished at sea and soonk belaw peeped forth from the arms of soome, w’ile oothers clootched roodders and sea chests or the skeleeton of some land aneemal; and most horreeble of all, a little mermaird whom they had caught and sooffercairted.’ There!” cried the professor, holding up his hand to quell the shouts of laughter. “What do you think of that?”

Jan stood dumfounded by his shame and rage, a graceless and forbidding figure enough, with untidy hair and a wreck of a tie, and one lace trailing: a figure made to look even meaner than it was by the spruce old handsome man at his side.

“What dost tha’ think o’ yon?” pursued the professor, dropping into dialect with ready humour.

“It’s not what I said,” muttered Jan, so low that his questioner alone could hear.

“Not what you said, eh? We’ll take you through it. How do you pronounce 'bones’?”

No answer, but a firmer cast to the jaw of Jan, a less abject droop of the shoulders, a good inch more in actual stature.

“B, o, n, e, s!” crooned the professor, shewing all his teeth.

But Jan had turned into a human mule. And the silence in the great room had suddenly grown profound.

“Well, we’ll try something else,” said the professor, consulting the text somewhat unsteadily, and speaking in a rather thin voice. “Let us hear you say the word 'sunk.’ S, u, n, k—sunk. Now, if you please, no more folly. You are wasting all our time.”

Jan had forgotten that; the reminder caused him a spasm of satisfaction. Otherwise he was by this time as entirely aware of his folly as anybody else present; but it was too late to point it out to him; it was too late to think of it now; his head was burning, his temples throbbed, his tongue clave. He could not have spoken now if he had tried. But it would have taken a better man than Abinger to make him try. And the better man sat by without a word, pale, stern, and troubled with a complex indignation.

“I can do nothing with this boy,” said Abinger, turning to him with just a tremor in his thin high tones. “I must leave him to you, Mr. Thrale.”

“Twelve o’clock!” cried the other with ominous emphasis; and as he stabbed the school list with his joiner’s pencil, the Middle Remove rose and returned down the gangway to their accustomed place.

Jan went with them as one walking in his sleep. And Carpenter followed Jan with a tragic face and tears very near the surface. But as one sees furthest before rain, so Chips saw a good deal as he walked back blinking for his life. And one of the things he happened to see was Evan Devereux and the fellow next him doubled up in fits of laughter.

The Head Master usually sat in judgment on the culprits of the day without vacating his oaken throne in the Upper Sixth class-room until the first of them knelt down for his deserts. But the Abinger visitation upset everything; and on this occasion, when the campaign ended with the award of a medal to the præpostor who had done least violence to a leading article in the day’s Times, Mr. Thrale remained on his platform in conversation with Professor Abinger while the school filed out form by form. Meanwhile three delinquents besides Jan awaited his arrival on the scene of trial and execution, while a number of the smaller fry pressed their noses to the diamond panes of the windows overlooking the school yard; and the public gallery in a criminal court could not have been better patronised for a notorious case than were these windows to-day.

One of the other malefactors had brought a slip of paper which he showed to Jan; on it was set forth a crime of a type which Mr. Thrale was at that time taking Draconic measures to stamp out of the school. “Hornton says πεποιηκασι is a Dative Plural.... I think he deserves a good flogging,” the committing master had written, and signed the warrant with his initials. Jan had just reached that hieroglyph when in sailed their judge and executioner in his cap and gown.

The boy who deserved the good flogging advanced and delivered his certificate of demerit. Mr. Thrale examined the damning document, and when he came to the pious opinion at the end, exclaimed with simple fervour, “So do I!” With that he opened his desk and took out his cane, and the boy who deserved it knelt down with stolid alacrity. The venerable executioner then gathered half his gown into his left hand, and held it away at arm’s length to give free play to his right. And there followed eight such slashing cuts as fetched the dust from a taut pair of trousers, and sent their wearer waddling stiffly from the room.

“Wasn’t padded,” whispered one of those left to Jan, who put an obvious question with a look, which was duly answered with a wink.

Meanwhile a sturdy youth in round spectacles was being severely interrogated, and replying promptly and earnestly, without lowering his glasses from the awful aspect of the flogging judge.

“You may go,” said Mr. Thrale at length. “Your honesty has saved you. Trevor next. I’ve heard about you, Trevor; kneel down, shirker!”

And the wily Trevor not only knelt with futile reluctance, but writhed impotently during his castigation, though the eight strokes made half the noise of the other eight; and once up he went his way serenely with another wink at Jan.

Now by these days Jan had discovered that out of his pulpit Mr. Thrale was sufficiently short and sharp of speech, rough and ready of humour, with a trick of talking down to fellows in their own jargon as well as over their heads in parables. “Sit down, Rutter, and next time you won’t sit down so comfortably!” he had rapped out at Jan when the Middle Remove went to construe to the Head Master early in the term. And it was next time now.

Jan was left alone in the presence, and that instant became ashamed to find he was already trembling. He had not trembled on the platform before the whole school; his blood had been frozen then, now it was bubbling in his veins. He was being looked at. That was all. He was receiving such a look as he had never met before, a look from wide blue eyes with hidden fires in them, and dilated nostrils underneath, and under them a mouth that looked as though it would never, never open.

It did at last.

“Rebel!” said a voice of unutterable scorn. “Do you know what they do with rebels, Rutter?”

“No, sir.”

It never occurred to Jan not to answer now.

“Shoot them! You deserve to be shot!”

Jan felt he did. The parable was not over his diminished head; it might have been carefully concocted from uncanny knowledge of his inmost soul. All the potential soldier in him—the reserve whom this General alone called out—was shamed and humbled to the dust.

“You are not only a rebel,” the awful voice went on, “but a sulky rebel. Some rebels are good men gone wrong; there’s some stuff in them; but a sulky rebel is neither man nor devil, but carrion food for powder.”

Jan agreed with all his contrite heart; he had never seen himself in his true colours before, had never known how vile it was to sulk; but now he saw, and now he knew, and the firing-party could not have come too quick.

The flogging judge had resumed his carved oak seat of judgment behind the desk. Jan had not seen him do it—he had seen nothing but those pregnant eyes and lips—but there he was, and in the act of putting his homely weapon back in the desk. Jan could have groaned. He longed to expiate his crime.

“Thrashing is too good for you,” the voice resumed. “Have you any good reason to give me for keeping a sulky rebel in a standing army? Any reason for not drumming him out?”

Drumming him out! Expelling him! Sending him back to the Norfolk rectory, and thence very likely straight back to the nearest stables! More light rushed over Jan. He had seen his enormity; now he saw his life, what it had been, what it was, what it might be again.

“Oh, sir,” he cried, “I know I speak all wrong—I know I speak all wrong! You see—you see——”

But he broke down before he could explain, and the more piteously because now he felt he never could explain, and this hard old man would never, never understand. That is the tragic mistake of boys—to feel they can never be understood by men!

Yet already the hard old man was on his feet again, and with one gesture he had cleared the throng from the diamond-paned windows, and laid tender hand upon Jan’s heaving shoulder.

“I do see,” he said, gently. “But so must you, Rutter—but so must you!”

CHAPTER X
ELEGIACS

Jan was prepared never to hear the last of his outrageous conduct in the big schoolroom; that was all he knew about his kind. It cost him one of the efforts of his school life to show his face again in Heriot’s quad; and the quad was full of fellows, as he knew it would be; but only one accosted him, and that was Sprawson, whose open hand flew up in a terrifying manner, to fall in a hearty slap on Jan’s back. “Well done, Tiger!” says Sprawson before half the house. “That’s the biggest score off Abinger there’s been since old Bewicke’s time.” And Jan rushed up to his study with a fresh lump in his throat, though he had come in vowing that the whole house together should not make him blub.

That night at tea Jane Eyre of all people (who was splendidly supplied with all sorts of eatables from home) pushed a glorious game pie across the table to Jan; and altogether there was for a few hours rather more sympathy in the air than was good for one who after all had made public display of a thoroughly unworthy propensity. It is true that Jan had gone short of sympathy all his life, and that a wave of even misplaced sympathy may be beneficial to a nature suffering from this particular privation. But a clever gentleman was waiting to counteract all that, and to undo at his leisure what Mr. Thrale had done in about two minutes.

No sooner had the form re-assembled in his hall next day than Haigh made them a set sarcastic speech on the subject of Jan’s enormity. He might have seen at a glance that even outwardly the boy was already chastened; that his jacket and his hair were better brushed than they had been all the term, his boots properly laced, his tie neatly tied; that in a word there were more signs of self-respect. Haigh, however, preferred to look at his favourites at the top of the form, and merely to jerk the thumb of contempt towards his aversion at the bottom. He reminded them of his prophecy that Rutter would disgrace them all before the school, and the triumph of the true prophet seemed at least as great as his indignation at what had actually happened. Even he, however, had not foreseen the quality of the disgrace, or anticipated a fit of sulks in public. Yet for his own part he was not sorry that the headmaster, and Mr. Heriot and all the other masters and boys in the school, should have had an opportunity of seeing for themselves what they in that room had to put up with almost every day of the term. And the harangue concluded with a plain hint to the form to take the law into its own hands, and “knock the nonsense out of that sulky bumpkin, who has made us the laughing-stock of the place.”

