CHAPTER IX
LAST DAYS AT ST. ANSELM’S
One consolation Gerald Eversley possessed amidst the trials of which the last chapter has afforded a specimen. It lay in his visits to Helmsbury. Since the time of Harry Venniker’s illness it had become an almost understood thing that he should pay a visit to Helmsbury during all holidays. Lady Venniker’s tender heart had not lost the sense of gratitude for the sympathy he had shown when Harry was so near to the gates of the grave. He had become almost one of the family. He was permitted to enter into their intimate thoughts, and to tell them his own. It is true that Harry was unaware of his friend’s religious doubts and difficulties, nor would he have been able to appreciate them if he had been aware of them. His was not a nature that troubled itself about such things, and he would have been likely to dismiss speculations of a sceptical kind upon the Being of God and His relation to the souls and consciences of men as being, in his rough boyish phraseology, ‘all rot.’ But Lady Venniker, with true womanly instinct, divined that Gerald was not so happy in his mind as he used to be, that his unhappiness was occasioned by the stress of spiritual conflict, and that his spiritual conflict was in some way embittered by the circumstances of his home. Not that Gerald ever referred in censorious language to his home. On the contrary, he spoke of his early days at Kestercham as the happiest in his life, and of his father as the best man whom he had ever known.
In one respect Lady Venniker’s view of religion was so different from that in which Gerald had been brought up, that it came upon him as a revelation. She looked upon religious belief not as in any sense a burden or an obligation, but as a boon. She was only sorry for a person who did not believe in God; she was not angry with him at all, she could not imagine how anybody could be angry. She thought of one who had no sense for spiritual things as of one who had no ear for music or no eye for colour. She was very anxious, not so much to restore faith to him as to restore him to faith, or, in other words, to place him again in such a position that faith might seem to him not difficult, but easy and natural. She would sometimes remark that if a person is not moved by a beautiful scene, it is not the scene which needs changing, but the person. Only she did not think the change was best made by preaching, still less by scolding, but by living oneself in the light of the Divine Life. Our Lord (she would say) had never argued very much about God; only He lived the God-like life, and it was impossible to live near Him and not believe in God. The sunshine does not argue with the night shadows; it simply shines them away. And if Gerald ever expressed any surprise at the pure intensity of her faith, she used to say that by her long months of lying on the couch of sickness she thought God had given her more insight into the realities of the spiritual world than He gave sometimes to the strong and healthy who had not so much leisure for meditation.
Ethel Venniker, who was growing up from girlhood now into the dawn of a rich and beautiful womanhood, would often sit by when Gerald Eversley read some of his favourite passages of literature to her mother or discussed with her religious and other topics. Gerald could not help noticing the quick intelligence of her comments upon the reading, and how her cheek would flush at any deed or word of cruelty, and her eyes fill with tears at a tale of suffering.
‘O mamma,’ she cried once, ‘why is there so much misery in the world? I feel as if everybody ought to be happy as we are.’
‘It is, I think,’ her mother replied, ‘that those who are as happy as we are may try to make others happy too.’
‘But it is so hard to see other people suffer pain,’ said Ethel.
‘Yes, indeed it is,’ said her mother; ‘but life would lose its preciousness if there were no pain, no sorrow to be relieved; for then there would be no sympathy, and that is the most divine thing on earth.’
Lady Venniker spoke once of the future unseen world. Her daughter was not with her then. Her thoughts dwelt much upon it in the silent night watches. That there was such a world she could no more doubt than that there was this world. ‘As life goes on,’ she said, ‘and the beloved ones whom we have known pass one by one behind the veil, so that we have more and more friends in that world and fewer in this, we come to feel that we should be more at home there than on earth. I have been sometimes very near to that world—my life was given up—but God spared me. One little girl of ours, younger than Ethel, He has taken to Himself. I tremble sometimes for Ethel; she looks very delicate, don’t you think so, Gerald?’
He did think so, but he knew not then why the thought was so painful to him. He tried to disguise it, saying that Miss Venniker seemed stronger than she was when he first came to Helmsbury—she could walk further—he hoped she would soon be quite strong—many persons outgrew the delicacy of their youth.
