There was once a certain person called Procrustes who is said, in his reception of his visitors, to have adopted a simple and uniform procedure. He invited or compelled each one of them to pass a night in his house. He offered each a bed. He offered them all the same bed; he insisted upon their occupying it. It was a bed so constructed as to suit a man of mediocre size and stature. If any guest of Procrustes was too long for the bed, the superfluity of his limbs was lopped off. If any one was too short, his limbs were stretched to the proper length. It was only the guest whose stature exactly corresponded to the dimensions of the bed that escaped without mutilation.
The modern bed of Procrustes is or was a public school. Nowhere in the world is there so keen an appreciation of those who adapt themselves to local tone, temper, and custom. But nowhere is departure, however slight, from the recognised standard of propriety, visited with consequences so unfailing. The society of a public school is a world in itself, self-centred, self-satisfied. It takes but slight account of the principles and practices which obtain in the world of men. It has its own laws, its own fashions, its own accepted code of morals. To these all persons must submit, or the penalty of resistance is heavy. Its virtues are not altogether those of men and women, nor are its vices. Some actions of which the world thinks comparatively little, it honours with profound admiration. To others, which the world thinks much of, it is indifferent. Mere physical courage, for instance, is esteemed too highly. Self-repression is depreciated. Hypocrisy is loathed. But the inverted hypocrisy—the homage which virtue pays to vice—or, in other words, the affectation of being worse than one really is, is common among boys and is thought to be honourable. Truth, again, is not esteemed as a virtue of universal application, but is relative to particular persons, a falsehood, if told to a schoolfellow, being worse than if told to a master. Nobody can be intimate with a community of schoolboys and not feel that a morality so absolute, yet so narrow, and in some ways so perverted, bears a certain resemblance to the morality of a savage tribe. It is rather the germ of morals than morality itself.
It is true that the general softening of manners, which is the one clear gain that the world seems to make as it grows older, has in some degree affected even schoolboys. Public school life is not what it was in the days of ‘Tom Brown.’ Thirty years ago, at the epoch of this story, a boy who entered a public school was sure to suffer a certain number of annoyances, if not of positive hardships. To-day, it is probable that the only boys who are actual sufferers are those shy, delicate, sensitive creatures who do not understand the rough give-and-take of life, who imagine injuries and brood upon them, who have no sense of humour nor any such companionableness as is necessary in a society of human beings. Public school life is milder than it was. The sum of happiness in it is increasing, the sum of misery is diminishing or disappearing. But this story relates to thirty years ago; things were rougher then than they are now. Still it is not difficult even now to discuss the traces of what may be called the uncivilised or unsoftened spirit in public school life. It is seen in the homage paid among public school boys to physical faculties and performances. Of the achievements of the intellect, if they stand alone, public school opinion is still, as it has always been, slightly contemptuous. But strength, speed, athletic skill, quickness of eye and hand, still command universal applause among schoolboys as among savages.
It is this uncivilised character of the young which accounts for the lack of sympathy—nay, the positive indignation and contempt—with which they regard anything like eccentricity or individualism. Science teaches that the progress of the species depends upon the preservation and improvement of varieties. Perhaps the reason why schools have made so little progress is that they have never encouraged variation, but have suppressed it. The bed of Procrustes is not favourable to varieties. Individualism among the young is looked upon as a form of conceit. Far stricter, and enforced by far more terrible penalties than the rules which masters make for boys, are the rules which boys make for themselves and for each other. Woe to him who consciously or unconsciously transgresses them! Their absurdity is itself the measure of their severity. It is not long since a mother, walking with her boy through the muddy streets of St. Anselm’s after a thaw in mid-winter, suggested to him that it would be a good thing to turn up his trousers at the bottom, and he told her with a biting scorn (which was provoked not by the rule but by her ignorance in needing to be informed of it), that the turning up of trousers was a privilege reserved to the select mysterious beings who are known as ‘swells.’
