Читать книгу Years of Plenty - Ivor John Carnegie Brown - Страница 7

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In the morning Martin was stiff and sore and began his toilet by examining himself in a looking-glass: when he discovered the havoc that had been wrought he felt very proud of himself and knew that this appearance in the changing-room before football on Monday need cause him no distress: those who wanted to see the damage would have something to look at. The discomfort which he experienced during the day was quite outweighed by his satisfaction at his achievement and fortitude: that he was the first of the new boys to be swiped rendered him in their eyes a distinctly important person. Even Caruth, who always patronised Martin, began to climb down.

The Berneys had midday dinner with the house, and Martin succeeded in catching Mrs Berney as she left the dining-hall.

"I'm very sorry I couldn't come last night," he said, blushing.

"So am I. You must come next Saturday. What kept you?"

"Oh—er—I had to see one of the prefects," he answered with hesitation.

Mrs Berney, knowing that 'after prayers' was the hour of justice, could guess from the boy's manner what had occurred.

"That was a pity," she said kindly. And Martin knew that she knew. He felt prouder and more heroic than ever. Then she added: "Come in after prayers to-morrow night. There won't be anyone there."

"Oh, thank you very much," he said in ecstasy. He had become in a moment the slave and worshipper of Mrs Berney. Afterwards Caruth asked him the subject of his conversation with Mrs B., and he answered: "Oh, nothing." On Monday night he went to the drawing-room and read the odes with which the circle had dealt on Saturday. Mrs Berney gave him cocoa and cake and was entirely charming. As he left her he even thanked heaven for old Spots.

Leopard, on the other hand, was extremely angry with himself. He realised on the following day that he had behaved like a brute: under normal circumstances he would have ragged Martin and told him not to do it again. At the most a mild four would have been considered ample. But eight! It was undeniably excessive. If it had only been someone else it wouldn't have mattered so much (for abstract justice made no great appeal to Spots), but there was that kid slinking about his study and cleaning everything that he could lay hold of with maddening assiduity. Not for a moment could he forget his iniquity. One thing, however, was certain. It would be quite inconsistent with the dignity of a blood to say anything about what had occurred. So Martin noticed several changes in Spots' demeanour. He was more silent and did not rag him as before: nor did he follow his custom of bringing the Greek prose to Martin on Tuesdays and Fridays. Nobly he toiled at it alone and was roundly abused in form on the following days. But the memory of youth is short and soon they drifted back into the old friendly relations. Martin, however, took good care not to be guilty of further slips, for though he was glad now that he had been swiped, he did not in the least wish it to happen again.

The term ran smoothly on. Caruth was adopted, to his infinite joy, by Cullen and Neave and the youthful nuts, while Martin drifted into more soulful society. He was even taken up in a kindly way by the poet of Borrowdale, who lent him an anthology and used to hold forth to him about men and letters. Martin was very much impressed and could not decide what to think when Spots said the poet was a bilger. To Martin the voice of Spots was still the voice of a god. Later on he heard the poet call Spots 'a piffling Philistine,' but he did not know what it meant and was ashamed to ask. Life began to expand in many directions and new doors pressed themselves on his attention with haunting urgency. On the whole Martin was enjoying his first term.

And so he settled down gladly to the routine. School life is liable to a clearly marked dichotomy; there is a world of games and a world of work. For Martin both had their pleasure, both their monotony. Football, for instance, distinctly afforded moments. There were seventy minutes of consummate joy while the school, released from the round of "league" games, watched the match with their greatest rival, Ashminster. Martin never forgot that struggle. It was the first school match which he had been able to see, and he had not yet escaped from the age of worship, the age in which every blood is a true Olympian and reveals the deity as he walks. It was tremendous to watch Moore battling in the line-out, or Llewelyn heaving an enemy to the ground, or Raikes, capped now and the undisputed successor to Spots' position on the left wing, go plunging along the touch-line with that long and powerful stride. Martin could even forgive him for ousting Spots when he saw him pick up an opponent by the knees and pitch him a full three yards into touch.

