Читать книгу Stretton - Henry Kingsley - Страница 8
Chapter 6.
ОглавлениеOld Mordaunt, of Mordaunt Hall, used to say that his wife always had twins. When this statement was examined, you found that Mrs. Mordaunt had but two children--Johnny immediately after her marriage, and Jemmy twelve months afterwards, yet when the petrified spectator asked, in undisguised alarm, which was Johnny and which was Jemmy, the problem used to be solved by saying that Johnny was the fatter. But, then, neither of them was fat.
One--the elder--was broader, and less symmetrical than the younger one, James, more commonly called Jimmit. During the holidays, part of which young Edward Evans spent with his Aunt Eleanor, these two youths were frequent guests at her house. She pronounced them to be entirely similar, and utterly devoid of character. In which opinion she was not wholly right.
The Evanses and the Mordaunts both went to Gloucester together, and, as neighbours, saw a great deal of one another. Both families also had a little girl, younger than either of the brothers, with whom, at present, we have nothing to do--they were in the school-room still; and I have been turned out of the school-room by the governess at lesson-time too often to try and enter it again. By the by, are governesses so dreadfully bullied and ill-treated as it is the custom to represent? For my part, ever since I was six years' old until now, I have been almost as afraid of them as I am of a schoolmaster, and have been used to see them have pretty much their own way; but there are families, and families, no doubt.
I must quit speculation to give a letter, which was written at the time when these four lads were at ages ranging from seventeen to nineteen, and were all going up to matriculate at St. Paul's College--at either university you like. It came from the headmaster at Gloucester Grammer School, himself a man from Trinity College, Cambridge, and was addressed to the senior tutor at St. Paul's-his old friend and contemporary.
"Dear George,--You have asked me more than once to send you a boy or two, and I have always hesitated because I have always disliked your college, its ways, and its works. Now, however, that P-- E-- and O-- have married off altogether on college livings, and have undertaken cures of souls (their creed seeming to be that gentlemen's sons have no souls, or, like the French marquis, will be saved by rent-roll); now that you are first in command practically, I send you, my dear George, not one boy, but a batch of four. And, take them all in all, they are the finest batch of boys I have ever turned out.
"Let us speak plainly to one another, for we have never fairly done so. The reason of our clinging so strenuously to university work was the disappointment about Miss Evans. Well, we have never spoken of it before. I only ask you to stick to it a little longer, if it is only to see this batch of boys through.
"I don't know whether I am justified in sending them to you. You know, my dear George, that your college has been under the management of your old master and the three men who have retired to the cure of agricultural labourers souls very fast, very disreputable, and most extravagantly expensive. Nothing seems to have done well but the boat, which, having less than a mile to row, has, by developing a blind, furious ferocity, kept the head of the river. And in the schools you have only had a few first-class men, all of your training, with second, third, and fourth blanks.
"You say that you will mend all, and raise your tone. Of course you will. If I don't die, like Arnold, over this teaching, I will send you any number of boys in two years, when your influence has begun to work, and when the influence of the three pastors so lately sent out from high table and common room to catch agricultural sheep by the leg with their crook (Heaven save the mark!) has died out. But at present I am dubious. However, I have done it. Mind you the issue, as you will have to appear before God.
"Now, I must tell you about these fellows, and must go through them. In the aggregate, they are an extremely queer lot. They are extremely rude and boisterous, as my boys generally are, though perfect gentlemen if you put them on their mettle. They are absolutely innocent of the ways of the world, and will, no doubt, get thoroughly laughed out of all that by your young dandies, whom I, as a Cambridge man, most entirely detest. To proceed about the aggregate of them, they are all very strong and very rich. The total of their present income is considerably more than you and I shall have the spending of when we have worked ourselves to the gates of death, and they have taken to boat-racing--a thing I hate and detest from the bottom of my soul, as being one of the most stupid and most brutalizing of all our sports. I know, however, that you do not think so. If there was any chance of their losing all their property together, we might make something of them. As it is, you must back up my efforts to make something of them. Nothing stands in their way but their wealth.