A public school, then, is the home of the commonplace. It is there that mediocrity sits upon her throne. There the spirit which conforms to custom is lauded to the skies. There the spirit which is independent and original is apt to be crushed. And yet to these public schools of England come boys of all sorts, conditions and characters, strong boys, delicate boys, rough boys, impudent boys, sensitive boys, unhappy boys, boys who have many friends, boys who have no friends, boys who are capable of fighting their way against odds, and boys to whom every harsh or inconsiderate word is a pang; they are all sent without discrimination to live as they may, and to shape their own characters or the characters of others by the simple primitive process of rubbing down inequalities through constant friction. Parents and schoolmasters often assume that the English system of public school life is suited to all boys, and that, if boys dislike it, it is all the better for them. It is forgotten how many boys of highest temper and keenest feeling have derived not benefit but injury from their school. There is no reason to deny that the public school system is good for the majority of boys. But it has its victims. How often has it happened that the boys, whose names have in after life been the glory and pride of their schools, have been ignored, depreciated, persecuted in their school lives! It is not needless—it cannot be wrong—to plead for a kindly sympathetic forbearance from masters and boys, yes, from masters as much as from boys, towards the stricken, suffering, despised members of the flock. For of these was Gerald Eversley.
It will, perhaps, be thought that the masters of a public school, as being presumably men of wisdom and experience, should correct the sympathies and prejudices of their pupils. But to think so is to exaggerate the power of masters. Masters have less influence upon a school than is sometimes supposed, perhaps than they themselves suppose. They do not always create public opinion, and often they follow it. They take their tone from the boys, as well as the boys from them. Sometimes they admire the boys whom the boys themselves admire; they ignore those whom the boys ignore. It is only here and there that a master has the courage and the self-denial to leave the popular, pleasant, responsive boys to themselves and seek those who are destitute and out of the way. There are masters who do this, and they deserve great credit for it. But too often masters waste their favours upon those who do not need them, and the misunderstood boys whom their schoolfellows neglect are equally neglected by their masters.
Mr. Brandiston, in whose house Gerald Eversley had been placed, was what is sometimes called ‘a master of the old school.’ It does not exactly appear what is the meaning of the phrase, though it may be presumed that the master, who is so described, does not altogether belong to the present school of masters. He was a tall and handsome man; in youth he must have been very handsome. Even now, when his hair was silvered and his figure a little bent, it would have been difficult to pass him without tacitly complimenting him on his appearance. He had held a boarding house at St. Anselm’s for over twenty years. It was a very popular house, and if Mr. Brandiston had a weakness, it lay in his belief that all the virtue and all the distinction of the school were centred in that one house. That a considerable part of the virtue and distinction were centred in it was undeniable. Mr. Brandiston’s critics (who were rather numerous) were wont to say of him that he did not care for any boy who was not either an aristocrat or a scholar. He would have admitted a weakness or predilection for scholars, but he would have said that the aristocrats came to his house of themselves. At all events they came. Mr. Brandiston was so upright a man that his word, especially in regard to his own house, deserved to be accepted unhesitatingly. There was only one reason—and it might not occur to everybody—for harbouring a suspicion that he would perhaps not altogether shrink from a purely accidental connection with the aristocracy. Mr. Brandiston was in politics a Radical.
But there can be no doubt that the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house were proud of their house and of him. The conversation which Gerald Eversley heard on the first night of his school life exhibited that pride. If Mr. Brandiston’s boys found fault occasionally with him themselves, they never suffered a boy who was in any other house to find fault with him. It was the general fashion of the house to assume that its traditions and its methods were the best possible. This fashion the boys derived from Mr. Brandiston. They went so far as to maintain that the food provided by Mrs. Brandiston was superior to the food provided elsewhere. It was not so, and boys are critical of their food, however excellent it may be; but loyalty to the house and to Mr. Brandiston forbade the admission that other boys ate as good bread and butter as his. A master who excites this kind of loyalty is not an unsuccessful schoolmaster.
Mr. Brandiston excited loyalty by two qualities. One was a certain bluff straightforwardness of manner; to use the boys’ phrase, ‘there was no humbug about old Brandiston.’ Boys do not mind bluffness, roughness, or even gruffness of manner; what they hate is humbug. And they are apt to assume that anyone whose manner is at all effusive or demonstrative is a humbug. They do not, as a rule, themselves indulge in forcible eulogistic expressions; ‘not bad’ is one of their strongest forms of eulogy. It is somewhat curious that boys, whose expressions of censure or condemnation are so vehement, should be so moderate in their expressions of approval. But so it is, and they are often distrustful of anyone whose words or actions go beyond their own usual practice. But Mr. Brandiston was admitted to be as good as his word.