Lady Venniker put out her hand and pressed Gerald’s tenderly.
This conversation took place just before Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley went back for their last term to St. Anselm’s. After that term they would be parted, and their lives would flow in different channels, except for occasional meetings at Helmsbury or elsewhere; for Gerald, as the reader knows, was going to Balliol, and Harry was destined for the army. It was therefore with solemnised feelings, as standing on the verge of a dreaded inevitable change in their lives, that they went back together to St. Anselm’s.
Since Gerald Eversley’s success at Balliol and the holiday that rewarded it, he had come to hold a different position in the eyes of the school. To say that he was generally popular would be misleading. He still lived very much to himself. Boys would still remark to one another that they could not understand what ‘Venniker saw to be so fond of in that fellow Eversley.’ But they regarded Gerald, with a sincere, though distant, respect, as a boy who was unlike themselves, and in some sense their superior, who possessed such attainments and accomplishments as they could not aspire to, and who would probably be remembered at St. Anselm’s when they were forgotten.
Harry Venniker, though he was not intellectually distinguished, and had only scraped into the Lower Sixth Form by the subtle and compassionate process of a ‘charity remove,’ was in the cricket and football elevens, and his bowling was the hope and stay of the school. He had grown up to be a tall, manly, splendid creature, with the old curly auburn hair and the old sunny smile and ringing merry laugh. He was said to be the most popular boy in the school. It was noticed that his achievements in the cricket field were more loudly applauded than any other boy’s. Little boys, fresh to the school, would sometimes cause their parents and friends, when they visited St. Anselm’s, to walk a hundred yards or more out of their way for the sake of catching sight of him as he went to or from the cricket field. His tastes and feelings, whether known or only imagined, formed the etiquette of public opinion. One little boy, even more enthusiastic than the rest, turned one day to his sister who was making some innocent remark in the street, and said, ‘Hush! Katie, don’t talk, here’s Venniker coming along; he doesn’t like girls talking loud; perhaps he’ll look at you, if you’ll hold your tongue.’ Yet amidst all this popularity Harry Venniker remained unchanged; he was still as modest and unaffected as when he came to St. Anselm’s, and it seemed as if everybody were conscious of the wonderful favour attending his life, except himself.
It is sometimes said that boyhood is the happiest time of life. I know not if it is so; perhaps the world is apt to confuse happiness with freedom from responsibility; but there can be no doubt that for most boys the happiest time of boyhood, at least in a public school, is the last year of school life.
There is a time—it is most mysterious, it cannot be predicted, it cannot be defined, but every schoolboy knows what it is—when a boy becomes a ‘swell.’ He is elevated then above the mass of his schoolfellows. He is ennobled, so to say, by the popular voice. He becomes a privileged person. Certain actions, which, if performed by ordinary boys, would subject them to the dreadful imputation of ‘swagger,’ are allowed as lawful and natural to him. These actions are not the same in all schools, but in every school the boys know them perfectly. A boy who is a ‘swell’ may carry a light cane at house matches and on other solemn occasions, or may be a member of a particular club, or he may wear a special cap or necktie, or special collars, or may adorn his waistcoat with brass buttons, or may fold up his umbrella, or walk up and down the middle of the street arm in arm with other boys who are also ‘swells’ in the late afternoon, when young ladies are supposed to be returning from lawn-tennis parties, or he may be distinguished in any one of a hundred other trivial ways; but whatever the distinction is, and however trivial, it is that which constitutes a ‘swell.’
In point of fact, ‘swelldom’ (like some other highly coveted human distinctions) consists not so much in the possession of privileges as in the general belief that those privileges are possessed by the ‘swells.’
