Читать книгу The Holy Terror - H.G. Wells - Страница 8

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Under the influence of old Doctor Carstall, Rudie went to Hooplady House instead of having his subconsciousness explored, cleaned-up and made over in a suitable establishment on soundly psychoanalytical lines. Probably the results would have been very similar. Hooplady House, as an educational institution, never gave a thought to character and the finer shades of conduct—except on Speech Days. Then the headmaster said the boys were a household of young English gentlemen, and the parents and prefects heard him with quiet self-approval.

By way of teaching, the school devoted itself to satisfying the requirements of various respectable examining bodies, and unless your behaviour militated against the attainment of that objective, the school, as an organisation, did not concern itself about what was happening to you inside or outside or between the hours devoted to that purpose. Beyond the lines laid down by these examining bodies it did not adventure. Why should it? If they did not know what arrangement of obligatory and optional subjects constituted a proper education, who did? Most of the boys were day-boys, and by ordinary standards the tone was good. Filth was furtive, and such vice as occurred was inquisitive, elementary, infrequent and obscure. The head boy was a son of Doctor Carstall's, a taciturn, fair, good-looking boy who seemed to do everything he did well and with a minimum of effort. He won a sort of qualified hero-worship from Rud, quite at the beginning of their acquaintance.

Rud was engaged in an all-in scrap with a boy who had called him "The Stink." He had been jabbing at his adversary with a penholder with a broken nib. But the fellow had got him by the wrist now, only his left fist was free and he was getting the worst of the punching.

Carstall appeared, tall and calm, standing over them. "Don't fight with things like that, Whitlow. We don't do it here."

"He's bigger than me."

"Kick his shins if you must, junior's privilege, but don't use a filthy thing like that. Might poison his blood. Or jab his eye. What's the trouble?"

Explanation.

"Well, I say he's not to be called that. Nicknames ought to be tolerable. And Russell, you; tease someone your own size. Get out of it, both of you."

There was a splendour, Rud thought, about such authority. "Get out of it, both of you," he whispered to himself presently and wondered how long it would be before he was head of the school. He'd make 'em get out of it all right. But it seemed hard to him that he wasn't to use pen-nibs or scissors in warfare. Very hard. He was the sort of scrapper who would have invented knuckle-dusters, if they hadn't already been invented.

On the whole he was less aggressive during his junior days at school than at home. He was not much of a success at games and he was held to all sorts of rules and customs he had been accustomed to disregard at home with his brothers. He learnt quite early the inadvisability of mowing down the wicket with his little bat when he got out at cricket, or of quitting the game ostentatiously and vindictively directly after he had had his innings, and he grasped the necessity of having the football somewhere near at least, when he desired to hack another player. He ceased to bawl and threaten loudly when annoyed, but on the other hand he acquired a complete set of the recognised English bad words, and he muttered them ferociously whenever exasperated. Brother Sam he saw little of in the school; he was in the upper division; and brother Alf just drifted about him quietly, pursuing ends of his own. There was a lot of smouldering goodness in Alf and a touch of religion. "You didn't ought to say words like that, Rud," he protested.

Rud replied with practically the complete vocabulary. Alf put his hands to his ears and said: "You might be struck dead for that, Rud."

"He'd have to strike pretty near the whole school then," said Rud, who had a keen sense of justice when he himself was concerned.

He speedily displayed an active, insensitive intelligence beyond his years. His memory was exceptionally good, his reception uncritical. He bolted the feast of knowledge and threw it up again with ease, completely undigested. He was indeed a born examinee, and his progress up the school was exceptionally rapid. He competed for marks vehemently. He was best at English, Geography, History, French and Latin. He found mathematics tricky and problems irritating. He could not ponder. Formulae he could tackle but not problems. He got hot and cross in the face of difficulty. He was all for cutting the Gordian Knot instead of fiddling about with it, and he saw nothing idiotic in the classical story of Columbus and the egg. Downright action was in his nature.

