08 The White Feather

by Unknown

  “I’m glad of that. I mean, I’m glad we haven’t been such fools as we might have been. You see, we only had Stanning’s word to go on.”

  Sheen started.

  “Stanning!” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “He was the chap who started the story. Didn’t you know? He told everybody.”

  “I thought it was Drummond,” said Sheen blankly. “You remember meeting me outside his study the day after? I thought he told you then.”

  “Drummond! Not a bit of it. He swore you hadn’t been with him at all. He was as sick as anything when I said I thought I’d seen you with him.”

  “I—” Sheen stopped. “I wish I’d known,” he concluded. Then, after a pause, “So it was Stanning!”

  “Yes,—conceited beast. Oh. I say.”

  “Um?”

  “I see it all now. Joe Bevan taught you to box.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s how you came to be at the ‘Blue Boar’ that day. He’s the Bevan who runs it.”

  “That’s his brother. He’s got a gymnasium up at the top. I used to go there every day.”

  “But I say, Great Scott, what are you going to do about that?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Why, Spence is sure to ask you who taught you to box. He must know you didn’t learn with the instructor. Then it’ll all come out, and you’ll get dropped on for going up the river and going to the pub.”

  “Perhaps he won’t ask,” said Sheen.

  “Hope not. Oh, by the way—”

  “What’s up?”

  “Just remembered what I came up for. It’s an awful rag. The senior day-room are going to court-martial you.”

  “Court-martial me!”

  “For funking. They don’t know about Aldershot, not a word. I bagged the Sportsman early, and hid it. They are going to get the surprise of their lifetime. I said I’d come up and fetch you.”

  “I shan’t go,” said Sheen.

  Linton looked alarmed.

  “Oh, but I say, you must. Don’t spoil the thing. Can’t you see what a rag it’ll be?”

  “I’m not going to sweat downstairs for the benefit of the senior day-room.”

  “I say,” said Linton, “Stanning’s there.”

  “What!”

  “He’s a witness,” said Linton, grinning.

  Sheen got up.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Linton came on.

  Down in the senior day-room the court was patiently awaiting the prisoner. Eager anticipation was stamped on its expressive features.

  “Beastly time he is,” said Clayton. Clayton was acting as president.

  “We shall have to buck up,” said Stanning. “Hullo, here he is at last. Come in, Linton.”

  “I was going to,” said Linton, “but thanks all the same. Come along, Sheen.”

  “Shut that door, Linton,” said Stanning from his seat on the table.

  “All right, Stanning,” said Linton. “Anything to oblige. Shall I bring up a chair for you to rest your feet on?”

  “Forge ahead, Clayton,” said Stanning to the president.

  The president opened the court-martial in unofficial phraseology.

  “Look here, Sheen,” he said, “we’ve come to the conclusion that this has got a bit too thick.”

  “You mustn’t talk in that chatty way, Clayton,” interrupted Linton. “‘Prisoner at the bar’s‘ the right expression to use. Why don’t you let somebody else have a look in? You’re the rottenest president of a court-martial I ever saw.”

  “Don’t rag, Linton,” said Clayton, with an austere frown. “This is serious.”

  “Glad you told me,” said Linton. “Go on.”

  “Can’t you sit down, Linton!” said Stanning.

  “I was only waiting for leave. Thanks. You were saying something, Clayton. It sounded pretty average rot, but you’d better unburden your soul.”

  The president resumed.

  “We want to know if you’ve anything to say—”

  “You don’t give him a chance,” said Linton. “You bag the conversation so.”

  “—about disgracing the house.”

  “By getting the Gotford, you know, Sheen,” explained Linton. “Clayton thinks that work’s a bad habit, and ought to be discouraged.”

  Clayton glared, and looked at Stanning. He was not equal to the task of tackling Linton himself.

  Stanning interposed.

  “Don’t rot, Linton. We haven’t much time as it is.”

  “Sorry,” said Linton.

  “You’ve let the house down awfully,” said Clayton.

  “Yes?” said Sheen.

  Linton took the paper out of his pocket, and smoothed it out.

  “Seen the Sporter?” he asked casually. His neighbour grabbed at it.

  “I thought it hadn’t come,” he said.

  “Good account of Aldershot,” said Linton.

  He leaned back in his chair as two or three of the senior day-room collected round the Sportsman.

  “Hullo! We won the gym.!”

  “Rot! Let’s have a look!”

  This tremendous announcement quite eclipsed the court-martial as an object of popular interest. The senior day-room surged round the holder of the paper.

  “Give us a chance,” he protested.

  “We can’t have. Where is it? Biddle and Smith are simply hopeless. How the dickens can they have got the shield?”

  “What a goat you are!” said a voice reproachfully to the possessor of the paper. “Look at this. It says Cheltenham got it. And here we are—seventeenth. Fat lot of shield we’ve won.”

  “Then what the deuce does this mean? ‘Honours for St Paul’s, Harrow, and Wrykyn’.”

  “Perhaps it refers to the boxing,” suggested Linton.

  “But we didn’t send any one up. Look here. Harrow won the Heavies. St Paul’s got the Middles. Hullo!”