To all of which Jan listened without a trace of his old resentment, and then stood up in his place.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” said he. “I apologise to you and the form.”

Haigh looked unable to believe his eyes and ears. But he was not the man to revise judgment of a boy once labelled Poison in his mind. He could no longer fail to note the sudden improvement in Jan’s looks and manner; all he could do was to put the worst construction upon it that occurred to him at the moment.

“I shall entertain your apology when you look less pleased with yourself,” he sneered. “Sit down.”

But Jan’s good resolutions were not to be eradicated any more easily than the rooted hostility of Haigh, who certainly surpassed himself in his treatment of the boy’s persistent efforts at amendment. Jan, though no scholar, and never likely to make one now, could be sharp enough in a general way when he chose. But he never had chosen under Mr. Haigh. It was no use attending to a brute who “hotted” you just the same whether you attended or not. And yet that little old man in the Upper Sixth class-room, with a single stern analogy, had made it somehow seem some use to do one’s best without sulking, even without looking for fair play, let alone reward. And, feeling a regular new broom at heart, Jan was still determined to sweep clean in spite of Haigh.

It chanced to be a Virgil morning, and of course the new broom began by saying his “rep” as he had never said it before. Perhaps he deserved what he got for that.

“I thought you were one of those boys, Rutter,” said Haigh, “who affect a constitutional difficulty in learning repetition? I only wish I’d sent you up to Mr. Thrale six weeks ago!”

Yet Jan maintained his interest throughout the fresh passage which the form proceeded to construe, and being put on duly in the hardest place, got through again without discredit. It was easy, however, for a member of the Middle Remove to take an interest in his Virgil, for that poet can have had few more enthusiastic interpreters than Mr. Haigh, who indeed might have been the best master in the school if he had been less of a bullying boy himself. His method in a Virgil hour, at any rate, was beyond reproach. If his form knew the lesson, there was no embroidery of picturesque detail or of curious information which it was too much trouble for him to tack on for their benefit. The Æneid they were doing was the one about the boat-race; and what Mr. Haigh (who had adorned both flood and field at Cambridge) did not know about aquatics ancient and modern was obviously not worth knowing. He could handle a trireme on the blackboard as though he had rowed in one in the Mays, and accompany the proceeding with a running report worthy of a sporting journalist. But let there be one skeleton at the feast of reason, one Jan who could not or would not understand, and the whole hour might go in an unseemly duel between intemperate intellect and stubborn imbecility. Otherwise a gloating and sonorous Haigh would wind up the morning with Conington’s translation of the lesson; and this was one of those gratifying occasions; in fact, Jan was attending as he had never before attended, when one couplet caught his fancy to the exclusion of all that followed.

“These bring success their zeal to fan;

They can because they think they can.”

“Perhaps I can,” said Jan to himself, “if I think I can. I will think I can, and then we’ll see.”

Haigh had shut the book and was putting a question to the favoured few at the top of the form. “Conington has one fine phrase here,” he said. “I wonder if any of you noticed it? Possunt quia posse videntur; did you notice how he renders that?”

The favoured few had not noticed. They looked seriously concerned about it. The body of the form took its discomfiture more philosophically, having less to lose. No one seemed to connect the phrase with its English equivalent, and Mr. Haigh was manifestly displeased. “Possunt quia posse videntur!” he repeated ironically as he reached the dregs; and at the very last moment Jan’s fingers flew out with a Sunday-school snap.

“Well?” said Haigh on the last note of irony.

“'They can because they think they can’!” cried Jan, and went from the bottom to the top of the form at one flight, amid a volley of venomous glances, but with one broad grin from Carpenter.

“I certainly do wish I’d sent you up six weeks ago!” said Haigh. “I shall be having a decent copy of verses from you next!”

Yet Jan, though quick as a stone to sink back into the mud, made a gallant effort even at his verses; but that was his last. They were much better than any attempt of his hitherto; but it was clear to everybody that Haigh did not believe they were Jan’s own. Rutter was asked who had helped him. Rutter replied that he had done his verses himself without help. No help whatever? No help whatever. Haigh laughed to himself, but said nothing. Jan said something to himself, but did not laugh. And now at last he might never have been through those two minutes in the Upper Sixth class-room.

November was a month of the past; another week would finish off the term’s work, leaving ten clear and strenuous days for the Exams. Haigh could only set one more copy of Latin verses, and Carpenter was as sorry on his own account as he was thankful for Jan’s sake. Carpenter had acquired an undeniable knack of making hexameters and pentameters that continually construed and invariably scanned; it was the one thing he could do better than anybody in the form, and it had brought him latterly into considerable favour with a master whose ardour for the Muse betrayed a catholicity of intellect in signal contrast to his view of boys. It was not only the Greeks and Latins whose august measures appealed to Haigh; never a copy of elegiacs set he, but it was a gem already in its native English, and his voice must throb with its music even as he dictated it to his form. All this was another slight mistake in judgment: the man made a personal grievance of atrocities inevitably committed upon his favourite poets, and the boys conceived a not unreasonable prejudice against some of the noblest lyrics in the language. Carpenter was probably the only member of the form who not only revelled in the original lines, but rather enjoyed hunting up the Latin words, and found a positive satisfaction in fitting them into their proper places as dactyls and spondees.

“That’s the finest thing he’s set us yet,” said Chips, when Haigh had given them Cory’s “Heraclitus” for the last copy of the term.

“It’ll be plucky fine when I’ve done with it,” Jan rejoined grimly.

“I should start on it early, if I were you,” said Chips, “like you did last week.”

“And then get told you’ve had ’em done for you? Thanks awfully; you don’t catch me at that game again. Between tea and prayers on Saturday night’s good enough for me—if I’m not too done after the paper-chase.”

“You’re not going to the paper-chase, Tiger?”

“I am if I’m not stopped.”

“When you’re not even allowed to play football?”

“That’s exactly why.”

The paper-chase always took place on the last Saturday but one, and was quite one of the events of the winter term. All the morning, after second school, fags had been employed in tearing up scent in the library; and soon after dinner the road under Heriot’s study windows began to resound with the tramp of boys on their way in twos and threes to see the start from Burston Beeches. A spell of hard weather had broken in sunshine and clear skies; the afternoon was brilliantly fine; and by half-past two the scene in the paddock under the noble beeches, with the grey tower of Burston church rising behind the leafless branches, was worthy of the day. Practically all the school was there, and quite a quarter of it in flannels and jerseys red or white, trimmed or starred with the colour of some fifteen. Off go the two hares—gigantic gentlemen with their football colours thick upon them. Hounds and mere boys in plain clothes crowd to the gate to see the last of them and their bulging bags of scent. The twelve minutes’ law allowed them seems much more like half-an-hour; but at last time is up, the gates are opened, and the motley pack pours through with plenty of plain clothes after them for the first few fields. In about a mile comes the first check; it is the first of many, for snow is still lying under the trees and hedges, and in the distance it always looks like a handful of waste-paper. The younger hounds take a minute off, leaving their betters to pick up the scent again, and their laboured breath is so like tobacco smoke that you fancy that young master in knickerbockers is there to see that it is not. Off again to the first water-jump—which everybody fords—and so over miles of open upland, flecked with scent and snow—through hedges into ditches—a pack of mudlarks now, and but a remnant of the pack that started. Now the scent takes great zigzags, and lies in niggardly handfuls that tell their tale. Now it is thick again, and here are the two fags who met the hares with the fresh bags, and those gigantic gentlemen are actually only five minutes ahead, for here is the high road back past the Upper, and if it wasn’t for the red sun in your eyes there should be a view of them from the top of one of those hills.

On the top of the last hill, by the white palings of the Upper Ground, there is a group of boys and masters, and several of the masters’ wives as well, to see the finish; and it is going to be one of the best finishes they ever have seen. Here come the gigantic gentlemen, red as Indians with the sun upon their faces, and one of them plunging headlong in a plain distress. They rush down that hill, and are half-way up this one, the wet mud shining all over them like copper, when the first handful of hounds start up against the sky behind them.

“Surely that’s rather a small boy to be in the first dozen,” says Miss Heriot, pointing out a puppy in an untrimmed jersey, who is running gamely by himself between the first and second batches of hounds.

“In no fifteen, either,” says Heriot, noticing the jersey rather than the boy, who is still a slip of muddy white on the opposite hill.

The hares are already home. They have been received with somewhat perfunctory applause, the real excitement being reserved for the race between the leading hounds, now in a cluster at the foot of the last hill; but half-way up the race is over, and Sprawson is increasing his lead with every stride.

“Well run, my house!” says Heriot, with laconic satisfaction.

“The house isn’t done with yet, sir,” pants Sprawson, turning his back to the sun. “There’s young Rutter been running like an old hound all the way; here he is, in the first ten!”

And there indeed was the rather small boy in the plain jersey whom neither Heriot nor his sister had recognised as Jan; but then he looked another being in his muddy flannels; slimmer and trimmer, and somehow more in his element than in the coat and collar of workaday life; and the flush upon his face is not merely the result of exercise and a scarlet sky, it is a flush of perfect health and momentary happiness as well.