For sixty minutes Martin stood wedged in a mass of shoving, bawling humanity. And he had bawled, bawled till his voice and breath were gone and he saw that he would need all his strength to avoid being barged out of his position in the front row, a treasured post won by a tedious wait. And now the long-drawn roar of 'Schoo-ool' went up almost in despair. Ashminster were leading by six points to three and Elfrey, with only ten minutes more, were being penned in their own twenty-five. Never had their prospects looked more gloomy: the forwards were losing the ball in the scrummage time after time and only the perfect tackling of the backs kept down the score. Suddenly Ross, on the right wing, intercepted a fumbled pass and was off. Someone shouted: "Kick, man, kick." But this was no moment for safety play, and Ross went on. Not till he was close to the fullback did he kick, and then it was no feeble punt into touch that he made, but a great swinging kick across field. For a moment there was a silence. Then a great roar went up, the greatest roar since the beginning of the match. Raikes, on the left wing, had foreseen the move, and following up with the speed of the wind had magnificently caught the ball and was making for the enemy's undefended line. It was the kind of movement that comes crashing into the mind of the spectator years later on without cause or suggestion just because it is unique.

But he was not over the line yet. Carter, the Ashminster centre, who had captained his school for three years and played for the Harlequins in the holidays, was in desperate pursuit. It was a race from the half-way line and Raikes had five yards' start. Martin, crushed against the ropes, hoarse and gasping, discerned with horror the deadly speed of Carter. It was growing dark and a November mist was creeping over the great field: impossible to trace that relentless pursuit: one could only wait and listen. A roar went up. Raikes had been collared. The teams gathered round the fallen figures and the referee. At last they parted. Ashminster remained on their line and Armstrong, the Elfrey scrum-half, was bringing out the ball. Raikes had fallen over the line in a central position. The school gave vent to a shout that stirred Mr Foskett to quote Homer on the wounded Ares. Llewelyn of course took the kick. A safe thing, one said. But now, incredibly, he failed. The ball trickled feebly along the ground and a vague moan passed down the ranks.

Six all and five minutes to go. Play settled down near half-way. Both teams were fighting like devils: and still there were found men to go down to the rushes. Then the Ashminster back miskicked in an effort to find touch. Llewelyn had made a mark. It was far off, but he was going to have a shot at goal. As the teams separated and Llewelyn balanced the ball in the half-back's hands, there was silence. Only here and there a muttered voice would be heard as someone strove to relieve the strain by objurgation.

"Callingham, you blighter, don't barge," or: "After you with my feet, Ginger," or: "Hack that stinker Murray, he's oiled up two places."

Then, as Llewelyn took his run and the enemy charged, there was no sound. The ball went soaring up. He had done it? The mist was ubiquitously damned. Then the touch-judges behind the goals raised their flags, a signal for the greatest roar of all. The match was over, gloriously over. It only remained to charge headlong to the tuck-shop and fight the whole game over again with ham and eggs or the succulent cho-hone.

These were moments.

Football too brought other, more directly personal, moments. There was the occasion when Moore and Spots came down to watch the juniors of Berney's and Martin scored a try beneath their awful gaze. Surely it was the very essence of triumph to see the enemy scowling on their goal-line while Berney's sauntered away with the ball, and to know that he and he alone was responsible for this cleavage of the hosts. Martin walked with all the tremendous humility of glowing pride. It was the first try he had ever scored, and Moore and Spots had seen it.

That evening Moore approached him after prayers.

"Hullo, Leigh," he said. "You scored this afternoon, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Martin, making a desperate effort to conceal his satisfaction.

"Well," answered Moore deliberately, "you hadn't any business to. You're a forward and it isn't your job to cut the scrum and lurk about for the ball. They were pushing us and it was a mere fluke that they kicked too hard. Anyhow the half could have scored: it was only a matter of going two or three yards. You ought to have been in the middle, shoving like hell. See?"

"Yes."

"Well, don't lurk any more, or there'll be trouble. It isn't a forward's business to score tries. Anyone can be a 'winger': it takes a man to shove."

Moore was one of the old school of forwards. He believed in foot-work and read The Morning Post.

"So don't let me catch you loafing outside the scrum again," he concluded. "There's quite enough chaps doing that already." And he strolled away.

Moore was not a person of much imagination and he never saw that he was not going the right way to make a great forward. A word of encouragement coming on the top of this, possibly injudicious, success would have made Martin play like a devil. Instead he deliberately slacked for a week.