"Now, I will begin with them individually, and I begin with Roland Evans. Do you retain your old Platonic love for perfect physical beauty, perfect innocence, and high intelligence, and ambition? If so, you had better not see too much of my Aristides, Antinous Evans. The lad wonders why I laugh when I look at him. I laugh with sheer honest pleasure at his beauty. He is like the others, a boy of many prayers, but of few fears. If he could get his influence felt in your deboshed old college, he would do as much as you, old friend. But he is so gentle, and so young, that I fear he will not do much for you at once.
"I pass to the elder Mordaunt. The elder Mordaunt is a wonderfully strong, bull-headed lad, whose course at school has been perfectly blameless, fulfilling every possible duty, but declining to show any specialité except wonderful Latin prose. There is something under the thick hide of him somewhere, for I have seen it looking at me from behind that dark-brown eye of his a hundred times. Can you fetch it out? I have not been able. I have often been inclined to throw the book at the head of this young man, in return for his quiet contemplative stare; but I have never done so. I flogged him once, because Sir Jasper Meredith (a cripple) let off a musical box in chapel, and I thought it was the elder Mordaunt. It was arranged between the Mordaunts and Meredith that the elder Mordaunt was to take the thrashing, because little Sir Jasper was not fit to take it. Sir Jasper Meredith came crying to me afterwards, and told the whole business. I never had occasion to flog the elder Mordaunt again. Be careful of this fellow, George. I don't understand him. You may.
"I come now to the younger Mordaunt. And now I find that I have to tell a little story. Young Mordaunt was an unimpressionable lad, quite unnoticed by me, and nearly so by the lower masters, under whose hands he was passing, who only made their reports on him to me for extreme violence and fury. I have often had to flog this boy--you say what a nice employment for an educated gentleman--cela va sans dire; and on one occasion I held him ready for expulsion. It was the most terrible case of bullying which had ever happened: four fifth-form boys, just ready for the sixth, had set on a sixth-form boy, just about to leave us for the army, and beaten him with single-sticks to that extent that he had to be taken to the hospital, as it appeared, with his own consent, for he made no complaint. The younger Mordaunt was one of the beaters, one of the attacking party, and I was going to expel them all, until the elder Mordaunt, backed by my brother, the master of the lower third, explained the circumstances, upon which I did a somewhat different thing. I held my tongue, and gave the beaten boy a chance for a new life.
"The elder Mordaunt and the elder Evans, Roland, lately grandfathers of the school, have always respected and honoured one another. But between the young Mordaunt and the elder Evans there was for a long time a great dislike. I have it from a former monitor, now Balliol scholar, that they actually fought on three occasions. Of course they were no match; the older Evans easily beat the younger Mordaunt, while the elder Mordaunt, although an affectionate brother, positively declined to give his younger brother even the use of his knee during these encounters.
"The reason of the reconciliation between these two was odd. The cause of these encounters was the persistent bullying of the younger Evans, who was the fag of the younger Mordaunt. I have always forbidden bathing before the tenth of May, and have seldom been disobeyed. On one occasion, however, the younger Mordaunt disobeyed me, and before the winter's water was run off, determined to bathe in the weir, and having told his intention to a few, started, taking his fag, little Eddie Evans, to mind his clothes.
"It came to the ears of Roland Evans and old Mordaunt, who followed quickly with some other six-form boys, and were happily in time. You, as an Oxford man, know what lashers are: you knew the Gaisford and Phillimore monument, set up to warn boys, if they could be warned, of the deadly suck under the apron.
"Well, the younger Mordaunt stripped and headed into the furious boil. He was in difficulties directly. Instead of being carried down into the shallow below, he was taken under, and disappeared. He rose again, and with infinite courage and coolness, swam into the slack water, and tried to hold on by the Camp's heading. But it was slippery, and he was carried again into the race, and turned over and ever.