In fact it has been the one afternoon of all the term which Jan may care to recall in later life; and how it will stand out among the weary walks with poor Carpenter and the hours of bitterness under Haigh! But the afternoon is not over yet. Sprawson is first back at the house; his good-natured tongue has been wagging before Jan gets there, and Jan hears a pleasant thing or two as he jogs through the quad to change in the lavatory. But why has he not been playing football all these weeks? It might have made just the difference to the Under-Sixteen team; they might have beaten Haigh’s in the second round, instead of just losing as they had done to his mortification before Jan’s eyes. What did he mean by pretending to have a heart, and then running like this? It must be jolly well inquired into.

“Then you’d better inquire of old Hill,” says Jan, naming the doctor as disrespectfully as he dares to the captain of the house. “It was he said I had one, Loder, not me!”

And Loder looks as if he would like to smack Jan’s head again, but is restrained by the presence of Sprawson and Cave major, both of whom have more influence in the house than he. The great Charles Cave has not been in the paper-chase; he will win the Hundred and the Hurdles next term, but he is too slender a young Apollo to shine across country, and is not the man to go in for the few things at which he happens not to excel. He does not address Jan personally, but deigns to mention him in a remark to Sprawson.

“Useful man for us next term, Mother,” says Cave, “if he’s under fifteen.”

“When’s your birthday, Tiger?” splutters Sprawson from the showerbath.

“End of this month,” says Jan.

“Confound your eyes!” cries Mother Sprawson, “then you won’t be under fifteen for the sports, and I’ll give you a jolly good licking!”

But what Sprawson really does give Jan is cocoa and biscuits at Maltby’s in the market-place: a most unconventional attention from a man of his standing to a new boy: who knows enough by this time to feel painfully out of place in the fashionable shop, and devoutly to wish himself with Carpenter at one of their humble haunts. But even this incident is a memory to treasure, and not to be spoilt by the fact that Shockley waylays and kicks him in the quad for “putting on a roll,” and that Heriot himself has Jan into his study after lock-up, for the first time since the term began, and first gives him a severe wigging for having run in the paper-chase at all, but sends him off with a parting compliment on having run so well.

“He said he’d only been forbidden to play football,” so Bob Heriot reported to his sister. “Of course I had to jump on him for that; but I own I’m thankful I didn’t find out in time to stop his little game. It’s just what was wanted to lift him an inch out of the ruck. It augurs the sportsman I believe he’ll turn out in spite of us.”

“But what about his heart?”

“He hasn’t a heart, never had one, and after this can never be accused of such a thing again.”

“I wonder you didn’t go to Dr. Hill about it long ago, Bob.”

“I did go to him. But Hill said he wouldn’t take the responsibility of letting the unfortunate boy play football without inquiring into his past history. That was the last proceeding to encourage, and so my hands are tied. They always are where poor Rutter is concerned. It was the same thing with Haigh over his Latin verses. He wanted me to write to the boy’s preparatory schoolmaster! I haven’t interceded with him since. Rutter’s the one boy in my house I can’t stick up for. He must sink or swim for himself, and I think he’s going to swim; if he were in any other form I should be sure. But I simply daren’t hold out the helping hand that one would to others.”

Miss Heriot gave an understanding nod.

“I’ve often heard you say you can’t treat two boys alike. Now I see what you mean.”

“But I can’t treat Rutter as I ever treated any boy before. I’ve got to keep my treatment to myself. I mustn’t make him conscious, if I know it; that applies to them all, of course, but it would make this boy suspicious in a minute. He puts me on my mettle, I can tell you! I’m not sure that he isn’t putting the whole public-school system on its trial!”

“That one boy, Bob?”

“They all do, of course. They’re all our judges in the end. But this one is such a nut to crack, and yet there’s such a kernel somewhere! I stake my place on that. The boy has more character even than I thought.”

“Although he sulks?”

“That’s often a sign. It means at the least courage of one’s mood. But what you and I know, and have not got to forget, is that his whole point of view is probably different from that of any fellow who ever went through the school.”

“As a straw plucked from the stables?” laughed Miss Heriot under her breath.

“Hush, Milly, for heaven’s sake! No. I was thinking of the absolute adventure the whole thing must be to him, and has been from the very first morning when he got up early to look about for himself like a castaway exploring the coast!”

“Well, I only hope he’s found the natives reasonably friendly!”

The sudden friendliness of the natives was of course Jan’s greatest joy, as for once he revelled in the peace and quiet of the untidiest study in the house. He was more tired than he had ever been in his life before, but also happier than he had ever dreamt of being this term. The hot-water pipes threw a modicum of grateful warmth upon his aching legs, outstretched on the leg-rest of the folding-chair. The curtains were closely drawn, the candles burning at his elbow. On his knees lay a Gradus ad Parnassum, open, upon an open English-Latin; and propped against the candle-sticks was the exercise book in which he had taken down the beautiful English version of “Heraclitus.” It is to be feared that the beauty was lost upon Jan, who was much too weary to make a very resolute attack upon a position which he was not equipped to capture, or to lead another forlorn hope in which the least degree of success would be deemed a suspicious circumstance. But he did make certain idle demonstrations with a pencil upon a bit of foolscap. And ten minutes before prayers he pulled himself sufficiently together to write his eight lines out in ink.

“Let’s have a look,” said Carpenter, as they waited for the Heriots in hall; and a look was quite enough. “I say, Tiger, you can’t show this up! You’ll be licked as sure as eggs are eggs,” whispered Chips.

“I don’t care.”

“You would care. You simply shan’t get this signed to-night. I’ll touch it up after prayers, and let you have it in time to make a clean copy before ten, and Heriot’ll sign it after prayers in the morning.”

And he put that copy in his pocket as the sentinel in the passage flew in with his sepulchral “Hush!”

By gulping down his milk and taking his dog-rock with him to his study, Carpenter was able to devote a good half-hour to Jan’s verses and still give Jan ten minutes to copy out the revised version; the ten minutes was ample, but the half-hour was all too short. The very first line began with a false quantity, and ended with a grammatical blunder. Carpenter rectified the false quantity by a simple transposition, and made so bold as to substitute perisse for moriri at the end of the hexameter. The second half of the pentameter was hopeless: Chips fell back on his own, merely changing causa doloris to fletus acerbus, and plumed himself on his facility. But in the second couplet every other foot was a flogging matter if Jan got sent up.

“I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.”

Chips loved the lines well enough to blush for his own respectable attempt at a Latin rendering; but his blood ran cold at Jan’s—

“Flevi quum memini nostro quam sæpe loquendo

Defessum Phœbum fecimus ire domum.”

He flung himself on the monstrosity, but had to leave it at—

“Cum lacrymis memini nostro quam sæpe loquendo

Hesperias Phœbus fessus adisset aquas.”

Chips did not plume himself on this; but at any rate nostro loquendo was Jan’s own gem, and just bad enough to distract attention from the suspicious superiority of the rest without invoking the direst consequences. This was a subtle calculation on the part of Carpenter. He was quite conscious of the subtlety, and by no means as ashamed of it as such a desperately honest person should have been. He justified the means by the end, which was to save Jan a certain flogging; and the stage after justification was something very like a guilty relish in a first offence. There was an artistic satisfaction in doing the thing as deftly as Chips was doing it. The third couplet might almost have passed muster as Jan had left it; a touch or two and it was safe. But the last hexameter would never do, and Chips replaced it with a plagiarism of his own corresponding line which might have sufficed if he himself had not come curiously to grief over the last hexameter.

“Excellent, as usual, Carpenter,” said Haigh in the fulness of time. “I could have given you full marks but for an odd mistake of yours towards the end. You seem to have misread the original penultimate line: 'Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;’ what part of speech do you take that 'still’ to be?”

“Adjective, sir,” said Chips, beginning to wonder whether it was one.

“Exactly!” cried Haigh, with the guffaw of his lighter moments. “So you get Muta silet vox ista placens, tua carmina vivunt—'Thy pleasant voices are still; on the other hand, however, thy nightingales are awake’—eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Chips, more doubtfully than before.

“Have you a comma after the word 'nightingales’ in the English line as you took it down?”

“No, sir.”

“That accounts for it! Ha, ha, ha! But it may be my fault.” Nothing could exceed the geniality of Haigh towards a boy with Carpenter’s little gift. He was going through the week’s verses on the chimneypiece in his hall, but now he turned his back to the blazing fire. “Will those who have a comma after 'nightingales’ be good enough to hold up their hands?” A forest of hands flew up. “I’m afraid it’s your mistake, Carpenter,” resumed Haigh, with a final guffaw. “Well, I couldn’t have pitched upon a finer object-lesson in the importance of punctuation, if I had tried; but when you come to look at it again, Carpenter, you’ll find that even without the comma your reading was more ingenious than plausible.” He turned back to the chimneypiece and the pile of verses. The incident seemed closed, when suddenly Haigh was seen frowning thoughtfully into the fire. “Surely there was some other fellow did the same thing!” he exclaimed, and began glancing through the pile. “Ah! Rutter, of course! Jucundæ voces tacitæ sunt, carmina vivunt!”

His voice was completely changed as it rasped out the abhorred surname; it changed again before the end of Jan’s hexameter.

