Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Your carpet,” Boy said, wondering what was wrong with it. He had brushed it furiously and was certain that not a speck of dirt was left upon it.

  “Oh, is it! Then why the hell don’t you treat it like a carpet? I thought it was some old rag you’d found, you’ve thrown it down so carelessly.”

  Boy stared down again in bewilderment; not a crease or fold was there in it.

  “Do you live in these conditions at home? What is your guv’nor—some sort of tradesman, is he not?”

  Boy stayed silent, knowing he could not say the words that sprang into his mind. But even his silence felt like a betrayal of his father.

  “Do you tolerate servants who chuck carpets down like that?”

  This time Malaby obviously expected an answer.

  Boy coughed up a pleading little laugh. “Honestly, Malaby, I see nothing wrong with it.”

  “Nothing wrong! My dear young fellow, they’ve obviously sent you to a decent school in the nick of time. Down on your knees, please!”

  His heavy cajolery, delivered in the lightest tone, filled Boy with foreboding as he obeyed.

  “Oblige me,” Malaby went on, “by drawing your finger along the line of the floorboards.” Boy did so. “Good. Now, while you try to hold the memory of that line in your tiny little brain, kindly trace out the line formed by the edge of the carpet.”

  Again Boy obeyed. Malaby’s drift began to reach him: The two lines were not precisely parallel!

  Malaby saw the understanding as it dawned in Boy’s eyes. “Oh yes! Horror of horrors! Not parallel, as old Euclid so quaintly phrases it. Those two lines don’t meet in the hereafter; they meet somewhere in this bloody room! They subtend an angle greater than zero—are you familiar with these mathematical arcana in your tradesman’s palace?”

  Boy nodded miserably.

  “Because if not, I’ll teach you. I can already see I’m going to have to teach you quite a bit. You obviously strolled in here thinking you needn’t give a hoot about old Malaby’s comfort, you can sling his rug down any old how.”

  Boy, who had slaved extra hard, he thought, to make the study pleasant, felt the injustice of Malaby’s scorn fiercely; but again he held his tongue.

  “You’ve just earned a Barn beating. Now get out!”

  “What’s a Barn beating?” Boy asked de Lacy.

  “Oh, Malaby’s always in a wax when he’s behind with his prep…” de Lacy began; but he had no time to explain a Barn beating because at that moment a buck poked his head into the passage, nodded at Boy, and said, “Whym wants you. Five minutes ago.”

  Boy’s heart fell to his boots. The Lorrimer inquisition was about to begin. Barn beatings and tongue lashings from Malaby would soon seem very small beer.

  Mr. Whymper did a lot of breathing and staring before he spoke. “Last night!” was all he said.

  Last night? Did he mean Lorrimer? Or the drumming-in? Or even Blenkinsop? So much had happened last night. Boy was determined not to resolve Whymper’s ambiguity for him.

  “Yes, master?”

  “Well?”

  Boy shrugged, nonplussed.

  “Answer the question, dammit, sir!”

  “I’m sorry, master. What is the question?”

  “You know full well ‘what is the question’!”

  “About the drumming-in, master?”

  Whymper’s nostrils flared until Boy thought they would disgorge the two black caterpillars. “Drumming-in! Drumming-in? There is no such thing, d’ye hear! This school tolerates no such rituals. If you hear of it, if you hear so much as a whisper, you are to come at once to me and we shall extirpate it, eradicate it, root it out.”

  The word “root” must have tripped the schoolmaster’s equivalent of a hair trigger in his mind, for he at once added: “What is the derivation of the words extirpate and eradicate?” Then, no doubt remembering that their business was much too serious for pedagogical games, he said gruffly, “No matter. No matter. You understand what I was saying before?” He glared at Boy, challenging him to so much as mention the drumming-in again.

  “Do you mean Lorrimer, master?” Boy longed to ask if he were alive or dead but did not dare.