And he was just. Boys admire justice, and Mr. Brandiston was just. It may be that he plumed himself a little upon his justice. If so, the boys were not unwilling to forgive him. Boys despise weakness, and are wholly unmerciful in taking advantage of it. But they do not resent severity, so long as it is impartial. They are strangely impatient of undeserved punishment, forgetting how often they escape punishment which is richly deserved; but if they have done wrong, and are fairly detected in doing wrong, they do not mind being punished, they expect punishment, and rather like it.
One point in Mr. Brandiston’s favour it would be unfair to pass over. It is that he was generally called ‘old Brandiston.’ The epithet ‘old’ is apt to be taken as descriptive of age. It may denote age, but it may denote something quite different. There are some persons who in the vocabulary of boys are always ‘old,’ and always were ‘old.’ They are persons varying in age, character, and experience. But I do not recall any instance of a man or boy being known in a school as ‘old,’ if he was permanently unpopular among the boys. Mr. Brandiston was just, and he was called ‘old Brandiston.’ More fortunate than Aristides in the ancient story, he did not forfeit his popularity by his justice.
Mr. Brandiston, or ‘old Brandiston,’ if for once it may be permitted to call him so, took a definite and precise view of the duties of school life. His formality of view was rather like his formal manner of going round his house at night. He held that boys ought to work and ought to play. If a boy both worked well and played well, he set him on a pedestal in his affections. If he either worked well or played well, he regarded him as a not unworthy member of his house. But if a boy was not distinguished in work or in play, it was Mr. Brandiston’s opinion that he ought to have gone to some other house. Yet even this is not a complete exposition of Mr. Brandiston’s educational theory. For he expected his athletes to work with sufficient assiduity to obtain respectable places in the school, and he expected his scholars to follow the regular recognised lines of public school education. He had no idea of any athletes who were not cricketers or football players. He had no idea of any scholars who were not good at Latin and Greek, or at mathematics; he was sometimes suspected of not setting much store even by mathematics. It would have been as disagreeable to him that any of his pupils should achieve distinction in Chemistry or German as that they should achieve it at hoops or marbles. He was a worshipper of the mens sana in corpore sano. The thing which he disliked most cordially was ‘loafing;’ but under ‘loafing’ he included not only idling about the street or lolling in the confectioners’ shops, but the irregular studious habits of boys who sat reading books in their rooms or in the library, instead of taking part in the games.
Such being Mr. Brandiston’s theory of school life, it is easy to imagine what sort of language he would address to his two pupils, Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley, when they were successively called into his study on the morning after the first night which they had spent as schoolfellows and companions in the same room. He had purposely placed them together, not so much from the love of paradox as on principle, because it was a fixed article of his belief that boys of widely different characters and antecedents, by being placed together, did each other good, rubbing off angles (as he said), the shy scholar becoming more a man of the world, and the athletic aristocrat imbibing a qualified love of learning.
To Harry Venniker, who entered the study with his usual sunny smile, Mr. Brandiston expressed the hope that his mother, whose delicacy he had heard of, was better; he alluded to his father and other members of his family who had been at St. Anselm’s; then he added: ‘I dare say you will soon make friends, or find them ready made in the house. I shall expect you to work and get up the school, for the credit of the house. I hear you are a good cricketer, a lefthand bowler; is that true?’
Harry said ‘Yes, sir, I bowl a little,’ with a flush of pleasure mantling upon his cheek.
Well, you must get into the Eleven,’ continued Mr. Brandiston, ‘and I shall look to you to win the great match.’
It was in a different spirit, timid and trembling, that Gerald Eversley entered the study. A tête-à-tête with his house master was to him like the ancient ordeal of fire or water. He did not venture to lift his eyes from the floor until he heard Mr. Brandiston say kindly:
‘Well, Eversley, and how do you like St. Anselm’s?’ A pause. ‘But it is too early to ask that yet. Rather strange, is it not? You have not finished unpacking yet, I see,’ looking, as he spoke, at Gerald’s neck and chin, so Gerald thought. ‘Your father tells me you have not been at school before. All the more credit to you,’ he added, seeing the boy’s look of pain, ‘to have won a scholarship straight from home. You must try for some of the classical prizes soon. I hope you will do the house credit. I shall expect you to be captain of the school some day. Now you may go and get your books from Arkwright’s.’
Harry Venniker, who had been waiting for his companion in the passage outside the study, prevented the possibility of any remark that Gerald might have wished to make by his rapid questions. ‘What did you think of him? Not a bad sort, is he? He asked me if I wasn’t a bowler, and told me he hoped I should get into the Eleven. What did he say to you?’