Indeed footer, in spite of its moments, became monotonous. Martin had to play four and often five times a week in all weathers, and very often the sides were uneven and the game, consequently, a farce, a shivery, cheerless farce in which everyone longed for the pleasant signal for release. By the end of term nobody liked the games and everybody was as sick of the fields as of the classrooms. If was not merely that the games were too frequent, but that they were scarcely ever treated as games. As the end of the term approached, bringing with it challenge cup matches for old and young, house feeling ran strong and the various teams were goaded by their prefects with relentless severity. Sometimes whole fifteens would be swiped in turn for their failure to win matches, quite irrespective of their capacity to do so: slackness could always be alleged. At Berney's, it was true, no great rigour was displayed. Had Spots been captain more blood might have been shed, but Moore, who directed the house teams, was more lenient and rarely went further than guttural abuse and threats. Being, however, himself a forward, he instituted scrumming practice in the evenings, and Martin found himself being pushed about the house gymnasium at great pain to his ears and limbs, while larger boys planted shrewd and stinging blows on the prominent portions of the losing side: it was no fun being in the back row. As he shoved and groaned in the perspiring mass, there flamed across his mind the remark of a well-meaning aunt: 'How you will enjoy the games!' Martin was not particularly weak or unathletic: his physique and taste for games were quite up to the normal, but he did not stand alone when he proclaimed to his friends his weariness with the official recreation which only doubled life's burden.

"Of course," said Caruth, after scrumming practice one night, "it's awfully good for us. Bally influence and all that. You know what the crushers say."

"And they ought to know," added Martin, "as they never play, at least not compulsorily."

"Anyhow," said Caruth, "there is one comfort."

"What is that?"

"We don't have to sweat it out like Randall's. Their pre's make them groise at it all day and all night."

"Good job. The stinkers."

Martin's sympathy with the oppressed was not yet as strong as his hatred of Randall's, the pot hunters, the unspeakable.

Work with the Terror was not always terrible: for Martin it even had its moments. He enjoyed turning out a good verse or a good translation, and he enjoyed also the commendation that it won. The Terror, whose real name was Vickers, was a young man soured by misfortune. He had meant to go triumphantly to the Bar: he had connections, he had brains, he would rise. But a financial crisis in the family had left him in despair, too old to enter for the Civil Service, too poor to attempt the Bar in spite of his connections. He had drifted, of necessity, to the arduous, responsible, and despised task of moulding the future generation. The future generation, as represented by the Lower Fifth, Classical, of Elfrey, seemed to Vickers a loathsome crew, fit only to be the victim of the sarcastic tongue on which he prided himself. He hated the elderly bloods who remained calmly and irremovably at the bottom of the form: he hated the ink-stained urchins with brains who passed through his hands on their way to higher things. The Lower Fifth he held to be an abominable form because it was neither one thing nor the other. The teaching was not mere routine, the soulless cramming of impenetrable skulls: on the other hand, it wasn't like taking a Sixth. There were times, especially in the afternoons, when the frowst of the water-warmed room, the dingy walls and desks, the ponderous horror of mistranslated Æschylus, and the unmannered lumpishness of the human boy (average age sixteen) would all combine to play upon his nerves and to rend the amorphous thing which once had been an active, ambitious soul. Wearily he vented his wrath upon the form.

His method was, as a rule, the sarcasm courteous. He lounged magnificently while he played with his victim.

"Simpson!" This to a clever but idle youth remarkable for his large, inky hands and persistent untidiness of apparel. There was something in Simpson's grimy collars and straggling bootlaces that infuriated Vickers.

"Simpson!"

"Yes, sir?"

"You owe me, I think, a rendering of Virgil."

"Please, sir, I haven't quite finished it yet, sir."

"And how much, may I ask, have you finished?"

"Well, sir, last night I had the Agamemnon chorus."

"I see, Simpson. I see."

"Please, sir, I was very busy."

"Our Simpson was busy early this morning also, I suppose."

"Yes, sir."

"At your ablutions, I presume."

Here the form would laugh: Simpson's cleanliness was a standing joke.

"Please, sir, I didn't wake up very early."

"That was very distressing."

There was a silence. "Well, Simpson?" Vickers would continue in his softest tone.

Simpson gazed moodily at the desk, digging nibs into the wood.

"Our Simpson seems fonder of water than of Maro. We must tighten the bonds between Simpson and the poet. May I say the whole of the first Georgic this time?"

"Oh, sir."

"You think the quantity excessive?"

Simpson summoned up his courage and said he did think so.

"Ah, but the verse is so beautiful," came the answer. "I couldn't deprive you, Simpson. Anyhow, you may begin your magnum opus and let me know when you have reached line two hundred."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Simpson, that will be delightful. You were translating, Grant, I think."

Vickers aimed at being a strong man and he never set a grammar paper in which he did not ask for a comment on the phrase:

"Oderint dum metuant."

