Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  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 hare
s 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.