It was not necessary for Gerald to reply to the question respecting his opinion of his house master, for Harry ran on with his sentences like a mountain-stream flowing over the pebbles in its bed but not delayed by them; but he thought of Mr. Brandiston as the incarnation of law and order and felt disposed to worship him accordingly.
They went off to Arkwright’s, the bookseller’s shop.
‘I say, Arbuthnot,’ cried a little red-haired boy named Thornton, who had been watching the two new boys as they rounded the corner of the passage leading from the boys’ entrance of the boarding house into the street, ‘here’s a new chap come who has got “stick-ups” and a jacket.’
Thornton, as having been exactly one term in the school, had arrogated to himself the position of an authority upon scholastic etiquette. Seniority soon confers authority at a public school. It may be necessary to explain that the social solecism of which Gerald Eversley was thus pronounced to be guilty consisted in wearing the ‘stick-up’ collars which are at St. Anselm’s the traditional accompaniments of a tailcoat, instead of the smooth flat-lying collars—sometimes known as the Eton collars—with a jacket. His costume had thus become a curious blending of the dress of the senior and the junior boys at St. Anselm’s. It offended the sentiments of both classes of boys.
Arbuthnot opened his eyes in astonishment. It seemed impossible to believe that any boy, however ‘green,’ would be ignorant of the immemorial laws of dress at St. Anselm’s.
‘No,’ he said; ‘that’s too rich.’
‘I swear he is though,’ was Thornton’s reply; ‘he’s just come out of Brandiston’s study. I wonder what the old ’un said to him.’
The impeachment of Gerald Eversley’s costume was unfortunately true. Mr. Eversley, knowing nothing of public schools, had not imagined that it could matter what kind of collars a boy in jackets might wear.
‘Well, he must be a “green,”’ said Arbuthnot.
‘I believe you,’ answered Thornton. ‘I took a wink at him this morning in Hall, and, my eye, if he hadn’t been blubbing all night! We’ll have some fun out of him when the fag-spotting’s over.’
It was the humane and merciful rule of Mr. Brandiston’s house that a new boy might not be molested or persecuted by impertinent interrogations until twenty-four hours after his entering the house. The reason of it was that on the evening of the second day of the term all the boys liable to fagging (including, of course, all the new boys) were divided by a long-established principle of selection among the Sixth Form, and after that time, but not before, a new boy was felt to possess a natural patron or protector, and therefore to be a legitimate victim for the shafts of his natural enemies.
The ceremony of choosing the fags, or, as it was technically designated, ‘fag-spotting,’ deserves something more than a passing notice. It was a strange and almost barbarous ceremony. In some respects the nearest parallel to it may be said to have been the sale of slave girls in the market at Constantinople. The fags, or rather the boys liable to fagging, were marshalled after supper at one end of the Hall, and the Sixth Form boys stood at the other. Between them, seated at the different tables and turning their faces now to one end of the Hall and now to the other, according as they were interested in the deliberations of the Sixth Form or in the behaviour of the various candidates for their favour, were the mass of boys in the house, who had risen, by seniority or by position in the school, above the obligation of fagging, but were still below, and some of them much below, the dignity of the Sixth Form who were alone entitled to choose or ‘spot’ fags. These boys constituted what may perhaps be called a neutral or buffer state between the fagmasters and their fags. The Sixth Form boys chose fags in turn according to an order of precedence which depended upon their rank in the school, and the choice might be made either by calling a boy’s name, or, if his name were not known, by walking up to him and laying a hand upon his shoulder. When every Sixth Form boy had chosen a fag, the choice began over again, and so continued until the number of the fags was exhausted, every one of them having now received his fagmaster. It was open to any Sixth Form boy to inspect these candidates (if they may be so called) for the privilege of waiting upon him, for cleanliness was a recommendation in a fag as well as attractiveness of appearance or alacrity, and it would happen not unfrequently that one Sixth Form boy, acting the part of the Præpostor Immundorum or Præpostor of the Dirty Boys in the ancient days of English public school life, would cause a boy, whom he thought of choosing, to hold out his hands amidst the critical applause and laughter of his schoolfellows. With the fags it was a point of honour to be chosen early. Happy indeed was he who was so fortunate as to obtain the suffrage of the head of the house. Sometimes a fag was chosen on grounds of personal friendship, or of domestic interest, if a Sixth Form boy ‘knew him at home’ or had been specially asked to select him as a fag; but in general the choice was determined by the superficial merits or demerits of the fags themselves.
