Fathers of Men

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Hornung Ernest William. Fathers of Men

CHAPTER I. BEHIND THE SCENES

CHAPTER II. CHANGE AND CHANCE

CHAPTER III. VERY RAW MATERIAL

CHAPTER IV. SETTLING IN

CHAPTER V. NICKNAMES

CHAPTER VI. BOY TO BOY

CHAPTER VII. REASSURANCE

CHAPTER VIII. LIKES AND DISLIKES

CHAPTER IX. CORAM POPULO

CHAPTER X. ELEGIACS

CHAPTER XI. A MERRY CHRISTMAS

CHAPTER XII. THE NEW YEAR

CHAPTER XIII. THE HAUNTED HOUSE

CHAPTER XIV “SUMMER-TERM”

CHAPTER XV. SPRAWSON’S MASTERPIECE

CHAPTER XVI. SIMILIA SIMILIBUS

CHAPTER XVII. THE FUN OF THE FAIR

CHAPTER XVIII. DARK HORSES

CHAPTER XIX. FAME AND FORTUNE

CHAPTER XX. THE EVE OF OFFICE

CHAPTER XXI. OUT OF FORM

CHAPTER XXII. THE OLD BOYS’ MATCH

CHAPTER XXIII. INTERLUDE IN A STUDY

CHAPTER XXIV. THE SECOND MORNING’S PLAY

CHAPTER XXV. INTERLUDE IN THE WOOD

CHAPTER XXVI. CLOSE OF PLAY

CHAPTER XXVII. THE EXTREME PENALTY

CHAPTER XXVIII “LIKE LUCIFER”

CHAPTER XXIX. CHIPS AND JAN

CHAPTER XXX. HIS LAST FLING

CHAPTER XXXI. VALE

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Rutter had been put in the small dormitory at the very top of the house. Instead of two long rows of cubicles as in the other dormitories, in one of which he had left Carpenter on the way upstairs, here under the roof was a square chamber with a dormer window in the sloping side and a cubicle in each of its four corners. Cubicle was not the school word for them, according to the matron who came up with the boys, but “partition,” or “tish” for short. They were about five feet high, contained a bed and a chair apiece, and were merely curtained at the foot. But the dormitory door opened into the one allotted to Rutter; it was large enough to hold a double wash-stand for himself and his next-door neighbour; and perhaps he was not the first occupant whom it had put in mind of a loose-box among stalls.

He noted everything with an eye singularly sardonic for fourteen, and as singularly alive to detail. The common dressing-table was in the dormer window. The boy had a grim look at himself in the glass. It was not a particularly pleasant face, with its sombre expression and stubborn mouth, but it looked brown and hard, and acute enough in its dogged way. It almost smiled at itself for the fraction of a second, but whether in resignation or defiance, or with a pinch of involuntary pride in his new state of life, it would have been difficult even for the boy to say. Certainly it was with a thrill that he read his own name over his partition, and then the other boys’ names over theirs. Bingley was the fellow next him. Joyce and Crabtree were the other two. What would they be like? What sort of faces would they bring back to the glass in the dormer window?

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So the night passed, his first at a public school. The only sounds were those that marked its passage: the muffled ticking of his one treasure, the little watch under his pillow, and the harsh chimes of an outside clock which happened to have struck ten as he opened the Midsummer List. It had since struck eleven; he even heard it strike twelve. But life was more exciting, when he fell asleep soon after midnight, than Jan Rutter had dreamt of finding it when he went to bed.

Jan was not unduly taken aback; he was prepared for anything with regard to Devereux, including the next question long before it came.

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