  “Great Scott!” said the senior day-room.

  There was a blank silence. Linton whistled softly to himself.

  The gaze of the senior day-room was concentrated on that ridge of purple beneath Sheen’s left eye.

  Clayton was the first to speak. For some time he had been waiting for sufficient silence to enable him to proceed with his presidential duties. He addressed himself to Sheen.

  “Look here, Sheen,” he said, “we want to know what you’ve got to say for yourself. You go disgracing the house—”

  The stunned senior day-room were roused to speech.

  “Oh, chuck it, Clayton.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Clayton.”

  “Silly idiot!”

  Clayton looked round in pained surprise at this sudden withdrawal of popular support.

  “You’d better be polite to Sheen,” said Linton; “he won the Light-Weights at Aldershot yesterday.”

  The silence once more became strained.

  “Well,” said Sheen, “weren’t you going to court-martial me, or something? Clayton, weren’t you saying something?”

  Clayton started. He had not yet grasped the situation entirely; but he realised dimly that by some miracle Sheen had turned in an instant into a most formidable person.

  “Er—no,” he said. “No, nothing.”

  “The thing seems to have fallen through, Sheen,” said Linton. “Great pity. Started so well, too. Clayton always makes a mess of things.”

  “Then I’d just like to say one thing,” said Sheen.

  Respectful attention from the senior day-room.

  “I only want to know why you can’t manage things of this sort by yourselves, without dragging in men from other houses.”

  “Especially men like Stanning,” said Linton. “The same thing occurred to me. It’s lucky Drummond wasn’t here. Remember the last time, you chaps?”

  The chaps did. Stanning became an object of critical interest. After all, who was Stanning? What right had he to come and sit on tables in Seymour’s and interfere with the affair
s of the house?

  The allusion to “last time” was lost upon Sheen, but he saw that it had not improved Stanning’s position with the spectators.

  He opened the door.

  “Good bye, Stanning,” he said.

  “If I hadn’t hurt my wrist—” Stanning began.

  “Hurt your wrist!” said Sheen. “You got a bad attack of Peteiro. That was what was the matter with you.”

  “You think that every one’s a funk like yourself,” said Stanning.

  “Pity they aren’t,” said Linton; “we should do rather well down at Aldershot. And he wasn’t such a terror after all, Sheen, was he? You beat him in two and a half rounds, didn’t you? Think what Stanning might have done if only he hadn’t sprained his poor wrist just in time.

  “Look here, Linton—”

  “Some are born with sprained wrists,” continued the speaker, “some achieve sprained wrists—like Stanning—”

  Stanning took a step towards him.

  “Don’t forget you’ve a sprained wrist,” said Linton.

  “Come on, Stanning,” said Sheen, who was still holding the door open, “you’ll be much more comfortable in your own house. I’ll show you out.”

  “I suppose,” said Stanning in the passage, “you think you’ve scored off me.”

  “That,” said Sheen pleasantly, “is rather the idea. Good bye.”

  XXIV

  BRUCE EXPLAINS

  Mr Spence was a master with a great deal of sympathy and a highly developed sense of duty. It was the combination of these two qualities which made it so difficult for him to determine on a suitable course of action in relation to Sheen’s out-of-bounds exploits. As a private individual he had nothing but admiration for the sporting way in which Sheen had fought his up-hill fight. He felt that he himself in similar circumstances would have broken any number of school rules. But, as a master, it was his duty, he considered, to report him. If a master ignored a breach of rules in one case, with which he happened to sympathise, he would in common fairness be compelled to overlook a similar breach of rules in other cases, even if he did not sympathise with them. In which event he would be of small use as a master.

  On the other hand, Sheen’s case was so exceptional that he might very well compromise to a certain extent between the claims of sympathy and those of duty. If he were to go to the headmaster and state baldly that Sheen had been in the habit for the last half-term of visiting an up-river public-house, the headmaster would get an entirely wrong idea of the matter, and suspect all sorts of things which had no existence in fact. When a boy is accused of frequenting a public-house, the head-magisterial mind leaps naturally to Stale Fumes and the Drunken Stagger.

  So Mr Spence decided on a compromise. He sent for Sheen, and having congratulated him warmly on his victory in the Light-Weights, proceeded as follows:

  “You have given me to understand, Sheen, that you were taught boxing by Bevan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At the ‘Blue Boar’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This puts me in a rather difficult position, Sheen. Much as I dislike doing it, I am afraid I shall have to report this matter to the headmaster.”

  Sheen said he supposed so. He saw Mr Spence’s point.

  “But I shall not mention the ‘Blue Boar’. If I did, the headmaster might get quite the wrong impression. He would not understand all the circumstances. So I shall simply mention that you broke bounds by going up the river. I shall tell him the whole story, you understand, and it’s quite possible that you will hear no more of the affair. I’m sure I hope so. But you understand my position?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all, then, Sheen. Oh, by the way, you wouldn’t care for a game of fives before breakfast tomorrow, I suppose?”

  “I should like it, sir.”

  “Not too stiff?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well, then. I’ll be there by a quarter-past seven.”