It was rumoured among the smaller boys of the house (though with what truth was not known) that Stanley, the captain of the Eleven, had announced his intention of making Harry Venniker his fag, and had in fact used his personal influence to prevent his being chosen by any Sixth Form boy higher in the school than himself. Whether that was so or not, it turned out that Harry had not yet been chosen when it came to Stanley’s turn to make his choice, and he uttered the momentous words ‘I’ll have that chap, Venniker.’ Meanwhile, as the choosing of the fags proceeded, it became probable that Gerald Eversley would be left to the last. No Sixth Form boy knew him or was interested in choosing him. He saw one companion after another named and taken from his side. He was left. The ignominy of being constantly passed over was like ‘the iron entering into his soul.’ He hoped, he ardently prayed, that he might not be left to the very last. But still the election went on, and still his name was not called. At length came the terrible moment when he remained alone. All eyes in the Hall were fixed on him. It fell to a Sixth Form boy named Browne—a boy who was not in any way conspicuous—to ‘spot’ the last fag.
‘I suppose I must have this fellow,’ he said contemptuously. ‘What’s your name—you in the “stick-ups”?’
There was a momentary profound silence in the Hall. The attention of all the boys had been called to the disgrace which Mr. Eversley’s ignorance of the rules of dress had brought upon his son. A boy in the fourth form whispered to his neighbour, who was also in the fourth form, that his nickname was sure to be ‘Stick-ups.’
‘Eversley, sir,’ he replied at last amidst a general outburst of laughter; for in his confusion he had addressed Browne as if he were a master. ‘Well,’ said Browne, ‘I see I’m reduced to you,’ then turning with a smile to his colleagues in the Sixth Form, he added, ‘Eversley’s my horse—rather a dark one.’
In this way Gerald Eversley became a fag. The ‘spotting’ of the fags being now concluded, and their social destiny decided for the term, the Sixth Form, according to custom, left the Hall.
The boys who were not in the Sixth Form stayed behind, according to custom, for a second ceremony in which (as may be supposed) the inherent dignity of the Sixth Form forbade them to participate. It was called the ‘trying of voices.’ Like the ‘fag-spotting’ it always took place in the Hall on the second evening of the term. It was customary that the boy highest in the school below the Sixth Form, who was known as the captain of Hall, should choose a song: it was played by some boy who possessed sufficient musical knowledge to accomplish a tune on the piano, then the new boys sang it, or some verses of it, in turn. On this occasion the captain of Hall was a boy named Tracy, not a boy who enjoyed a very admirable reputation among his schoolfellows. He had brought down a comic song called ‘Uncle Sam’ which had lately acquired a certain popularity in the London music halls. It described, in language not particularly coarse, but on the other hand not particularly refined, how the hero of the song, Uncle Sam, had maintained an imperturbable demeanour amidst a variety of trials, partly financial, partly social, and partly conjugal, which were related with a good deal of detail. Like most songs of similar nature it contained a chorus, sung at the end of every verse by the soloist and then taken up by all the boys. The chorus was in these words:
You may laugh, said Uncle Sam,
But I do not care a d—n;
I’ll be jolly, jolly, jolly as I am.
It is possible that the song is still remembered in some quarters.
The new boys were called upon to sing it, one after another. There were eight new boys in all. The first three of them sang it with more or less success, the second, indeed, less successfully than the other two; for he had no ear, and the sounds which issued from his lips bore at the best a dim and distant resemblance to the tune that was being played on the piano. But he persevered to the end, and was loudly cheered. Then the captain of Hall called ‘Venniker.’ Harry Venniker had a good voice; his appearance and manner were prepossessing, and he sat down amidst general applause. The same fourth form boy, who had whispered to his neighbour before, remarked now, though in a less audible tone, that he seemed ‘rather a good sort.’