Mysterious indeed, except to the initiated, are the outward and visible signs of ‘swelldom,’ but not less mysterious is the fact of ‘swelldom’ itself. At St. Anselm’s (for of that school only is it necessary to speak) there were some boys who became ‘swells’ by prescriptive title, such as the captain of the school, and the boys of a year’s standing in the cricket and football elevens. About them no question could arise in any well-ordered mind. But a number of other boys there were who stood, as it were, on the borderline of ‘swell-land.’ They might or might not at any time be privileged to cross the border. Until or unless they could cross it, they were like the spirits which Dante saw in the first circle of his ‘Inferno.’ How a boy came to cross the border, he himself could hardly explain. But as a boy spends many days perhaps, or weeks, trying to swim, and all but swimming, and then one day, without any direct assignable cause, feels that he can swim, so a boy might aspire to ‘swelldom,’ and live close to it for ever so long a time and be excluded from it, and then at last wake up some morning and feel that he was a ‘swell,’ like the great poet who awoke to find himself famous.
Harry Venniker had been a ‘swell’ for a long time, ever since the term in which he ‘got his flannels.’ So good an athlete, so popular a boy was admitted to the charmed circle as of right. Gerald Eversley, it will be believed, had never dreamed of ‘swelldom;’ the ‘swells’ were the last boys with whom he would naturally associate. But it was the practice of the ‘swells’ to co-opt occasionally, though only on rare occasions, some boy who, by his position or character or attainments, might be thought not incapable of shedding lustre even upon their distinguished order. Gerald Eversley was now the third boy in the school. He was acknowledged to be the cleverest boy. He had won the school a holiday by winning the Balliol scholarship—and he was Harry Venniker’s friend.
The ‘swells’ were divided in opinion about co-opting him into their order. Some of them had hardly spoken to him, and doubted how they should get on with him. Others thought that he was ‘the kind of fellow to be encouraged.’ But it was Harry Venniker’s warm support that carried the day; Gerald Eversley might be passed over, but Harry Venniker’s friend could not. It was intimated to Gerald, according to the mysterious freemasonry of public-school life, that he might consider himself as exalted (not altogether through his own merit) to the august hierarchy of the ‘swells.’
If Gerald Eversley cared at all for being a ‘swell,’ it was only because his admission to ‘swelldom’ destroyed the last remaining barrier between himself and his friend. There was now no scene of life at St. Anselm’s to which he could not accompany Harry Venniker. They could talk more freely; they had more interests in common. They were more frequently seen together. Some one in the school began to call them ‘the inseparables.’ Never had their friendship seemed so intimate or complete as in their last days at St. Anselm’s. And yet what a gulf, that no man thought of, stretched between them!
Almost all boys whose lives in their public schools have been honourable, experience a sadness—a sinking of the heart—as they draw near to the time of leaving them for ever. They know the trials and dangers as well as the delights of school life; they do not know what may come after it. They have been sailing in waters where every reef and shoal is mapped out for them, and they are going to put forth on the untravelled illimitable ocean. The counsel which they valued, even when it was rejected, will be theirs no more. There will be no familiar hand, as of old, to bear them up, no voice to guide them aright. It is the mysteriousness of the future that appals them. If only they could foresee the worst, it would be less dreadful. Besides this, Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley stood at the parting of the roads. They would be friends perhaps, but at a distance. The old daily intercourse of the last four years was dying, and it could not be revived or replaced.
It was to this cause, and only to this, that Harry Venniker attributed the depression of spirits which he thought he noticed in his schoolfellow.
‘Cheer up, old man,’ he said one day. ‘You must not mope. I’ll write to you every week, and so must you to me; and you’ll come to Helmsbury in the holidays; it will be almost as good as being at St. Anselm’s.’
Light-hearted promises! Ah! how many a one has fondly deemed that the future would be as the present, and it never, never is the same!
But life is saved from the paralysis which reflection would cause by the blessed necessity of action. If there were more time for reflection, it would become impossible to act. But because the habitual daily duties of life demand action, we can live, and not live in vain. Thus it is that the saintliest Christians, like Bishop Wilson, who entered most deeply into the joy of communion with the All Holy, have yet given the preference to an active over a contemplative life.
In the stir and eagerness of the last days at St. Anselm’s Gerald Eversley had not much time for thought.