“Were you helped in this, Rutter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you help him, Carpenter?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was not an instant’s hesitation before either answer. Yet the very readiness of the culprits to confess their crime was an evident aggravation in the eyes of Haigh, who flew into a passion on the spot.

“And you own up to it without a blush between you! And you, Rutter, expect me to believe that the same thing didn’t happen last week, when you denied it!”

“It did not happen last week, sir,” said Jan; but all save the first three words were drowned by Haigh.

“Silence!” he roared. “I don’t believe a word you say. But I begin to think you’re not such a fool as you pretend to be, Rutter; you saw you were found out at last, so you might as well make a clean breast of it! That doesn’t minimise the effect of cheating, or the impudence of the offence in a brace of beggarly new boys. Perhaps you are not aware how dishonesty is treated in this school? I would send you both up to Mr. Thrale at twelve o’clock, but we don’t consider that a flogging meets this kind of case. It’s rather one in which the whole must suffer for the corruption of a part. I shall consider the question of a detention for the entire form, and we’ll see if they can’t knock some rudimentary sense of honour into you!”

The two delinquents trembled in their shoes; they knew what they were in for now. Had they entertained a single doubt about the matter, a glance at the black looks encompassing them would have prepared them for the worst. But Chips had not the heart to lift his eyes, and so a slip of paper was thoughtfully passed down to him by Shockley. “I’ll murder you for this,” it said; and the storm burst upon the hapless couple the moment they were out in Haigh’s quad after second school.

“What the deuce do you both mean by owning up?”

“I wasn’t going to tell a lie about it,” said Jan, doggedly.

“No more was I!” squealed Chips, as Shockley twisted his arm to breaking point behind his back.

“Oh, yes, you’re so plucky pious, aren’t you? Couldn’t do Thicksides with other people; too highly moral and plucky superior for that; but not above doing the Tiger’s verses, and getting the whole form kept in!”

“It isn’t for getting your verses done,” cried another big fellow, frankly, as he tried but failed to get a free kick at Rutter: “it’s for being such infernal young fools as to own up!”

So much for the sense of honour to be knocked into the fraudulent pair by the rest of the form! It was a revelation to Carpenter and Rutter. They knew that Shockley and Buggins rarely did a line of any sort of composition for themselves, and more than once they had heard the pair indignantly repudiate the slightest suggestion against their good faith on the part of Haigh. But these poor specimens in their own house and form were the only fellows whose code of honour they had been hitherto able to probe. And it did surprise them to find some of the nicest fellows in the form entirely at one with their particular enemies in condemning the honesty which had got them all into trouble.

Was it a good system that could bring this about? The two boys did not ask themselves that question; nor did it occur to them to carry their grievance to Mr. Heriot, whose expert opinion would have been as interesting as his almost certain action in the matter. But in the bitterness of their hearts they did feel that an injustice had been done; and one of them at any rate was very sorry that he had told the truth. He would know what to say another time. Yet how human the fury of the form, threatened with punishment for an offence for which only two of their number were responsible, and subtly suborned by the master to do his dirty work by venting their natural anger on the luckless pair! Could any trick be shabbier in a master? Could any scheme be more demoralising for boys? The effect on them was easily seen. They were to inculcate a higher sense of schoolboy honour. And the first thing they did was to curse and kick you for not piling dishonour on dishonour’s head!

Chips and Jan did not see the fiendish humour of the situation, any more than they looked beyond their immediate oppressors for first principles and causes. But whatever may be said for the punishment of many for the act of one or two, as the only thing to do in certain cases, it would still be hard to justify the course pursued by Mr. Haigh, who held his threat over the whole form until the two boys’ lives had been made a sufficient misery to them, and then only withdrew it in consideration of a special holiday task, to be learnt by heart at home and said to him without a mistake (on pain of further penalties) when they came back after Christmas.

CHAPTER XI
A MERRY CHRISTMAS

Christmas weather set in before the holidays. Old Boys came trooping down from Oxford and Cambridge, and stood in front of their old hall fires in astonishing ties and wondrous waistcoats, patronising the Loder of the house, familiar only with the Charles Cave. But when they went in a body to inspect the Upper, it was seen at once that the Old Boys’ Match could not take place for the ground was still thickly powdered with snow, and a swept patch proved as hard and slippery as the slide in Heriot’s quad. This slide was a duly authorised institution, industriously swept and garnished by the small fry of the house under the personal supervision of old Mother Sprawson, who sent more than one of them down it barefoot, as a heroic remedy for chilblains rashly urged in excuse for absence. Indeed it was exceptionally cold, even for a nineteenth-century December. The fire in the hall was twice its usual size; the study pipes became too hot to touch, yet remained a mockery until you had your tollies going as well and every chink stopped up. Sprawson himself was understood to be relying more than ever on his surreptitious flask; but as he never betrayed the ordinary symptoms of indulgence, except before a select and appreciative audience, and could sham sober with complete success whenever necessary, these entertainments were more droll than thrilling. It was Sprawson, however, who lit up the slide with tollies after lock-up on the last night, and kept the fun fast and furious until the school bell rang sharply through the frost, and the quad opened to dispatch its quota of glowing faces to prize-giving in the big schoolroom.

The break-up concert had been given there the night before; but the final function was more exciting, with the Head Master beaming behind a barricade of emblazoned volumes, the new school list in his hand. It was fascinating to learn the new order form by form, and quite stirring to hear and abet the thunders of applause as the prize-winners went steaming up for their books and came back with them almost at a run. Crabtree was the only one whom Jan clapped heartily; he was top of his form as usual, as was Devereux lower down the school, but Jan was not going to be seen applauding Evan unduly. Chips could not keep still when it came to the Middle Remove, and even Jan sat up with a tight mouth then. On their places depended their chance of a remove out of the clutches of old Haigh. And Jan was higher than he expected to be, but Chips was higher still, with the Shocker and Jane Eyre just above him, and Buggins the lowest of the group.

“I wish to blazes old Haigh would hop it in the holidays, Tiger,” said Buggins, and actually thrust his arm through Jan’s on their way back through the snow. “You and I may have another term of the greaser if he don’t.”

Jan said little, but it was not because he was particularly surprised at the sudden friendliness of an inveterate foe. Everybody was friendly on the last day. Jane Eyre was profuse in his hospitality at tea. Shockley himself had borrowed a bit of string that he would certainly have seized a week ago; as for Chips, he had already presented Jan with a German-silver pencil-case out of his journey money. And what made these signs so remarkable was that Jan himself had never been more glum than during the last days of the term, when all the rest were packing or looking up trains, and talking about their people and all they were going to do at home, and making Jan realise that he had no home and no people to call his own.

That was not perhaps a very fair or a grateful way of putting it, even to himself; but Jan had some excuse for the bitterness of his heart. He had not received above three letters from the rectory in all these thirteen weeks; the poverty of his correspondence had in fact become notorious, because he soon ceased looking for a letter, and when there was one for him it lay on the window-sill until some fellow told him it was there. This circumstance had provided the chivalrous Shockley with yet another taunt. Then that occasional letter never by any chance enclosed a post-office order, or heralded a hamper on its way by rail; and Jan had brought so little with him in the first instance, in the way either of eatables or of pocket-money, that a time had come when he flatly refused Chips’s potted-meat because he saw no chance of ever having anything to offer him in return. These of course had been among the minor troubles of the term; but they were the very ones a fellow’s people might have foreseen and remedied, if they had really been his people, or cared for a moment to do the thing properly while they were about it. But all they had done was to write three times to remind him of their charity in doing the thing at all, and to impress upon him what a chance in life he was getting all through them! That again was only Jan’s view of their letters, and was perhaps as ungrateful and unfair as his whole instinctive feeling towards his mother’s family; but it was strong enough to make him more than ever the pariah at heart when he came down from dormitory on the last morning, in his unaccustomed bowler (but not the “loud tie” of all the bigger fellows), and partook of the meat breakfast provided in the gaslit hall; and so out into the chilling twilight, to squeeze into some omnibus because he had failed to take Chips’s advice and order a trap in the middle of the term.

Jan’s journey was all across country, and long before the end he had shaken off the last of his schoolfellows travelling in the same direction. It happened that he knew very few of that contingent even by name, and yet he was sorry when they had all been left behind; they were the last links with a place where he now realised that he felt more at home than he was ever likely to feel in the holidays. Eventually he reached a bleak rural station, where there was nothing to meet him, and walked up to the rectory, leaving casual instructions about his luggage.

It was not a pleasant walk; there had evidently been more snow in Norfolk than at school, and it had started to thaw while Jan was in the train. The snow stuck to his boots, and the cold was far more penetrating than it had seemed during the frost. The rectory, however, was the nearest point of the thatched and straggling hamlet of which it was also the manor house. It stood in its own park, a mile and more from the vast flint church in which a handful of people were lost at its two perfunctory services a week. The rector was in fact more squire than parson, though he wore a white tie as often as not, and conducted a forbidding form of family prayer every week-day of his life. He chanced to be the first person whom Jan saw in the grounds, on the sweep of the drive between house and lawn. On the lawn itself a lady and a number of children were busy making a snow-man; and the old gentleman, watching with amusement from the swept gravel, cut for the moment a sympathetic figure enough. Jan had to pass so close that he felt bound to go up and report his return; but no one seemed to see him, which made it awkward. He had been for some moments almost at the rector’s elbow, too shy to announce himself in words, when the lady came smiling across the snow.