"A capital sentiment, Simpson," he would say with his gentlest smile, as he mouthed out the words. But his pretensions were not idle, as was shown by the fact that he could lose his temper without becoming ridiculous. If a weaker man had called the giant Batson 'a contemptible ass,' Batson would have laughed and the form would have sniggered. But when Vickers flared up he commanded the silence of the greatest.

Vickers had a gift of phrase and Martin learned much from him, partly because he was so afraid that he always worked hard, and partly because Vickers took a fancy to him and would give him little hints about translation and composition which he did not choose to waste on the ruck. Martin was less inky and more intelligent than the average new boy who was placed in the Lower Fifth. Moreover, his fear of his master was obvious, and there was no more effective method of flattering Vickers than to fear him and to let your fear be seen.

Yet it was a relief, even to Martin, to escape from the tension of the Terror's classroom to the turbulent relaxation that prevailed in the dark chamber where Barmy Walters taught mathematics. Old Barmy suffered from acute poverty and incipient senile decay. He had once been a brilliant undergraduate at Cambridge and then a wrangler, a man with a future: he now lived in a red-brick villa with a chattering wife and two gaunt, unwedded daughters. For nearly forty years it had been his function to instruct the classical side in mathematics: he had never been a strong man, never fitted for his work. And so in spite of all his brilliance as a mathematician he had missed promotion, seen his chance of a house go by, and eventually lost grip. To retire was financially impossible (Elfrey was too poor a school to have a pension fund), and he stuck to his work grimly, sitting beneath his blackboard with an overcoat under his dusty gown, wheezing and grumbling and looking for his glasses. Plainly he could be ragged: and ragged he was without mercy or cessation. A couple of hours with the Terror had a vicious effect on the tempers of his victims, and Barmy Walters found in the Lower Fifth, coming straight from Vickers, torturers of a fiendish devilry.

To begin with, there was the distribution of the instrument-boxes before geometry. The boxes stood in great piles at the end of the room and it was the duty of the bottom boy to deal them round. It was also part of the established order of things that the bottom boy dropped the two and twenty boxes with a series of slow and deafening crashes. At the end he would say: "Oh, sir, I'm so sorry."

And Barmy would answer: "Um, ah. Really, really, you boys will shatter my nerves. How many times have I told you to be careful? Um, ah!"

Then there would be a rush to recover the boxes, a long, clattering rush with much jostling and swearing and spilling of ink, some of which would find its way to Barmy's glass of water. When peace had been restored people would begin to ask questions, to demand elaborate demonstrations on the blackboard, or to consume food. Barmy's room was renowned as a resort for picnics. Biscuits were popular in winter, but in summer there was a special line in fruit. Once a daring individual threw a biscuit at Barmy's head and hit him, whereupon he had to carry to his housemaster a note which began:

"DEAR RANDALL,—Morgan struck me with a macaroon."

The conjunction of the words 'strike' and 'macaroon' so pleased Mr Randall that he omitted to deal with Morgan.

All the obvious things were done to Barmy by one or other of his classes. Mice were brought into form and released, and once a grass snake. He found a hedgehog in his mortar-board. Barmy had an idea that fifty lines formed a long imposition and he used to whine out:

"Um, ah, boy, I'll give you a long day's work. Take fifty lines."

He would enter the imposition in a note-book which he left in his unlocked desk, and in the morning he would find 'shown up' written against it in his own handwriting. After a long day of wheezing and grumbling about his shattered nerves Barmy would be seen mounting his aged bicycle with fixed wheel and pedalling laboriously to the villa and the chattering wife and the gaunt, unwedded daughters. Yet perhaps he was not altogether unhappy, for, if a master is to be ragged, he may as well sink to the depths: the tragedy of the defenceless dotard has less pathos than the suffering of the young man with ideals, whose burning desire to teach well and to succeed is thwarted by just the slightest lack of that presence and authority which make the master.

Undoubtedly, however, Barmy could be hurt, and Martin was not old enough to understand the consummate brutality of the proceedings in that dismal room. Like all young schoolboys, Martin regarded a master or crusher as a natural foe, a person with whom truceless war is waged. If he is fool enough to let himself be ragged, that is his look-out: he has all the resources of punishment on his side and if he cannot use them he deserves no mercy. So Martin worked off his vitality in ragging, and, being of an ingenious turn of mind, became noted for the improvisation of new japes. He was patronised by the bloods of the form and enjoyed himself hugely: without realising the nature and results of his conduct, he even lay awake at nights devising new and exquisite methods for completing the destruction of Barmy's nervous system.