Читать книгу Stretton - Henry Kingsley - Страница 9

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Furnished with this important epistle, the Dean of St. Paul's (college) felt a natural curiosity to see the young men who had attracted so much of the attention of undoubtedly the very best of the day, since the dies infaustus when Arnold's old pupil came down to breakfast with fresh questions, and heard that the master had called for his master, and that he had arisen and followed him speedily.

The Dean was a dry man, and a man of humour. St. Paul's was, in those times, a queer, wild place; it was partly "manned" by county gentlemen's and county parsons' sons, from the counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Shropshire, and partly from two grammar schools in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The two sets of lads never spoke to one another. The former set were always perfect gentlemen in their manners, though not always in their morals: the latter were mainly gentlemen in their morals, but never in their manners. It was vinegar upon nitre with them, and the dry, shrewd, caustic Dean looked with great anticipation of amusement for the curious "team" which the headmaster of Gloucester had sent him up.

He had undertaken the Latin prose lecture of that somewhat scholarless college, and had repeatedly said that it would bring him to an untimely grave, but after a fellow-commoner translating "The Art of Mingling in Society" in English of Addison, into Latin of his own, the Dean had dropped the Latin prose lecture, and had taken to the Greek. "You are safer in Greek," he said. "I am not good in Greek, and so I may live the longer. But I couldn't stand the Latin any more."

So it was in the Greek prose lecture that the Dean expected his young friends, with great curiosity. They were the first who came, very early, and they came sidling and whispering into the room one after another, and sat down in a row, each one saying as he went by, "Good morning, sir," while the Dean stood and looked at them. Can one not see him now, with his broad shoulders, and his keen eyes looking out from under his wig?

They sat down in the chair opposite to him, and he had a good look at them. The first who came in was Roland Evans, evidently leader among them, a splendid upstanding young fellow, with short curling hair, who carried his head like a stag. "A fine face and a good head," thought the Dean. "I wonder what is inside it?" Next to him came his brother--a small, slight, bright-looking lad, rather too pretty to please the Dean's taste, but pleasant to see, with a wistful look in his clear brown eyes, which the Dean did not disapprove of. Next came the elder of the two Mordaunts, gigantic, somewhat stolid in appearance, looking as the Dean thought with Falstaff, "land and beeves." Then came the younger Mordaunt, gigantic also, and rather cross-looking, but with a good square head; as he passed on, he gave one look at the Dean, and let him know unmistakably that he considered him in the light of his natural enemy. Last of all came the "booby" who was to marry Miss Evans, and when the Dean looked on him, he thought at once: "The rest are a puzzling lot, but there is no doubt about you; you carry your turnpike-ticket in your hat; you are a good fellow, and so I think is that Roland Evans."

But he was puzzlingly amused by them on one account: four out of the five seemed strangely cast in the same mould. Here were two pairs of brothers, and a fifth young man, and they were all cast in the same mould, with the exception of the younger Evans, who seemed poetical. Had this batch of lads come under his notice with any other recommendation than that of the shrewd Doctor, he would have set them down for four young louts of the landholding persuasion from the western counties, and have thought no more about them; but his friend had sent them to him as four of his picked boys, and Balliol would have opened her gates to them; yet there they sat in a row before him, silent and apparently stupid, occasionally sneaking their eyes up at his, as though to see what he was like, but dropping them again directly. "Is there character here?" the Dean asked himself. "K. should know; he said they were boisterous and troublesome. They are quiet enough now."

The odd contrast between the apparently stupid insouciance of the Englishman at one time, and his violent fury at another, seemed to be hardly known to the Dean as yet: he got an illustration of it.

The other men, to the number of some thirty, dropped in, and the lecture proceeded. Anything more saint-like than the behaviour of the Shropshire five was never seen. The lecture consisted in turning "Spectator" into Greek prose, and after half an hour, every one being ready, the Dean called on Roland Evans, who stood up, and on being told that he might sit down, was very much confused. He read out his few sentences of Greek prose, and the Dean leant back in his chair.