  “Yes, I mean Lorrimer, sir. I understand that three people who were there say he tripped and fell. But you, for reasons best known to yourself, persist in blackening his name with some wild talk or other, incidentally casting yourself in an heroic mould.”

  “That is true, master.”

  Whymper’s attitude certainly didn’t suggest that Lorrimer had died, but how could you tell with someone who obviously knew that the drumming-in ceremony went on and who yet denied it so blatantly? And to one of the victims within hours of his experience of it? There was such a puzzling gap in this place between what people said and what they did.

  Without looking, Whymper reached behind him, into a nook between the chimney breast and a bookcase, and fished out a stout malacca cane. In crude assertion of his power he laid it on the faded leather of his desk; the fine wire binding around the end of it gleamed fiercely in the multicoloured sunlight that fell between them from the stained-glass window. “What is true, Stevenson? That is what I wish to know. That is what I intend to know.”

  “It is true that three people say he slipped.”

  “Including your own brother.”

  “Including him. And I say he was bullying de Lacy and I merely…”

  “Bullying?” It was obviously not the word Whymper had expected. “But you said ‘doing unspeakable things’—that is very different from mere bullying.”

  Boy took a deep breath. “He was making de Lacy lick his toes. Lorrimer was making de Lacy lick Lorrimer’s toes. Then Lorrimer stood on de Lacy’s head. And there was worse than that. I call it unspeakable, master.”

  “And I call it unspeakable to blacken a boy’s name—an honourable name, from a family far more ancient than the Stevensons, I may say—when there is a perfectly reasonable alternative explanation.”

  Boy was silent.

  “What do you say to that?”

  “I say that they will have to swear it before God and I know that at least one of them, being a Stevenson, will not then be able to maintain the lie, master. And I trust the same is true of the others.”

  Whymper looked puzzled at this.

  “Surely there must be some kind of inquiry…” Boy began.

  Before he could say more the door opened and a tall, powerful man walked in. His fair, curly hair, released as he lifted his mortarboard, gave his rugged face an almost boyish look. Only then did Boy recognize him as the chief.

  “Good morning to you, Whymper,” he said; then he looked at Boy with a stern, guarded sympathy—a conditional promise of sympathy, Boy thought. But Boy was on the lookout for sympathy that morning.

  Whymper had risen at once. “Good morning, chief. This is Stevenson major. Stevenson, here is your headmaster, Dr. Brockman.”

  Brockman held out a muscular hand—a big bunch of squabby fingers, which closed right over Boy’s paw. “I sent for you a good thirty minutes ago. I trust you weren’t skulking somewhere?” Something in his tone let Boy understand that a partial rebuke was aimed at Whymper, for not sending Boy at once.

  “I was with Mr. Whymper, sir,” he said.

  Brockman smiled thinly at the master.

  “We were discussing Lorrimer,” Boy added, thinking it no harm to get at once to the matter.

  “Yes, how is young Lorrimer?” Brockman asked.

  Boy looked in relief from chief to master. How is Lorrimer? The question answered his own unspoken one. The whole day grew lighter. And Whymper’s answer put the seal on it: “He has taken nourishment and is sleeping.”

  “Good, good,” Brockman said with conventional cheer. “A nasty shock. Now, m’boy, I wish you to come with me.”

 
Boy followed, walking on air. Lorrimer was alive! Alive! The most beautiful pair of syllables in any language. He found he could even picture Lorrimer’s face again now—something his mind had shrunk from in dread of the pallor, the white eyeballs, he had feared to discover. Now he could imagine Lorrimer talking, laughing, sneering. He could even rehearse again that dreadful fall without cringing in his flesh and cursing his own impulsive nature.

  “Stevenson ma.” He caught the undertones all around as he trotted beside the chief, who, striding in flowing gown and crimson hood, swept a miraculous swath through knots of boys on their way to tutorials. He was surprised to find that he and the chief were hand-in-hand. He had heard little of what the man was saying but understood, vaguely, that it was to do with the age of the foundation and the many changes it had seen since the days of the monks. In the end, just as they reached the gate of the chief’s garden, he became aware that Brockman had halted and was looking at him, as if waiting for an answer to some question.