All this time Gerald Eversley, holding the words of the song in his hand, was in agony of mind. It was not that he could not sing, as he was fond of music, and possessed some little skill upon the organ. But there was a word in the chorus which his scrupulous conscience felt to be wicked. It was not a word that he had known to be used, except once, on a very hot day, by a labourer at Kestercham. But he conceived it to be an offence against God. He had heard his father speak of its solemn and terrible meaning in preaching upon the text—‘He that believeth not shall be damned.’ It was one of the words that he had promised never to use. No doubt he magnified the sinfulness of using it, if sinfulness there were. You who read this story are wiser than he was; you use it, perhaps, and think nothing of it. But would it not be better for you, in the presence of the angels, if your conscience were as pure and sensitive as his?
Another boy was called upon to sing after Harry Venniker; then Gerald.
He hesitated a little, and did not begin when the pianist began.
‘Look sharp, I say,’ said Tracy; ‘we can’t wait here all night.’
In a low tone, rather tremulously, he sang a verse; then, as he approached the words of the chorus, his voice showed signs of faltering. At the second line he stopped; the pianist left him behind again. The boys all looked at him in surprise.
‘I tell you what it is, youngster,’ said Tracy, ‘every new chap has got to sing a verse; that’s the rule of the house; and if you don’t choose to sing, it will be the worse for you.’
Gerald looked round the Hall as the victim at an auto-da-fé may often have cast his eyes around the ring of spectators without discerning a movement of sympathy on any face; the boys did not even understand what his difficulty was.
‘Now, then,’ said Tracy; and the boy at the piano began the chorus once more.
Gerald repeated the words:—
‘You may laugh ... said Uncle Sam,
But ... I ... do not ... care;’
then he broke down, hid his face in his hands, and rushed from the Hall.
The boys sat gazing at each other. Nobody spoke.
‘What the devil is the matter with the young fool?’ said Tracy at last.
‘Don’t you see?’ suggested another fifth form boy, Coleridge by name, next in seniority to Tracy, and of higher character, ‘he didn’t like the little word—d, a, m, n. That’s the fence which he refused.’
Immediately there was an outburst of discordant voices expressing astonishment, doubt, indignation, anger, and some few compassion, the boys all talking at once, and eagerly discussing the procedure to be adopted. Some boys (among whom Tracy was conspicuous) urged that Gerald ought to be brought back at once perforce, and made to sing, being subjected to corporal chastisement if he refused; others that his behaviour, as being an unprecedented violation of the rules and customs of the house, should be referred to the Sixth Form; others, again, that he should be sent to Coventry for a month; others, that he should incur a double measure of fagging. But there were not a few boys—and some of these the most influential—who felt in their hearts, and after a time began to express the feeling, that Tracy had made a mistake alike of taste and of judgment in choosing a song which contained any word of a questionable nature, even though it was one that boys used habitually without much thinking of it; it was a shame (they said) to compel ‘a kid like that’ to use the word at all, and the incident, if it got abroad in the school, would reflect no great credit on the house. The one point, therefore, upon which the whole house agreed was that the incident must not be allowed to get abroad. For the rest, as generally happens when a multitude of counsellors deliberate upon a plan of action, it was resolved to take no action at all. But the ‘trying of voices’ was at an end for that night. The meeting broke up, and the boys stood in knots in the passages or outside the rooms, discussing what had taken place. It was universally felt that Gerald was ‘not up to snuff,’ and that the sooner he was initiated into that mystery, the better; but opinion was in favour of letting the initiation be effected by the gradual and subtle awakening process of school life, rather than by the searching test of the ‘trying of voices.’ This opinion was confirmed when it became known that the Sixth Form, who were the supreme arbiters of all moral or social questions in the house, had decided against inflicting any pains and penalties upon Gerald Eversley, and that the particular member of the Sixth Form who had chosen him, or had been reduced to taking him as a fag, had pronounced the treatment which he had experienced to be a shame.
When Harry Venniker returned to his room, he found Gerald Eversley weeping by the fireside.
‘Well, you young fool,’ he said, ‘you’ve made a pretty shindy. The whole house is talking about what’s to be done to you.’
Gerald was silent.
‘You don’t mean to say,’ continued Harry, ‘that you object to saying damn. Why, it’s what everybody says.’
‘But I promised I wouldn’t say it,’ replied Gerald amidst his tears.
‘Why not?’
‘My father says it’s a wicked word,’ was the answer.
It was an answer which Harry Venniker found some difficulty in meeting, for it was an article of his moral code that parental authority ought to be respected, however irrational it might be.
‘All I can say is,’ he continued after an interval, ‘that I don’t see how you are to get on if you are always thinking things wrong.’