"That is really splendid, Mr. Evans. I could not write such Greek myself. Read it again, please, and listen to it, you others." Roland did so.

"Do you all write Greek like this at Gloucester? This is refreshing. Good Heavens! when I think of the trash my ears are dinned with. Here, Mr. Mordaunt the elder, read your piece next: let me see if it runs in families, or is common to the school."

Old Mordaunt--sitting, as we used to say at school, one place below young Evans--did so, and his piece was very good.

"Now, young Mr. Evans, read yours."

It appeared that these youths were under the impression that they could take places. They had come in and sat down in their old Gloucester class form. Young Eddy Evans had in his piece a passage of Addison's or Steele's in which occur the words, "pray do not deceive yourself on this matter." Young Evans gave it "meplanasthe." Whereupon both the Mordaunts rose to their feet, and cried with one voice, "I challenge."

Before the astonished Dean could say one word, the two brothers were at it tooth and nail.

"I challenged first," said old Mordaunt.

"You did nothing of the kind," said the younger. "You read the fourth chapter of Acts, and see what happened to Ananias and Sapphira."

"That's a pretty thing to say to your own brother," said old Mordaunt.

"Not a worse thing than trying to cut your own brother out of a place. Why do you challenge?" said the younger brother.

"Because it's Greek Testament, and wrong in person," said the elder, scornfully.

"Testament Greek is good enough--better than you could write. I challenge on other grounds. Ask him, sir, what letter he puts before the sigma."

The younger Evans, confused and directed by his evil genius, said hurriedly, "Epsilon." The younger Mordaunt at once sank back in his chair with the air of a man who had done a happy thing, and, addressing the Dean, said--

"This, sir, is a specimen of the scholarship of the Doctor's house-boys. If a commons-house boy had made such a mess, he would have been cobbed by the school."

At which dreadful words wrath and fury were depicted on the faces of the two Evanses, and of Maynard, who was engaged to their sister. Young Evans rose, perfectly calm, and, addressing the Dean as "Dominus," said that as the rules of English society prevented one boy from personally asking any explanation from any other boy in class, and indeed, in any place but the playground, whether he, the Dominus, would be so good as to demand, in his character as Dominus, of Mordaunt minor, when he was caned last, and what it was for. Whereupon Maynard, who had taken no part as yet, cried out, "Go it, young Evans!"

"It was your brother who pressed the spring and set it going," said old Mordaunt.

"It was nothing of the kind; and no one knows it better than yourself," said Roland Evans. "I never touched it; what did he want with it at chapel?"

"I suppose he could take his musical snuff-box into chapel," said old Mordaunt, now, after the preliminary skirmish, in close alliance with his brother. "I suppose he had as good a right to bring his musical box in as you had to bring in your Buttmann's Lexilogus."

"Well, you need not turn up old things like that," said Roland Evans.

"Then you leave my brother alone, and I'll leave you alone. As for you, young Evans, you ought to have the Lexilogus banged about your stupid young head, and you would have had three months ago."

The Dean had by this time partly recovered from the stupor into which he had been plunged by this unexpected and violent storm. He found breath enough to say, "Gentlemen, I must really request, and of necessity insist, that this unseemly objurgation ceases at once." After a few growls and sniffs the lecture proceeded. The Gloucester boys' Greek was all nearly first-class, and then the Dean waded away into a slough of miserable stuff, which was furnished to him three times a week by the other men of his college.

A deaf fellow-commoner was blundering along through his piece, and the Dean thought that everything was going right, when the younger Mordaunt, who had been frowning and bristling for some time, finding his recollected wrongs too great to be kept in any longer, suddenly broke into articulate speech. To the unutterable terror and confusion of the whole lecture, he said, in a loud voice:

"Those two Evanses double-banked young Perkins in the play-ground one Saturday afternoon, when the fellows were bathing, and took his money from him. And they took nineteen-pence-halfpenny, and all he ever got back was a shilling and a sixpence, and the shilling was bad."

