Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “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!r />
  “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.