“Surely this is Jan, papa?” she said, whereupon the rector turned round and exclaimed: “Why, my good fellow, when did you turn up?”

Jan succeeded in explaining that he had just walked up from the station; then there was another awkward interval, in which his grandfather took open stock of him, with quite a different face from that which had beamed upon the children in the snow. The lady made amends with a readier and heartier hand, and a kind smile into the bargain.

“I’m your Aunt Alice,” she announced, “and these little people are all your cousins. We’ve come for Christmas, so you’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Clearly there was no time then; the children were already clamouring for their mother’s return to the work in hand, and she rejoined them with a meek alacrity that told its tale. Jan did not know whether to go or stay, until the rector relieved him by observing, “If you want anything to eat they’ll look after you indoors;” and Jan accepted his dismissal thankfully, though he felt its cold abruptness none the less. But the old man had been curt and chilling to him from the first moment of their first meeting, and throughout these holidays it was to remain evident that he took no sort of interest in the schooling which it was his arbitrary whim to provide. Nor would Jan have minded this for a moment—for it was nothing new—if he had not caught such a very different old fellow smiling on the other grandchildren in the snow.

His grandmother went to the opposite extreme; she took only too much notice of the lad, for it was notice of a most embarrassing kind. Her duty towards Jan, as she conceived it, was to supplement the Public School in turning him out as much of a gentleman as was possible at this advanced stage of his development. Mrs. Ambrose began the holidays by searching through her spectacles for the first term’s crop of visible improvements. Very few were brought to light by this method; but a number of inveterate blemishes were found to have survived, and each formed a subject of summary stricture as it reappeared. Mrs. Ambrose was one of those formidable old ladies whom no exigencies of time or place can restrain from saying exactly what they think. Jan could not come into a room, but her spectacles dogged his footsteps, and he was always liable to be turned back on the threshold “to wipe them properly”; if he had changed his boots, his fingers and nails came in for scrutiny instead, or it might be his collar or his hair. He seldom sat at table without hearing that he had used the wrong fork, or that knives were not made to enter mouths, even with cheese upon their point. As in the case of his reception by the rector, the lad would have been much less resentful if the other grandchildren had not been present, and their equally glaring misdemeanours consistently overlooked; he did not realise that the old lady’s sight was failing, and that she deliberately had him next her “for his own good.”

He disliked the other grandchildren none the less, but chiefly because his Aunt Alice was the one member of the party whom he really did like, and they would never let him have a word with her. They were the most whining, selfish, exacting little wretches; and their father spent most of his time shooting with another uncle, a soldier son of the house, and left the whole onus of correction to dear uncomplaining Aunt Alice. But now and then Jan got her to himself; and her gentle influence might have sweetened all the holidays if her eldest had not celebrated the New Year by nearly putting out Jan’s eye with a snowball containing a lump of gravel. Now, Jan was externally good-tempered and long-suffering with his small cousins, but on this occasion he told the offender exactly what he thought of him, in schoolboy terms.

“I don’t care what you think,” retorted the child, who was quite old enough to be at a preparatory school but had refused to go to one. “Who are you to call a thing 'caddish’? You’re only a stable-boy—I heard Daddy say so!”

Jan promptly committed the unpardonable sin of “bullying” by smacking the head of “a boy not half your size.” It was no use his repeating in his own defence what the small boy had said to him. “And so you are!” cried his poor Aunt Alice, mixing hysterical tears with her first-born’s passionate flood. And coming from those gentle lips, the words cut Jan to the heart, for he could not see that the poor soul was not a reasonable being where her children were concerned; he only saw that it was no use his trying to justify his conduct for a moment. Everybody was against him. His grandfather threatened him with a horse-whipping; his grandmother said it was “high time school began again”; and Jan broke his sullen silence to echo the sentiment rudely enough. He had to spend the rest of that day in his own room, and to support a further period of ostracism until the military uncle’s return from a country-house visit. The military uncle, being no admirer of his younger nephews and nieces, took a seditious view of the heinous offence reported to him by the ladies, and backed it by tipping the offender a furtive half-sovereign at the earliest opportunity.

“I’m afraid you’ve been having a pretty poor time of it,” said Captain Ambrose; “but take my advice and don’t treat little swabs spoiling for school as though you’d actually got ’em there. They’ll get there in time, thank the Lord, and I wouldn’t be in their little breeches then! Found something good to read?”

“I’m not reading,” said Jan, displaying the book which had occupied him in his disgrace. “I’m learning 'The Burial-March of Dundee.’”

“That sounds cheerful,” remarked the captain. “So they give you saying-lessons for holiday tasks at your school?”

“I can’t say what they do,” replied Jan. “There’s no holiday task these holidays; this is something special.”

And he explained what without much hesitation, and likewise why and wherefore under friendly pressure from the gallant captain, whose sympathetic attitude was making another boy of Jan, but whose views were more treasonable than ever on the matter of the vindictive punishment meted out by Haigh.

“But I never heard of such a thing in my life!” cried he. “A master spoil a boy’s holidays for something he’s done at school? It’s perfectly monstrous, if not illegal, and if I were you I wouldn’t learn a line of it.”

“I doubt I’ve learnt very near every line already,” responded Jan, shamefacedly. “And there’s a hundred and eighty-eight altogether.”

“A hundred and eighty-eight lines in the Christmas holidays! I should like to have seen any of our old Eton beaks come a game like that!”

“He said he’d tell Jerry if either of us makes a single mistake when we get back.”

“Let him! Thrale’s an O.E. himself, and one of the very best; let your man go to him if he likes, and see if he comes away without a flea in his ear. Anyhow you shan’t hang about the house to learn another line while I’m here; out you come with me, and try a blow at a bird!”

So after all Jan had a few congenial days, in which he slew his first pheasant and conceived a secret devotion to his Uncle Dick, who occasionally missed a difficult shot, but never a single opportunity of encouraging a young beginner. Now encouragement in any direction was what Jan needed even more than open sympathy and affection; and a natural quickness of hand and eye enabled him to repay the pains which were bestowed upon him. Captain Ambrose told his mother they would make something of the boy yet, if they did not worry him too much about trifles, and he only wished his own leave could last all the holidays. But he had to go about the middle of January, a few days after Aunt Alice and her party, and Jan had a whole dreary week to himself after that. It is to be feared that he spent much of the time in solitary prowling with a pipe and tobacco bought out of Uncle Dick’s tip. Of course he had learnt to smoke in his stable days, and, unlike most boys, he genuinely enjoyed the practice; at any rate a pipe passed the time, albeit less nobly than a gun; but he was not allowed to shoot alone, and his grandfather never took him out, or showed the slightest interest in his daily existence under the rectory roof. His grandmother, however, continued to equalise matters with such unwearied fault-finding, and so many calls to order in the course of every day, that the end of the holidays found Jan longing for the privacy of his unsightly little study at school, and for a life in which at all events there were no old ladies and no little children.

He was therefore anything but overjoyed when a telegraph-boy tramped up through the heavy snow of what should have been the eve of his return to school, with a telegram to say that the line was blocked and it was no use his starting till the day after to-morrow. Some four hundred of these telegrams had been hurriedly dispatched from the school to the four quarters of Great Britain; and one may suppose that the other three hundred and ninety-nine had been received with acclamation as surprise packets of rapture and reprieve. But Jan took his news, not indeed without a smile, but with a very strange one for a boy of fifteen on the verge of that second term which is notorious for all the hard features of a first, without its redeeming novelty and excitement.

CHAPTER XII
THE NEW YEAR

Shockley, Eyre and Carpenter found themselves duly promoted to the Lower Fifth. Rutter and Buggins had failed to get their remove, the line being actually drawn at Jan, who therefore was left official captain of the Middle Remove. His dismay was greater than he would own to himself, but Chips was articulate enough for two on the subject of their separation in school hours. Jan, however, was less depressed about that than at the prospect of spending most of his time in the same class as Evan Devereux. It was bad enough to be “hotted” by Haigh, but how much worse before Master Evan! Jan felt that he was safe to make a bigger fool of himself than ever, and he spent the first morning in an angry glow, feeling the other’s eyes upon him, and wondering what reports would go home about him now, but apparently forgetting what was hanging over Chips and himself at the hands of Haigh.

Chips, however, had not forgotten, but had written to Jan about the matter in the holidays, without receiving any reply, and had taxed him to little better purpose the moment they met. It was impossible to tell, from a certain dry, somewhat droll, and uncouthly secretive demeanour, in part product of his Yorkshire blood, which made Jan very irritating when he chose to put it on, whether he was actually word-perfect in “The Burial-March of Dundee” or not. This was Chips’s sole anxiety, since he himself had left nothing to chance, when he attended Haigh after second school on the first day, and found Jan awaiting him with impassive face.

“Now, you boys!” exclaimed Haigh, when the three of them had his hall to themselves. “Begin, Carpenter.”

“'Sound the fife, and cry the slogan——’” began Chips, more fluently than most people read, and proceeded without a hitch for sixteen unfaltering lines.