‘But isn’t it wrong?’ said Gerald.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Harry; ‘I suppose it is, if you look at it in that way; but it’s what everybody does, and, upon my word, I don’t see the harm of it.... However, if you object to it,’ he added, when he had meditated upon the problem for a few moments, ‘I suppose you are right, and if fellows try to bully you, I’ll let them know what I think, only you can’t exactly wear a pinafore in a house like this.’
And that was the limit of the sympathy which Gerald experienced in his first protest against public opinion.
Still, it soon became known in the house that Harry Venniker, while regarding his room-fellow as ‘rather a muff, don’t you see?’ was not disposed to see him the victim of systematic persecution. He was reported to have ‘punched’ the red head of the boy Thornton, who had intruded with malicious purpose into the room, whistling the tune of the song which had proved fatal to poor Gerald’s peace of mind, and making two or three mimetic pauses in the first lines of the chorus. This tacit championship was of the highest value to Gerald Eversley. For boys possess a singular faculty (if they care to exercise it) of making other boys’ lives intolerable. They are masters of the art of annoyance and irritation. They understand how by speech, and still more by silence, to convey the killing sense of their displeasure. I will undertake to say that half a dozen small boys, without committing any such action as could bring them within reach of the law, will drive a schoolfellow to the verge of despair. But against this organised, though indeterminate, persecution, the voice of one boy, if clear and courageous, possesses great weight. Gerald Eversley owed more than he was aware of to the stalwart, if somewhat unsympathetic, defence of Harry Venniker. But for that, it is probable that his social error in coming to school with ‘stick-up’ collars, and his moral error (for so it was widely considered) in refusing to sing a song selected in due order by the captain of Hall, would have brought him into considerable trouble. As it was, however, the boys did nothing worse than leave him very much to himself; they would look at one another in a knowing way, and perhaps shrug their shoulders, when he passed, or one of them would nudge his arm at dinner to prevent his eating with absolute equanimity, or ask him the Latin for a saint, or inquire if his mother or his sisters knew that he was out; once or twice he found his boots filled with water in the morning, or a blot of ink upon his carefully written exercise; or his hat was hidden away, to make him late for chapel; or he received on the first of April a packet of ‘stick-up’ collars as a present.
Boys’ memories are generally short-lived. Nine days’ wonders do not last nine days in a school. Events follow each other with such rapidity and variety that neither successes nor defeats are long remembered. The nickname ‘Stick-ups’ adhered to Gerald Eversley for about five weeks, and then, as the original cause of it had disappeared after the first two or three days of the term, it dropped. The incident of the song was remembered a little longer; but its only permanent result was that the Sixth Form decided not to leave the choice of songs to the captain of Hall, but to prescribe a song of which a verse should be sung by all new boys, and after much consideration the ‘March of the Men of Harlech’ was adopted for this purpose as being at once simple, moral, and inspiriting.
There came to be a tacit understanding among the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house that Gerald Eversley was not altogether like others, and that it was necessary to treat him differently from them, that he was a fair subject for good-humoured chaff, but that it was a ‘chouse’ to bully him, and that as Venniker (who was admitted to be a downright good fellow) could put up with him in his room, the boys generally could put up with him in the house.
Harry Venniker wrote home to his father a long letter telling him that the ‘chap’ whom they had seen on the platform was in his house and in his room, that he was ‘awfully pious,’ and Harry doubted if he had ever been out of his nursery; that he had got himself into trouble by refusing to sing a song in which the word ‘damn’ occurred, and that Harry did not know what a boy was to do ‘with notions like that;’ but, added Harry at the end of his letter, ‘he is not such a bad fellow, though a terrible milksop, and if other boys are down upon him, I mean to stick up for him as well as I can.’ In addition, Harry said that he was ‘getting on all right,’ and life at St. Anselm’s was ‘good fun on the whole.’
Gerald Eversley, in writing to his father, made no allusion to the ‘trying of voices;’ he did not know whether he ought not to tell his father about it, but he could not make up his mind how to describe it, though he began it several times, but after fully describing the other incidents of his first days at St. Anselm’s, and especially his association with Venniker, he went on to say that he found school-life very different from his expectation, a great many things of which he had had no experience were said and done in it; he could not say he liked it at present, but he hoped he should come to like it better as time went on. Mr. Eversley read the letter more than once, then wrote Gerald, No. 1, on the envelope, and put it away in his desk by itself.