On the Saturday evening before the last Sunday Harry Venniker asked him if he were going to communion the next morning, and rather than excite suspicion of his spiritual state (though he somehow felt that he was acting a part) he answered Yes. The two friends knelt for the last time side by side in the memorial of the Divine Passion. There were very many communicants; the service was not over until nearly two o’clock.
The last Sunday evening service at the chapel at St. Anselm’s was always an impressive occasion. Who could look without emotion on such a multitude of young lives gathered for the last time in that place of holy memories and associations? So often had they worshipped together during their school lives. When would they all meet for worship again?
At all times the striking feature of a school service is its unity. A common parochial congregation is made up of diverse elements, the young and the aged, the rich and the poor, masters and servants, men, women, and little children; they meet, as it were, accidentally, their lives are various and separate, they are bound by no strong personal ties each to the other; and the preacher, if he appeals to one class from the pulpit, is necessarily oblivious or neglectful of another. Among the boys of the same great school it is not so; they are one in sentiment, tradition, association, life; the honour of each is the interest of all; they are trustees, the weakest as well as the strongest, of the name and fame of an institution greater than themselves, and in the congregation itself they are not one element out of many—they are all. And some of them are in the morning of their days as yet unclouded, and some in the chequered midway of school life, and some on the very verge of the great change, going forth into the world; and there are those who will make shipwreck of faith or morals in after-days, or will be wasted with suffering, or will die heroic deaths in far-off lands, and those who will rule senates or parliaments, or expand the confines of learning, or mitigate the sufferings of the poor, and those, too, who will lead the forlorn hopes of philanthropy and plant the Cross where the tortured slave kneels down to die.
It is not hard to believe that such thoughts as these filled Dr. Pearson’s mind as he looked in silence upon that congregation before beginning his sermon. He chose as his text the words, ‘Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men.’ A profound stillness reigned in the chapel while he spoke. Even in dark days afterwards, Gerald Eversley did not forget that sermon. At two or three points of the sermon some boys sitting on the front benches drew their handkerchiefs from their pockets, then hastily thrust them back again, as if ashamed of themselves.
It is not possible to give an abstract of the sermon. Some few phrases of it Gerald seems to have written down the same evening; they were probably such as struck him most. Dr. Pearson began by speaking of the intimacy of his own relation to the school. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘except, perhaps, your parents, can have the same interest in any one of you—no one the same interest in you all—as I have had.’ There must have been some direct reference to the achievements, perhaps also to the failures and shortcomings, of the school; for he spoke of the common corporate life at St. Anselm’s, ‘a life in which the honour of each one of us has been the honour of all, and if any shame has fallen upon any one of us, even the humblest, we have felt it, every one, as his own personal stain.’ And then, addressing the boys who were so soon about to leave the school, he told them that it was for them, when the enforced discipline of school life should come to an end, to see that their lives were ever controlled and inspired by the more sacred, because more arduous, self-discipline that Christ taught. He bade them remember that it was harder to live nobly than to die nobly; and he begged emphatically that, if they knew any boy who was coming back to school to be in danger of going wrong, they would not—even if in the past they had done wrong themselves—leave St. Anselm’s without asking him to give it up. The last few sentences of his sermon were somewhat as these: ‘I have spoken to you, my dear boys, many a time in this sacred place. To some of you—to those who are leaving—I am speaking now for the last time. Let me then ask of you all, and of them especially, these three things—I ask them as a personal favour in my Master’s name—first of all, that you will never say, or permit it to be said in your presence, that the thing which is right, however difficult it may be, cannot be done, or that the thing which is wrong, however tempting it may be, must needs be done; secondly, that, whatever your profession may be, you will take some part, though it be but slight, in ministering, directly or indirectly, to the relief of human suffering, and so in making this world, or some corner of it, a little better for your lives; and thirdly—knowing, as I must know, what are the difficulties of religious faith in a time like this—that you will not altogether break at any period of your lives with the ordinances of religion, above all, that you will not abandon the privilege of prayer.’ And he told them in a few sacred sentences what the religion of Christ had been to his own soul. Dr. Pearson pressed these requests with an affectionate and pathetic earnestness as one who felt in his heart of hearts his responsibility for the young souls committed to his care. The boys were sobered and melted by his words. They remained kneeling for an unusually long time after the sermon. It was followed by the hymn that long usage had consecrated in the minds of the boys of St. Anselm’s, and of other schools too, as pre-eminently suited to the last Sunday of the school year, with its touching prayer for those who are leaving, and its equally touching prayer, no less needed, for those who will come back:
Let Thy father-hand be shielding
All who here shall meet no more;
May their seed-time past be yielding
Year by year a richer store;
Those returning
Make more faithful than before.