“Rutter!” interrupted Haigh.

But Jan made no response.

“Come, come, Rutter,” said Haigh, with an unforeseen touch of compassionate encouragement, as though the holidays had softened him and last term’s hatchet cried for burial with Dundee. “'Lo! we bring with us the hero’”—and in the old snarl after a pause: “'Lo! we bring the conquering Græme?’”

But even this prompting drew never a word from Jan.

“Give him another lead, Carpenter;” and this time Chips continued, more nervously, but not less accurately, down to the end of the first long stanza:

“Bade us strike for King and Country,

Bade us win the field, or fall!”

“Now then, Rutter: 'On the heights of Killiecrankie’—come on, my good boy!”

The anxious submissiveness of the really good boy, with the subtle flattery conveyed by implicit obedience to an overbearing demand, had so far mollified the master that Jan was evidently to have every chance. But he did not avail himself of the clemency extended by so much as opening his mouth.

“Have you learnt your task, or have you not, Rutter?”

And no answer even to that!

“Sulky brute!” cried Haigh, with pardonable passion. “I suppose you don’t remember what was to happen if either of you failed to discharge the penalty of your dishonesty last term? But you remember, Carpenter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Carpenter, you may go; you’ve taken your punishment in the proper spirit, and I shall not mention your name if I can help it. You, Rutter, will hear more about the matter from Mr. Thrale to-morrow.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jan, breaking silence at last, and without palpable impertinence, but rather with devout sincerity. Mr. Haigh, however, took his aversion by the shoulders and ran him out of the hall in Chips’s wake.

Chips was miserable about the whole affair. He made up his mind either to immediate expulsion for his friend, or such public degradation as would bring the extreme penalty about by hardening an already obdurate and perverse heart. The worst of it was that Jan did not treat Chips as a friend in the matter, would not talk about it on the hill or in his study, or explain himself any more than he had done to Mr. Haigh. The one consoling feature of the case was that only the two boys knew anything at all about its latest development; and Chips was not the person to discuss with others that which Jan declined to discuss with him.

Next day, however, in his new form, which happened to be taken by the master who had the Lodge, there was no more absent mind than Carpenter’s as second school drew to an end. It was after second school that the day’s delinquents were flogged by the Head Master before the eyes of all and sundry who liked to peer through the diamond panes of his class-room windows. Chips had to pass close by on his way out of school; but there were no spectators looking on outside, no old gentleman playing judge or executioner within. In response to an anxious question Chips was informed, by a youth who addressed him as “my good man,” that even old Thrale didn’t start flogging on the second day of a term. Instead of being relieved by the information, he only felt more depressed, having heard that really serious cases were not taken in this public way at all, but privately in the Head Master’s sanctum. Chips went back to his house full of dire forebodings, and shut himself in his study after looking vainly into Jan’s; and there he was still sitting when Jan’s unmistakable slipshod step brought him to his open door.

“Tiger!” he called under his breath; and there was a world of interrogation and anxiety in his voice.

“What’s up now?” inquired Jan, coming in with a sort of rough swagger foreign to his habit, though Chips had observed it once or twice in the course of their confidential relations.

“That’s what I want to know,” said he. “What has happened? What’s going to happen? When have you got to say it by?”

“I’ve said it.”

Chips might have been knocked down with a fledgling’s feather.

“You’ve said your Aytoun’s Lay to Haigh?”

“Without a mistake,” said Jan. “I’ve just finished saying it.”

“But when on earth did you learn it, man?”

“In the holidays.”

And Jan grinned uncouth superiority to the other’s stupefaction.

“Then why the blazes couldn’t you say it yesterday?”

“Because I wasn’t going to! He’d no right to set us a holiday task of his own like that; he’d a right to do what he liked to us here, but not in the holidays, and he knew it jolly well. I wanted to see if he’d go to Jerry. I thought he durs’n’t, but he did, and you bet the old man sent him away with a flea in his ear! He never got on to me all second school, and he looked another chap when he told me that Mr. Thrale said I was to be kept in till I’d learnt what I’d got to learn. It was the least he could say, if you ask me,” remarked Jan, with a complacent grin, “and Haigh didn’t seem any too pleased about it. So then I said I thought I could say it without being kept in, just to make him sit up a bit, and by gum it did!”

“But he heard you, Tiger?”

“He couldn’t refuse, and I got through without a blooming error.”

“But didn’t he ask you what it all meant?”

“No fear! He’d too much sense; but he knows right enough. Instead of him sending me up to the old man, it was me that sent him, and got him the wigging he deserved, you bet!”

By this time Chips was in a fever of enthusiastic excitement, and the conclusion of the matter reduced him to a mood too demonstrative for Jan’s outward liking, however much it might cheer his secret heart.

“Tiger!” was all Chips could cry, as he wrung the Tiger’s paw perforce. “O, Tiger, Tiger, you’ll be the hero of the house when this gets known!”

“Don’t be daft,” replied Jan in his own vernacular—under no restraint in Chips’s company. “It’s nobody’s business but yours and mine. It won’t do me any good if it gets all over the place.”

“It won’t do you any harm!” said Chips eagerly.

“It won’t do me any good,” persisted Jan. “Haigh knows; that’s good enough for me, and you bet it’s good enough for Haigh!”

And Chips respected his friend the more because there was no bid for his respect in Jan’s attitude, and he seemed so unconscious of the opportunity for notoriety, or rather of its advantages as they presented themselves to the more sophisticated boy.

“But who put you up to it?” inquired Chips, already vexed with his own docility in the whole matter of the Aytoun’s Lay; it would be some comfort to find that the Tiger had not thought of such a counterstroke himself. And the Tiger was perfectly candid on the point, setting forth his military uncle’s views with much simplicity, and thereafter singing the captain’s praises in a fashion worthy of the enthusiastic Chips himself.

“What’s his initials?” exclaimed that inquirer when the surname had slipped out.

“R. N., I believe,” replied the Tiger. “I know they call him Dick.”

“R. N. it is!” cried Chips, and stood up before a little row of green and red volumes in his shelves. “He’s the cricketer—must be—did he never tell you so?”

“We never talked about cricket,” said Jan, with unfeigned indifference. “But he used to wear cricketing ties, now you remind me. One was green and black, and another was half the colours of the rainbow.”

“That’s the I. Z.,” cried Chips, “and here we have the very man as large as life!” And he read out from the green Lillywhite of a bygone day: “'Capt. R. N. Ambrose (Eton), M.C.C. and I. Zingari. With a little more first-class cricket would have been one of the best bats in England; a rapid scorer with great hitting powers.’ I should think he was! Why, he made a century in the Eton and Harrow; it’s still mentioned when the match comes round. And I’ve got to tell you about your own uncle!”

“It only shows what he is, not to have told me himself,” said Jan, for once infected with the other’s enthusiasm. “I knew he was a captain in the Rifle Brigade, and a jolly fine chap, but that was all.”

“Well, now you should write and tell him how you took his advice.”

“I’ll wait and see how it comes off first,” returned Jan, with native shrewdness. “I’ve had my bit of fun, but old Haigh has the term before him to get on to me more than ever.”

Yet on the whole Jan had a far better term in school than he expected. If, as he felt, he was deservedly deeper than ever in the master’s disesteem, at least the fact was less patent and its expression less blatant than heretofore. Haigh betrayed his old animosity from time to time, but he no longer gave it free rein. He gave up loading Jan with the elaborate abuse of a trenchant tongue, and unnecessarily exposing his ignorance to the form. He started systematically ignoring him instead, treating him as a person who seldom existed, and was not to be taken seriously when he did, all of which suited the boy very well without hurting him in the least. He would have been genuinely unmoved by a more convincing display of contempt on the part of Mr. Haigh; on the other hand, he often caught that gentleman’s eye upon him, and there was something in its wary glance that gave the Tiger quite a tigerish satisfaction. He did not flatter himself that the man was frightened of him, though such was in a sense the case; but he did chuckle over the thought that Haigh would be as glad to be shot of him as he of Haigh.

He had a double chuckle when, by using the brains which God had given him, and thinking for himself against all the canons of schoolboy research, he would occasionally go to the top of the class at a bound, as in the scarcely typical case of possunt quia posse videntur. On these occasions it was not only Haigh’s face that was worth watching as he gave the devil his due; the flushed cheeks of Master Evan, who was quick to acquire but slower to apply, who nevertheless was nearly always top, and hated being displaced, were another sight for sore eyes. And Jan was sore to the soul about Evan Devereux, now that they worked together but seldom spoke, nor ever once went up or down the hill in each other’s company, though that was just when Evan was at his best and noisiest with a gang of his own cronies.

Jan was in fact unreasonably jealous and bitter at heart about Evan, and yet grateful to him too for holding his tongue as he evidently was doing; better never speak to a chap than speak about him, and one day at least the silence was more golden than speech. Haigh was late, and Buggins, who was rather too friendly with Jan now that they were the only two of their house in the form, had described the old Tiger as his “stable companion.” Evan happened to be listening. He saw Rutter look at him. His eyes dropped at once, and Rutter in turn saw the ready flush come to his cheeks. That was enough for simple Jan; everything was forgiven in the heart that so many things conspired to harden. Evan was as sensitive about his secret as he was himself!