"When old Evans and old Mordaunt came, angrily, on the scene, all they saw was young Evans tearing the last of his clothes off. He knew his brother's voice, and he cried out, 'Shut down the paddles; he has come up again.' And then, forgetting cruelties which he had suffered, and insults which he had wept over in secret, he cast his innocent little body into the foaming dangerous lasher, and had his bitter enemy round the waist in one moment, trying to keep his head above the drowning rush of the water. Of course, Roland was in after them in a few seconds.
"Cool old Mordaunt, who should be a general, I think, had, while rapidly undressing, let down the paddles. The pool was still now, too terribly still, they tell me. The two elder lads, swimming high and looking for their brothers, saw neither, until the handsome little head of Eddy Evans rose from the water, and said, 'I had him here, this instant, and he will be carried back by the wash.' Roland Evans, a splendid shoulder-swimmer, was with his brother in a moment, and saw young Mordaunt drowning on the gravel beneath him, spreading out his fine limbs, like a Christopher's cross, with each of his ten fingers spread out, taking leave of the world. Never seen it? Better not; it is ugly; I have seen it several times, and don't like it. Well, the two Evanses had him out on the shallow before his brother, a slow breast-swimmer, could come up, and saved him. That is all my story.
"But it has changed this younger Mordaunt's life in some way. The great temptation of our English boys is brutality and violence, and this bathing accident has tamed him. The boy prayed more, as I gained from his brother, and desired that thanks should be given in chapel for his preservation, coupled (fancy that! to me) with the condition that the names of the two Evanses should be mentioned with his. I refused to do so: Heaven knows why! Whereupon the boy turned on me, and, face to face, refused to have any thanks given at all. He said he would give his own thanks.
"He is entirely tamed, if you can keep him en rapport with these two Evanses. He will follow them anywhere, and do just as they tell him, whether that be right or wrong. I never liked him, and I still think him boyish in many ways, though innocent almost to childishness in the way you wot of. He has brains, more brains than his brother. But he is a disagreeable boy. He has a nasty way of sitting straight up and frowning, and there is a petulant preciseness about him which I cannot bear. Try being civil and kind to him--I have never been. You have more power in that way as a Don than I have as a schoolmaster.
"Now I come to my last boy, young Evans. I won't say anything at all about this boy: I leave him to you. If you can stand his pretty ways, I can't.
"These boys will be a terrible plague to you. They make so much noise: don't stop them in that if you can help it. My best boys are noisy and outspoken. Coming from me, you need not doubt their scholarship: keep it up. They are, to conclude, an innocent lot of lads, dreadfully rich, and have taken up, I fear, with this most abominable boat-racing, which, however, is not so bad as steeple-chasing.
"Now good-bye. I have sent you a team fit for Balliol in scholarship, for Christchurch in breeding, and, I very much fear, for Brazenose in boating. Why Providence should have placed so many of our public schools near great rivers, where the stock gets steadily brutalised by that insane amusement, I cannot conceive. Old religious foundations, you say, always near rivers, then highways, and in the neighbourhood of fish for fast days. Fiddle-de-dee! It all arises from the perversation (misrepresentation) of the edicts of the first original council, in the year 1, when it was agreed that everything was to be where it was wanted. The only dissentient, you well remember, was the devil, who moved, as an amendment, that there should be full liberty of conscience, that every one should say the first thing which came into his head, and everybody was to do as he pleased. The great first council rejected, if you remember, this amendment with scorn; but we are acting on it now. Let us take the benefit of the new opinions. Come over and talk Swivellerism to me, and I will back myself to talk as much balderdash as you. But don't talk any of it to my boys. I insult you, my dear George, by the supposition.
"P.S.--A tall, handsome-looking young booby, from Eton, comes with them from Shropshire. His father, calling here with the fathers of the other boys, asked me to say a good word to you on his behalf. I would if I could, but I don't know anything at all about him, except that he is to be married to Miss Evans, by a family arrangement, before he is capable of knowing his own mind. He has been brought up with the Evanses and the Mordaunts, and therefore cannot be very bad. But you know my opinion of Eton, and indeed of all public schools, except my own."