He read voraciously. His imagination was fired particularly by the history of wars, conquests and campaigns. Then forthwith he became Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon or Genghis Khan, whichever Rud it happened to be. He conquered America with all Washington Irving's Conquistadors, and subjugated Ireland with the sword of Cromwell. He was Clive; he was Gustavus Adolphus. Fiction, generally speaking, he did not like, there were too many of those incalculable girls in it. He had no use for Fenimore Cooper and the noble Indian, and books about big-game hunting merely strengthened his innate distrust and dislike of animals. If ever he had to hunt tigers, he decided, he would do it with explosive bullets from a machan, a good high, strong machan. When he saw the elephants and gorillas in the zoological gardens he thrilled with hostility, and dreamt afterwards about fighting them with machine-guns and catching them in the most horribly spiky pitfalls. And when in his dream they just came closer and closer to him, bleeding, half-blinded, but persistently undying and intent upon him, he screamed and woke up in a frenzy of fear and hate.

Savages, barbarians, "natives," he "mowed down," he had no other use for them. Omdurman was his ideal battle.

Since he was a day-boy and not very fond of games, and since he could do his school work very quickly, he was free to take long, solitary walks in which he could let his imagination run riot in anticipatory reverie. To the passing observer he seemed to be a small, rather slovenly boy, with a large, pale, egg-shaped face, big end up, and usually a sniff, but in imagination he rode a magnificent charger, or occupied a powerful car, and his staff and orderlies and messengers buzzed about him, and his embattled hosts stormed the farmhouses and villages of the landscape and swept over the hills, while his pitiless guns searched their recesses. The advance was always victorious, and with the home-coming came the triumph. Usually Hooplady House was involved in that. The prisoners stood before him. That drawing-master, a proven traitor, was shot out of hand. Several of the upper boys shared his fate. The rest of the staff were shot or reproached and insulted according to the mood of the day. Sometimes his father and mother appeared on the scene and were put under protective detention. Cousin Rachel, the pincher, now in a greatly chastened mood, submitted to her fate. Sam and Alf were rarely given rôles.

But one figure was very frequent in these dreams. He was sometimes the second in command, sometimes the opposite general surrendering with all the honours of war, sometimes an ambiguous political associate in the revolution, or the counter-revolution, or the war of liberation, or the great conquest, whichever it happened to be. His admiration for the generalissimo was extreme, his loyalty amounted to devotion. This was Carstall. "My trusty Carstall." Rudie never seemed able to keep Carstall out of the phantasy. He never wanted to do so.

He whistled to himself as he took his imagination on these excursions. He never learnt to whistle normally. It was a sort of acid piping through his teeth and it lacked any consistent tune.

And always he got home by twilight. For in the dark the kings and captains departed, the fighting and the conquests died away, and the small boy was left exposed to those bears and tigers and gorillas, which escape so frequently from menageries even in the most settled districts, and to criminals and homicidal maniacs and hedge-bogies and all the shapeless terrors of the night.

As his mind grew and his reading expanded his reveries became more realist and coherent, and darkness less menacing. He began to study maps, particularly maps in which each country and its foreign possessions were done in the same colour; he began to collect pictures and comparative diagrams of armies and navies and air forces. He was particularly keen on air warfare. Dropping high explosive bombs together with printed warnings and proclamations, appealed to him as just the perfect way of making war. He read the newspapers with an avidity uncommon at his tender age. He knew the salutes and symbols of all the dictators in the world and the inner significance of every coloured shirt. And as he grew up towards them, these heroes, these masters of men who marched like lurid torches through the blue haze and reek of contemporary history, seemed continually to come down nearer the level of his understanding and sympathy.

So it was our Holy Terror nourished his imagination and anticipated his career.

His extensive reading fed a natural disposition to accumulate vocabulary. The staff realised that he could write the best examination paper in the school, and told him so. He used long words. Some of the assistants, and particularly the games master, were disposed to discourage this, but the English master applauded. "Nevertheless, take warning from our Hindu brethren," said the English master, and lent him a facetious book about Babu English. "If the new word sticks out among familiar usage like an unset gem—excise it, delete it. A new word is like a wild animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it in before you can use it freely."

Rud took that to heart. He learnt to write a good, nervous prose. He developed a certain gift for effective phrases.