The sermon was over. The tender notes of the voluntary, ‘O rest in the Lord,’ sounded on the organ as the boys slowly and reverently left the chapel.
O sacred beloved spot on earth—the chapel of a great school! It is there, if anywhere in the world, that worship is realised in its purity, far away from the discords of contending creeds—there, if anywhere, that the angels meet us, and we feel in our souls the benediction of the Eternal.
But Gerald Eversley was as one who saw and heard not.
The service being over, there remained a few minutes before the ringing of the lock-up bell would call the boys to their houses.
‘Let’s go up to the churchyard,’ said Gerald to Harry Venniker, who had joined him just outside the chapel.
They walked up the hill, talking of Dr. Pearson’s sermon.
‘By Jove!’ said Harry, ‘how well the doctor preached to-night! There’s nobody like him. He seems to know what fellows are thinking.’
‘Yes,’ said Gerald, ‘but it’s hard to do what he says.’
‘What’s hard?’ asked Harry.
‘Why, you see, a person may be able to act as he likes, but he can’t believe as he likes,’ said Gerald.
‘I don’t see that,’ answered Harry. ‘I know I find it a great deal harder to keep straight, though it’s plain enough what one ought to do.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant,’ was Gerald’s reply.
They had reached the churchyard by this time. They were standing under its elms, gazing out over the wold. There was a deep and almost awful stillness in the air. Only the rooks were cawing overhead.
‘Somehow,’ said Gerald, after a pause, ‘this always seems to me such a sad view.’
‘Nonsense!’ answered Harry; ‘that’s only because you are in a sad frame of mind just now.’
‘I think,’ said Gerald, not taking notice of his objection, ‘it’s because it’s all so level—so unbroken; there is no hill and dale, and there are no houses after you get clear of St. Anselm’s.... It’s very beautiful.’
Harry Venniker replied, ‘I rather wish now I had come here oftener. I knew it was fine, but I didn’t think much about it. I suppose you have been here very often, Gerald.’
‘Nearly every Sunday, I think,’ said Gerald.
His companion was going to make some remark, when he checked himself and said, ‘There’s the bell. We must go back to the house. Let’s go by the road.’
The two boys walked quickly down the footpath which runs at right angles into the road. They had then a part of the hill to climb. It was the same way as they had walked together on the first day of their life at St. Anselm’s. They had been silent then, and they were silent now. When they reached the turning of the road where Mr. Brandiston’s house came in sight, jutting out a little into the road just beyond the chapel, Gerald said:
‘Do you remember the first time we came here?’
‘You mean the day we came to St. Anselm’s?’ said Harry.
‘Yes,’ was the reply. ‘We have learnt a good many things since then.’
‘We’ve learnt to love one another and St. Anselm’s,’ said Harry.
Gerald looked at him with a look of ineffable gratitude.
By this time they were drawing near to the house. The bell ceased ringing as Harry spoke. There were still two minutes before the doors would be locked.
Gerald stopped.
‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘the promise you gave me that day? It was just over there.’
‘No,’ said Harry, ‘I don’t think I do.’
‘You promised to be my friend always, whatever happened,’ said Gerald.
‘Did I?’ answered Harry. ‘I hope, old man, I have been as good as my word.’
Gerald Eversley answered, with solemn, intense feeling, ‘You have indeed. I have never had a friend like you.’
‘Well, who knows?’ said Harry, as they entered the house; ‘it may be that the end is not yet.’
Two days later they both left St. Anselm’s. Mr. Selby was the only master (except Mr. Brandiston) to whom Gerald Eversley bade farewell.