  “What is it, m’boy?” Brockman asked at length.

  “I wasn’t sure whether Lorrimer was alive or dead, sir.”

  Brockman continued to look at him long and hard. “I see,” he said. “Then you have heard very little of what I have been saying.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.” Boy smiled ruefully.

  They went through the little garden, directly into the chief’s study. Caspar, who was already there, stood up as they entered. A large elk-hound lay sprawled before the fire. It looked up but did not otherwise stir. Boy was motioned to a leather chair next to Caspar, on the side of the fire away from the window. Brockman took the matching chair and became a silhouette whose features were barely lit by the small flames that flared now and then from the glowing coals.

  “I was talking to you about change, m’boy. Change and permanence. Change in order to achieve permanence, if you will, in an old foundation such as this is. Do you know how old it is?”

  “Pre-Reformation, sir?” Boy suggested.

  “That stained glass in Mr. Whymper’s pupil room is among the oldest in Yorkshire. To bring change to such a place, m’boy, is no easy matter!”

  “No, sir,” Boy said, since some comment seemed to be called for. He saw the chief smile, a shade dejectedly, and realized he would have to do better. He looked at Caspar and shrugged.

  “Your father, now—he is, of course, the Stevenson who is building this siege railway in the Crimea?”

  “Yes, sir.” Both of them answered at once. “It will be over forty miles before he has finished,” Caspar added.

  “A great achievement. You will both be very proud, to be sure. It is a great thing to do for one’s country.”

  “My father says he is pleased enough to repay his country, which has done so much for him,” Boy said.

  “Of course. It applies to us all, I hope. Your father is fortunate in one respect: The great opportunity presented itself. And all honour to him for grasping it so firmly, I say. But those of us not so fortunate should not grow discouraged when no great opportunity presents itself. We must make all the more sure to seize the smaller ones that come our way.”

  Boy nodded, thinking this was a very simple homily to digest. Caspar, taking the cue, nodded as well.

  “In my work here, for instance. How do you, Stevenson major, think I might best serve our country?” His eyes rested on Boy, who looked up in fright. It was surely not his place to offer suggestions.

  “What small opportunities may come my way?”

  Boy took his courage in both hands. “I suppose, sir, that each one of us is—er—a ‘small opportunity’…in a way.”

  Brockman leaned suddenly forward, his voice full of enthusiasm: “Jove, I’m sure you are right, m’boy!” He looked at both as if he suddenly had great hope of unsuspected wisdom in them. “But in what way? An opportunity for what?”

  Boy merely breathed a couple of times.

  “Come, m’boy. You’re no fool. I’ve met your father, remember. I know your stock. You can answer me well enough, I feel sure. Only diffidence prevents you.” His glance took in Caspar.

  “An opportunity to educate us, sir?” Caspar said; he had been waiting to speak.

  “And what may that mean? What is ‘education,’ do you imagine?”

  “To turn us into Christian gentlemen, well grounded in the classics?” Boy said. That was an easy answer. Their tutor at home, Mr. Morier-Watson, had always said that was the purpose of education.

  It was the right note. He could see that in the chief’s gleaming eyes. “Yes!” He leaned back and put large, spade-tipped fingers together. “I suppose it is open to each of us to hope to leave behind some monument, a single achievement, great or small, to the glory of God and for the benefit of one’s country, or one’s fellows. Your father, if he does nothing else—though, indeed, I’m sure his life will be both long and distinguished, but if your father does nothing else, I say—he will have his Crimea railway.”

  He looked sharply at Boy, almost begging him to supply the obvious extension.

  “And you, sir, would have the school,” Boy said.

  The chief smiled. “Will I, Stevenson? I wonder.” There was a long silence before he added: “And what is a school?” Now he looked at both of them equally. “Could it, for instance, exist with no boys?”

  They laughed, but chief’s monitory finger halted them.