"It was the same shilling we took from him," cried Roland, "and your fellows have double-banked ours a hundred times."

"What became of the three halfpence then?" said old Mordaunt.

"They spent it in Banbury tarts," said young Mordaunt.

"There were no coppers at all," said young Evans. "And you can't get one Banbury tart under twopence. Now then, what do you think of that?"

The Dean again recovered himself.

"In the whole course of my experience I never saw anything like this," he said. "I insist on perfect silence. You five men will remain after lecture. I insist on silence. Mr. Jones, go on."

"Now we shall all get lines, and liberty stopped," said young Mordaunt, aloud, "and it was that young Evans began it."

"It was not," said young Evans, emphatically.

"Will you hold your tongue, sir," said the Dean, in a voice which they knew they must listen to. And so the lecture went on and was finished. When it was done, the five remained, and young Mordaunt whispered to old Evans, "He won't flog the lot."

The Dean began on them: "Gentlemen, your Greek is excellent, but your conduct has not been good. My friend warned me that you were boisterous. I have no great objection to juvenile spirits--in fact, I like them; but I must most emphatically insist that you will not quarrel in my lecture. You no longer take rank as schoolboys: we give young men of your age brevet rank as men. I must request that this does not happen again."

Old Mordaunt shoved young Mordaunt, who shoved young Evans, who shoved Maynard, who shoved Roland Evans, by which he understood that he was to be spokesman. His speech was so odd, so very simple, so very provincial, so full of the argot of a provincial school, that the Dean scarcely understood it. He said:

"Sir, we are very sorry to have offended you; for myself, I have always been dead against barneying in class, for the mere purpose of spinning out the pensum. I have also tried most consistently to make friends between doctor's boys and common-house boys, principally, I will allow, for the sake of the boats. But these jealousies do exist, sir, even among friends, as we are: I am sure all true friends. But these jealousies have existed for a long time, and are not likely to cease. I will take it on myself to say, sir, that they shall be stopped in class; and not carried into play-ground, and that we would rather, having begun so unluckily, be punished by task instead of by stoppage of liberty."

The Dean impatiently paced the room, and scratched his wig. "What the deuce," he said to himself, "am I to do with such boys as these? An Eton or Harrow boy would know more of things at fourteen. Why does K. keep his boys back like this? they are as innocent as children. I never saw such a thing in my life; they fancy they are to be punished. Hang it all, let me see how green they are. Mr. Evans, how old are you?"

"Nineteen, sir."

"You have behaved very badly. Suppose I was to cane one of you."

"We understood, sir," said Roland, "that we could not be caned after we came here. If, however, you decide on that course, the only one you could cane would be my brother. No boy is ever caned over eighteen, and my brother is only seventeen."

"And it would be no use caning him!" exclaimed the irrepressible young Mordaunt; "he has been caned a dozen times for laughing in chapel. And last half I tried him to see whether he had got over it. I showed him a halfpenny in Litany, and he went off, and was taken out, and caned."

"I would gladly, sir," said Roland, "take my brother's punishment on myself; but being over eighteen, I cannot, and should, in fact, resist; it would be almost cowardly, sir, to put the fault of all of us on my brother."

"Do go to Bath, and keep me from Bedlam!" exclaimed the irritated Dean.

And they fled off, and apparently had a free fight on the stairs; for as the Dean put it, sixteen out of the five seemed to tumble down instead of walking down.

"This is K. all over," he said to himself, when they were gone; "this is his system; sending his boys up here babies instead of men. I wish he had sent them to Balliol,--I wish he had sent them to Jericho. I have no stand-point with them. I can't get at them. They are a noble lot; but they are five years too young. And this hotbed of sin! Come in!"