One thing, however, was doing Jan a lot of good about this time; that was his own running in the Mile. It was very trying for him to find himself accounted a bit of a runner, and yet just too old for the Under Fifteen events; but he never dreamt of entering for any of the open ones until Sprawson gave out in the quad that he had put that young Tiger down for the Mile and Steeplechase. Jan happened to be crossing the quad at the time; he could not but stop and stare, whereupon Sprawson promised him a tremendous licking if he dared to scratch or run below the form he had shown in last term’s paper-chase.

“Little boys who can run, and don’t want to run, must be made to run,” said Sprawson, with the ferocious geniality for which he was famed and feared.

“But it’s All Ages,” protested Jan aghast. “I shan’t have the ghost of a chance, Sprawson.”

“We’ll see about that, my pippin! It’s a poor entry, and some who’ve entered won’t start, with all this eye-rot about.” The pretty reference was to a mild ophthalmic affection always prevalent in the school this term. “Don’t you get it yourself unless you want something worse, and don’t let me catch you making a beast of yourself with cake and jam every day of your life. Both are forbidden till further orders, and ever after if you don’t get through a heat! You’ve got to go into training, Tiger, and come out for runs with me.”

And Jan said he didn’t mind doing that, and Sprawson said that he didn’t care whether he minded or not, but said it so merrily that Jan didn’t mind that either. And away the two of them would trot in flannels down the Burston road, and then across country over much the same ground as Chips and Jan had covered on their first Sunday walk, and would get back glowing in time for a shower before school or dinner as the case might be. But Jan had to endure a good deal of “hustle” about it when Sprawson was not there, and offers of jam from everybody within reach (except Chips) at breakfast and tea, until Sprawson came over from the Sixth Form table and genially undertook to crucify the next man who tried to nobble his young colt. Sprawson would boast of the good example he himself had set by pawning his precious flask until the Finals. He was certainly first favourite for both the Mile and the Steeplechase, in one or other of which he seemed to have run second or third for years. As these two events for obscure reasons obtained more marks than any others, and as the great Charles Cave was expected to render a characteristic account of himself in the Hundred and the Hurdles, there was a strong chance of adding the Athletic Cup to the others on the green baize shelf in Heriot’s hall. It might have been a certainty if only Jan had been a few weeks younger than he was. As it was he felt a fool when he turned out to run off his first heat in the Mile; his only comfort was that it would be his first and last; but he finished third in spite of his forebodings, and won some applause for the pluck that triumphed over tender years and an ungainly style.

Chips was jubilant, and Joyce vied with Buggins in impious congratulations. The Shocker volunteered venomous advice about not putting on a “roll” which only existed in his own nice mind. Heriot said a good word for the performance in front of the fire after prayers. And Sprawson took the credit with unctuous humour, but had allowed his man jam that night at tea. “Now, you fellows who were so keen on giving him some before; now’s your chance!” said Sprawson. And Chips’s greengage proved the winning brand, though Jane Eyre’s fleshpot was undoubtedly a better offer which it went hard to decline with embarrassed acknowledgments. Neither Sprawson nor anybody else, however, expected his young colt to get a place in the second round. But by this time the field was fairly decimated by “eye-rot,” and again Jan ran third; and third for the third time in the Semi-final; so that Sprawson’s young 'un of fifteen and a bit actually found himself in for the Final with that worthy and four other young men with bass voices and budding moustachios.

Not that Jan looked so much younger than the rest when they stripped and toed the line together. He was beginning to shoot up, and his muscles were prematurely developed by his old life in the stable-yard; indeed, his arms had still a faintly weather-beaten hue, from long years of rolled-up sleeves, in comparison with the others. Again his was the only jersey without the trimming or the star of one or other of the football fifteens. And his ears looked rather more prominent than usual, and much redder in a strong west wind.

The quartette from other houses were Dodds (who fell on Diamond Hill), Greenhill (already running an exalted career in black gaiters), Sproule and Imeson (on whom a milder light has shone less fitfully). Poor Dodds (as you may read in that year’s volume of the Magazine) “directly after the start began to make the pace, showing good promise if he had been able to keep it up. By the end of the first round he had got a good long way ahead. Imeson, however, stuck pretty near him, and the rest followed with an interval of some yards. Dodds, Imeson, and Sproule was the order maintained for the first three rounds. Towards the end of the second round, however, Dodds began to show signs of distress, and he was observed to begin to limp, owing to an old strain in his leg getting worse again with the exertion. Then Imeson, and Sproule, closely followed by Sprawson, began to gain fast on him.” (Observe how long before the born miler creeps into prominence and print!) “At this point the race began to get very exciting, intense interest being manifested when, about the middle of the fourth round, Sproule and Imeson, who had gradually been lessening the distance between themselves and Dodds, now passed him; Sprawson too was coming up by degrees, and had evidently been reserving his pace for the end, having passed Dodds, he made up the ground between himself and Sproule, and passing him before the last corner, got abreast of Imeson. Both of them had a splendid spurt left, especially Sprawson, who had gained a great deal in the last half round, and now passed Imeson, breaking the tape four or five yards ahead of him. Sproule was a good third, closely followed by Rutter, who had run very pluckily and had a gallant wind.”

Italics are surely excused by the extreme youth of him whom they would celebrate after all these years. They do not appear in the original account; let us requite the past writer where we can. He is not known to have followed the literary calling, but his early fondness for a “round,” in preference to the usual “lap,” suggests a quartogenarian whom the mere scribe would not willingly offend.

There are some things that he leaves out perforce. There is no mention of Jan’s unlovely, dogged, flat-footed style, of which Sprawson himself could not cure his young 'un, while the extreme brilliance of his ears at the finish was naturally immune from comment. Posterity has not been vouchsafed a picture of the yelling, chaffing horde of schoolboys; but posterity can see the same light-hearted crowd to-morrow, only in collars not invented in those days, and straw hats in place of the little black caps with the red creased badges. The very lists are twice their ancient size, and the young knights no longer enter them in cricket-trousers tucked into their socks as in simpler times. It may be that preliminary heats do not spread over as many weeks as they did, that it was necessary to make the most of them in the days before boxing and hockey. But it is good to think that one custom is still kept up, at all events in the house that once was Heriot’s. When a boy has got his colours for cricket or football, or gained marks for his house in athletics, that night at tea the captain of the house says “Well played,” or “Well run, So-and-So!” And over sixty sounding palms clap that hero loud and long.

On the night of the Mile it was old Mother Sprawson, who looked round to the long table in the middle of the uproar in his honour, and himself shouted something that very few could hear. But Chips always swore that it was “Well run, Tiger!” And although there were no marks for fourth place, it is certain that for the moment the row redoubled.

CHAPTER XIII
THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Next day was a Saint’s Day, which you had to yourself in the good old times from chapel in the early forenoon till private work after tea. Jan had just come out of chapel, and was blinking in the bright spring sunlight, when of a sudden his blood throbbed more than the Mile had made it. Evan Devereux had broken away from some boon companions, and was gaily smiling in Jan’s path.

“I say, I do congratulate you on yesterday! Everybody’s talking about it. I meant to speak to you before. That’s the worst of being in different houses; we never see anything of each other, even now we’re in the same form.”

The boy is an artless animal; here were two, and the second simpleton outshining the first in beams of pure good-will.

“That can’t be helped,” said Jan, with intentionally reassuring cordiality, so that Master Evan should not think he was, or possibly could have been, offended for a single instant.

“Still, I don’t see why we shouldn’t help it for once,” responded Evan, looking the other rather frankly up and down. “There’s nothing on this morning, except the final of the School Fives, is there? Why shouldn’t we go for a stroll together?”

Darkness descended upon beaming Jan like funeral pall on festal board. “I—I—I’d promised another chap,” he almost groaned, with equal loyalty and reluctance.

“What other chap?”

Was it contempt in Evan’s tone, or merely disappointment?

“Carpenter in our house.”

“Chips Carpenter! I know him well; we were at the same old school before this. I never see enough of him either. Let’s all go together.”

But Jan was not through his difficulty yet. “We were going to the haunted house,” he explained in a lower key. “It’s an old arrangement.”

“The haunted house!” exclaimed Evan in a half-tone between approval and disapproval. “I never heard of one here.”

“It’s a couple of miles away. They only say it’s haunted. We thought we’d have a look and see.”

“But is it in bounds?” inquired Evan, with some anxiety.

“I should hope so,” replied Jan, unscrupulously. “But here’s Chips; you ask him.”

Devereux, however, despite his law-abiding instincts, was not the one to draw back when two were for going on. He was an excitable boy with a fund of high spirits, but not an infinity; they ran out sometimes when least expected. This morning, however, he was at his best, and incomparably better company than either of his companions. Jan was shy and awkward, though his soul sang with pride and pleasure. But Chips the articulate, Chips the loquacious, Chips the irrepressible in congenial company, had least of all to say, except in the bitterness of his own heart against the boy who had usurped his place.

“He’s hardly spoken to either of us,” Chips was saying to himself, “since the very beginning of our first term; and I should like to have seen him now, if the Tiger hadn’t finished fourth in the Mile!”