  “No, no,” he said. “I do not jest. Could I and my assistant masters, could we, call in a builder and set out so much bricks and mortar—dormitories, refectories, schoolrooms, and so on, as well as playing fields and fives courts, and everything that goes to make what the vulgar might call a school, you follow? A school at holiday time, y’ou might say.”

  They nodded.

  “Would you call that a school, either of you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It has everything except…”

  “Pupils, sir.” They grinned. It was as exciting as finding a new passage in Socrates, where Plato has him making an absolute fool of someone.

  “Exactly! You are kind enough to say that this school may be my monument. But will you be good enough to make it so? For, as you have just proved to me, without pupils there is no school.” He smiled. “Will you?”

  “Yes, sir,” they promised, easily and eagerly.

  “Will you strive at all times and in all things to be industrious, pious, chaste, sober, athletic, and God-fearing—true, muscular little Christians?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was not quite so easy a promise to make. They began to feel uneasy that chief meant every word of it quite literally.

  He weighed them up before he spoke again, apparently deciding they were worth the words. “Many things here are unsatisfactory. I do not conceal it from you. Three years ago I found this place a relic of Georgian barbarism; it was almost as bad as Eton in my boyhood. And Old School, where you now find yourselves, is, I fear, as close to the infamous Long Chamber at Eton as you might find in all the world. It will be a remarkable boy—remarkable for purity and strength of character—who will pass unscathed through Old School. I hope that you, and others like you, but especially you, are such boys. Because I mean to change it—and without such boys I cannot do that.” He leaned back and put his fingertips together again. “Are you of the company?” he asked.

  “Sir?”

  “Or will the old barbarism claim you in its turn?”

  “No, sir,” Caspar promised brightly.

  Boy thought well before he answered: “I cannot truthfully say, sir. Not yet.”

  “Hmm. An honest answer, m’boy. Well, you may both go now. Major to private study until my divinity class at noon. Minor to Mr. Cusack’s geometry class.”

  As they reached the door to the garden, Brockman spoke again: “Remember, m’boys—patientes vincunt, the patient conquer, as Piers Ploughman says. And we have
a very long furrow to plough!”

  “What did old chiefy say to you?” de Lacy asked when Boy returned to Old School.

  “I couldn’t understand it,” Boy half-lied.

  “The usual rot? ‘Help me change the school, m’boy’?”

  “That sort of thing, yes.”

  “Ignore it. Rubbish! This is a damn fine place as it is.”

  Boy secretly marvelled that the demotion of one bully could turn a school that de Lacy claimed to “hate hate hate” into a “damn fine place.”

  “Let’s go out and start a snowman before it all melts,” de Lacy said.

  Chapter 6

  Cossack—as Mr. Cusack was inevitably called—was a young man, bordering on not-so-young, with an earnest, sober face that nevertheless hinted at a sort of red-cheeked, watery-eyed dissipation. He had not a hair on his scalp. It shone like wax beneath a dome of glass. Yet he was not a hairless man. He had muttonchop whiskers that ran around to a shelf of beard beneath his chin. As soon as he saw Caspar he beamed with delight and cried out: “It’s new!”

  A raucous laugh, full of anticipation, went up from the rest of the class—a hundred and twenty-eight boys, for this was public school, not a tutorial.

  “A new specimen of pond life! Let it come to me!” He beckoned Caspar into his open arms. The laughter redoubled. Caspar walked up to the podium.

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Stevenson mi, sir.”

  “Is that what its mother calls it, I wonder?”

  Caspar drew close and said, in an undertone, “Caspar Stevenson, sir.” Already he felt that a Christian name was somehow girlish and shameful.

  Cossack lifted him bodily onto his lap. “Casparius, filius Steveni. Or are you a big family, hmm? Are you a legion? Is it filius Stevenorum?”

  Caspar smiled weakly. Cossack had peppermint breath, with a hint of whisky behind it. He knew the smell of whisky from the way Mr. Morier-Watson sometimes smelt.