  Jack Bruce was waiting to see the headmaster in his study at the end of afternoon school.

  “Well, Bruce,” said the headmaster, coming into the room and laying down some books on the table, “do you want to speak to me? Will you give your father my congratulations on his victory. I shall be writing to him tonight. I see from the paper that the polling was very even. Apparently one or two voters arrived at the last moment and turned the scale.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It is a most gratifying result. I am sure that, apart from our political views, we should all have been disappointed if your father had not won. Please congratulate him sincerely.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, Bruce, and what was it that you wished to see me about?”

  Bruce was about to reply when the door opened, and Mr Spence came in.

  “One moment, Bruce,” said the headmaster. “Yes, Spence?”

  Mr Spence made his report clearly and concisely. Bruce listened with interest. He thought it hardly playing the game for the gymnasium master to hand Sheen over to be executed at the very moment when the school was shaking hands with itself over the one decent thing that had been done for it in the course of the athletic year; but he told himself philosophically that he supposed masters had to do these things. Then he noticed with some surprise that Mr Spence was putting the matter in a very favourable light for the accused. He was avoiding with some care any mention of the “Blue Boar”. When he had occasion to refer to the scene of Sheen’s training, he mentioned it vaguely as a house.

  “This man Bevan, who is an excellent fellow and a personal friend of my own, has a house some way up the river.”

  Of course a public-house is a house.

  “Up the river,” said the headmaster meditatively.

  It seemed that that was all that was wrong. The prosecution centred round that point, and no other. Jack Bruce, as he listened, saw his way of coping with the situation.

  “Thank you, Spence,” said the headmaster at the conclusion of the narrative. “I quite understand that Sheen’s conduct was very excusable. But—I distinctly said—I placed the upper river out of bounds….Well, I will see Sheen, and speak to him. I will speak to him.”

  Mr Spence left the room.

  “Please sir—” said Jack Bruce.

  “Ah, Bruce. I am afraid I have kept you some little time. Yes?

  “I couldn’t help hearing what Mr Spence was saying to you about Sheen, sir. I don’t think he knows quite what really happened.”

  “You mean—?”

  “Sheen went there by road. I used to take him in my motor.”

  “Your—! What did you say, Bruce?”

  “My motor-car, sir. That’s to say, my father’s. We used to go together every day.”

  “I am glad to hear it. I am glad. Then I need say nothing to Sheen after all. I am glad….But—er—Bruce,” proceeded the headmaster after a pause.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Do you—are you in the habit of driving a motor-car frequently?”

  “Every day, sir. You see, I am going to take up motors when I leave school, so it’s all education.”

  The headmaster was silent. To him the word “Education” meant Classics. There was a Modern side at Wrykyn, and an Engineering side, and also a Science side; but in his heart he recognised but one Education—the Classics. Nothing that he had heard, nothing that he had read in the papers and the monthly reviews had brought home to him the spirit of the age and the fact that Things were not as they used to be so clearly as this one remark of Jack Bruce’s. For here was Bruce admitting that in his spare time he drove motors. And, stranger still, that he did it not as a wild frolic but seriously, with a view to his future career.

  “The old order changeth,” thought the headmaster a little sadly.

  Then he brought himself back from his mental plunge into the future.

  “Well, well, Bruce,” he said, “we need not discuss the merits and demerits of driving motor-cars, need we? What
did you wish to see me about?”

  “I came to ask if I might get off morning school tomorrow, sir. Those voters who got to the poll just in time and settled the election—I brought them down in the car. And the policeman—he’s a Radical, and voted for Pedder—Mr Pedder—has sworn—says I was exceeding the speed-limit.”

  The headmaster pressed a hand to his forehead, and his mind swam into the future.

  “Well, Bruce?” he said at length, in the voice of one whom nothing can surprise now.

  “He says I was going twenty-eight miles an hour. And if I can get to the Court tomorrow morning I can prove that I wasn’t. I brought them to the poll in the little runabout.”

  “And the—er—little runabout,” said the headmaster, “does not travel at twenty-eight miles an hour?”

  “No, sir. It can’t go more than twenty at the outside.”

  “Very well, Bruce, you need not come to school tomorrow morning.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The headmaster stood thinking….The new order….

  “Bruce,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Tell me, do I look very old?”

  Bruce stared.

  “Do I look three hundred years old?”

  “No, sir,” said Bruce, with the stolid wariness of the boy who fears that a master is subtly chaffing him.

  “I feel more, Bruce,” said the headmaster, with a smile. “I feel more. You will remember to congratulate your father for me, won’t you?”

  Outside the door Jack Bruce paused in deep reflection. “Rum!” he said to himself. “Jolly rum!”

  On the senior gravel he met Sheen.

  “Hullo, Sheen,” he said, “what are you going to do?”

  “Drummond wants me to tea with him in the infirmary.”

  “It’s all right, then?”

  “Yes. I got a note from him during afternoon school. You coming?”

  “All right. I say, Sheen, the Old Man’s rather rum sometimes, isn’t he?”

  “What’s he been doing now?”

  “Oh—nothing. How do you feel after Aldershot? Tell us all about it. I’ve not heard a word yet.”

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