The worst of the enthusiastic temperament is that it lends itself to cynicism almost as readily, and vice versa as in Jan’s case now. Jan also had felt often very bitter about Evan, if not exactly against him, yet here he was basking in the boy’s first tardy and almost mercenary smile. But Jan’s case was peculiar, as we know; and everything nice had come together, filling his empty cup to overflowing. He might despise public-school traditions as much as he pretended for Chips’s benefit, but he was too honest to affect indifference to his little succès d’estime of the day before. He knew it was not little for his age. He would have confessed it some consolation for being at school against his will—but it was not against his will that he was walking with Master Evan on equal terms this fine spring morning. He had always seen that the making or the marring of his school life lay in Evan’s power. It had not been marred as it might have been by a cruel or a thoughtless tongue; it might still be made by kind words and even an occasional show of equality by one whom Jan never treated as an equal in his thoughts. He was nervous as they trod the hilly roads, but he was intensely happy. Spring was in the bold blue sky, and in the hedgerows faintly sprayed with green—less faintly if you looked at them aslant—and in Jan’s heart too. Spring birds were singing, and Evan bubbling like a brook with laughter and talk of home and the holidays that Jan knew all about; yet never a word to let poor Chips into the secret of their old relations, or even to set him wondering. Any indiscretion of that sort was by way of falling from Jan himself.

“Do you ever see the Miss Christies now?” he had inadvertently inquired.

“The Christies!” Evan exclaimed, emphatically, and not without a sidelong glance at Carpenter. “Oh, yes, the girls skated on our pond all last holidays. Phyllis can do the outside edge backwards.”

“She would,” said Jan. “I doubt you’re too big for Fanny now?”

Fanny had been Evan’s pony, on which he had ridden a great deal with his friends the Christies; hence the somewhat dangerous association of ideas. He said he now rode one of the horses, when he rode at all. His tone closed that side of the subject.

“Do you remember how you used to hoist a flag, the first day of the holidays, to let the young—to let the girls know you’d got back?”

Evan turned to Carpenter with a forced laugh. “All these early recollections must be pretty boring for you,” said he. “But this chap and I used to know each other at home.”

“I wish we did now,” said Jan. “There’s nobody to speak to down in Norfolk.”

“Except R. N. Ambrose,” put in Chips, dryly. “I suppose you know that’s his uncle?”

Devereux did not know it, and the information was opportune in every way. It reminded him that Mrs. Rutter had been a lady, and it reminded Jan himself that all his people had not sprung from the stables. It made him distinctly less liable to say “the Miss Christies” or “Master Evan.” Above all it introduced the general topic of cricket, in which Chips and his statistics got a chance at last, so that in argument alone a mile went like the wind. Chips could have gained full marks in any paper set on the row of green and red booklets in his shelves. He was a staunch upholder of Middlesex cricket, but Jan and Evan were Yorkshire to the marrow, and one of them at least was glad to be heart and soul with the other in the discussion that followed. It was not a little heated as between Carpenter and Devereux and it lasted the trio until they tramped almost into the straggling and deserted street of the village famous for its haunted house.

“I suppose it’s at the other end of the village. We shan’t see it yet a bit.”

Jan spoke with the bated breath and sparkling eye of the born adventurer; and Chips whispered volubly of ghosts in general; but Evan Devereux became silent for the first time. He was the smallest of the three boys, but much the most attractive, with his clean-cut features, his auburn hair, and that clear, radiant, tell-tale skin which even now was saying something that he found difficult to put into so many words.

“Aren’t haunted houses rather rot?”

Such was his first attempt.

“Rather not!” cried Chips, the Tiger concurring on appeal.

“Still, it strikes me we’re bound to be seen, and it seems rather a rotten sort of row to get into.”

Carpenter was amused at the ostensible superiority of this view. It was hardly consistent with a further access of colour for which Chips was waiting before it came. He knew Devereux of old at their private school, and that what he hated above all else was getting into a row of any description. Jan might have known it, too, by the pains he took to reduce the adverse chances to decimals. Nobody was about, to see them; nobody who did would dream of reporting chaps; but for that matter, now there were three of them, one could keep watch while the other two explored. The house was no better than an empty ruin, if all Jan had heard was true, but they must have a look for themselves now that they were there. It was one of the two things worth doing at that school, let alone the games, and you had to go in for them, whether you liked them or not.

“What’s the other thing?” asked Evan, with a bit of a sneer, as became one who had been longer in the school and apparently learnt less.

“Molton Tunnel.”

“Yes, I have heard of that. Some fellows are fool enough to walk through it, aren’t they?”

“Some who happen to have the pluck,” said Chips, taking the answer on himself. “There aren’t too many.”

“Are you one?” inquired sarcastic Evan.

“No; but he is,” returned Chips, with a jerk of the head towards Jan. “I turned tail at the last.”

“Don’t you believe him,” says Jan, grinning. “I wouldn’t take him with me; he’s too blind, is Chips. Wait till he starts specs; then I’ll take you both if you like. There’s nothing in it. You can see one end or the other half your time; it’s only a short bit where you can’t see either, and then you can feel your way. But by gum it makes you mucky!”

“It’d make you muckier if you met a train,” Evan suggested, with a sly stress on Jan’s epithet.

“But I didn’t, you see.”

“You jolly nearly did,” Chips would have it. “The express came through the minute after he did, Devereux.”

“Not the minute, nor yet the five minutes,” protested Jan. “But here we are at the end of the village, and if that isn’t the haunted house I’ll eat my cap!”

It stood behind a row of tall iron palings, which stand there still, but the deadly little flat-faced villa was pulled down years ago, and no other habitation occupies its site. The garden was a little wilderness even as the three boys first saw it through the iron palings. But a million twigs with emerald tips quivered with joy in the breezy sunshine. It was no day for ghosts. The house, however, in less inspiriting circumstances, might well have lent itself to evil tradition. Its windows were foul and broken, and some of them still flaunted the draggled remnants of old futile announcements of a sale by auction. Its paint was bleached all over, and bloated in hideous spots; mould and discoloration held foul revel from roof-tree to doorstep; the whole fabric cried for destruction, as the dead for burial.

“I doubt they won’t have got much of a bid,” said Jan, pointing out the placards. “Yet it must have been a tidy little place in its day.”

He had forced the sunken gate through the weedy path, and was first within the disreputable precincts. Evan was peering up and down the empty road, and Chips was watching Evan with interest.

“I shouldn’t come in,” said Chips, “if I were you, Devereux.”

“Why not?” demanded Evan, with instantaneous heat.

“Well, it is really out of bounds, I suppose, and some master might be there before us, having a look round, and then we should be done!”

Before an adequate retort could be concocted, Jan told Chips to go to blazes, and Evan showed his indignation by being second through the garden gate, which Carpenter shoved ajar behind them. Jan was already leading the way to the back of the house. Instinctively the boys stole gently over the weeds, though there was but a dead wall on the other side of the main road, and only open fields beyond the matted ruin of a back garden.

The back windows had escaped the stones of the village urchins, but the glass half of a door into the garden was badly smashed. Jan put in his hand to turn the key, but the door was open all the time. Inside, the boys spoke as softly as they had trodden without, and when Carpenter gave an honest shudder, Devereux followed suit with a wry giggle. It was all as depressing as it could be: mouldy papers peeling off the walls, rotting boards that threatened to let a leg clean through, and a more than musty atmosphere that made the hardy leader pull faces in the hall.

“I should like to open a window or two,” said Jan, entering a room better lighted and still better aired by broken panes.

“I should start my pipe, if I were you,” suggested Chips, with the perfectly genuine motive implied. But it was a pity he did not think twice before making the suggestion then.

Not that it was the first time he had thought of Jan’s pipe that morning. He had been rather distressed when Jan showed it to him after the holidays, for Chips had been brought up to view juvenile smoking with some contempt; but he preferred to tolerate the smoker than to alienate the friend, and earlier in the term he had looked on at many a surreptitious rite. Jan certainly smoked as though he enjoyed it; but Sprawson had shown expert acumen when he threatened his young 'un with “hot bodkins if I catch you smoking while we’re training!” And Jan had played the sportsman on the point. But to-day he was to have indulged once more, and in the haunted house of all places. Carpenter had kept an eye on the pocket bulging with Jan’s pipe and pouch, wondering if Evan’s presence would retard or prevent their appearance, feeling altogether rather cynical in the matter. But he had never meant to let the cat out like this, and he turned shamefacedly from Jan’s angry look to Evan’s immediate air of superiority.

“You don’t mean to say you smoke, Rutter?”

“I always did, you know,” said Jan, with uncouth grin and scarlet ears.

“I know.” Evan glanced at Chips. “But I didn’t think you’d have done it here.”

“I don’t see any more harm in it here than at home.”

“Except that it’s a rotten kind of row to get into. I smoke at home myself,” said Evan, loftily.

“All rows are rotten, aren’t they?” remarked Carpenter, with apparent innocence. But Devereux was not deceived; these two were like steel and flint to-day; and more than sparks might have flown between them if Jan had not created a diversion by creeping back into the hall.

“I’m going upstairs before I do anything else,” he announced. “There’s something I don’t much like.”

“What is it?”