Читать книгу The Passionate Year - James Hilton - Страница 15

Table of Contents

He knew, at the end of the first school day, that he had been a success, and that if he took reasonable care he would be able to go on being a success. It had been a day of subtle trials and ordeals, yet he had, helped rather than hindered by his peculiar type of nervousness, got safely through them all.

Numerous were the pitfalls which he had carefully avoided. At school meals he had courteously declined to share jam and delicacies which the nearest to him offered. If he had he would have been inundated immediately with pots of jam and boxes of fancy cakes from all quarters of the table. Many a new Master at Millstead had finished his first meal with his part of the table looking like the counter of an untidy grocer's shop. Instinct rather than prevision had saved Speed from such a fate. Instinct, in fact, had been his guardian angel throughout the day; instinct which, although to some extent born of his recent public-school experience, was perhaps equally due to that curious barometric sensitiveness that made his feelings so much more acute and clairvoyant than those of other people.

At dinner in the Masters' Common-Room he had met the majority of the staff. There was Garforth, the bursar, a pleasant little man with a loving-kindness overclouded somewhat by pedantry; Hayes-Smith, housemaster of Mllner's, a brisk, bustling, unimaginative fellow whose laugh was more eloquent than his words; Ransome, a wizened Voltairish classical master, morbidly ashamed of being caught in possession of any emotion of any kind; Lavery, housemaster of North House (commonly called Lavery's), whose extraordinary talent for delegating authority enabled him to combine laziness and efficiency in a way both marvellous and enviable; and Poulet, the French and German Master, who spoke far better English than anybody in the Common-Room, except, perhaps, Garforth or Ransome. Then, of course, there was Clanwell, whom Speed had already met; Clanwell, better known "Fish-cake," a sporting man of great vigour who would, from time to time, astonish the world by donning a black suit and preaching from the Millstead pulpit a sermon of babbling meekness. Speed liked him; liked all of them, in fact, better than he did Pritchard.

At dinner, Pritchard sat next to him on one side and Clanwell on the other. Pritchard showed no malice for the incident of that morning's breakfast-time, and Speed, a little contrite, was affable enough. But for all that he did not like Pritchard.

Pritchard asked him if he had got on all right that day, and Speed replied that he had. Then Pritchard said: "Oh, well of course, the first day's always easy. It's after a week or so that you'll find things a bit trying. The first night you take prep, for instance. It's a sort of school tradition that they always try and rag you that night."

Clanwell, overhearing, remarked fiercely: "Anyway, Speed, take my tip and don't imagine it's a school tradition that any Master lets himself be ragged."

Speed laughed. "I'll remember that," he said.

He remembered it on the following Wednesday night when he was down to take evening preparation from seven until half-past eight. Preparation for the whole school, except prefects, was held in Millstead Big Hall, a huge vault-like chamber in which desks were ranged in long rows and where the Master in charge sat on high at a desk on a raised dais. No more subtle and searching test of disciplinary powers could have been contrived than this supervision of evening preparation, for the room was so big that it was impossible to see clearly from the Master's desk to the far end, and besides that, the acoustics were so peculiar that conversations in some parts of the room were practically inaudible except from very close quarters. A new Master suffered additional handicap in being ignorant of the names of the vast majority of the boys.

At dinner, before the ordeal, the Masters in the Common-Room had given Speed jocular advice. "Whatever you do, watch that they don't get near the electric-light switches," said Clanwell. Pritchard said: "When old Blenkinsop took his first prep they switched off the lights and then took his trousers off and poured ink over his legs." Garforth said: "Whatever you do, don't lose your temper and hit anybody. It doesn't pay."

"Best to walk up and down the rows if you want them to stop talking," said Ransome. Pritchard said: "If you do that they'll beat time to your steps with their feet." Poulet remarked reminiscently: "When I took my first prep they started a gramophone somewhere, and I guessed they'd hidden it well, so I said: 'Gentlemen, anyone who interrupts the music will have a hundred lines!' They laughed and were quite peaceable afterwards."

Speed said, at the conclusion of the meal: "I'm much obliged to everybody for the advice. I'll try to remember all of it, but I guess when I'm in there I shall just do whatever occurs to me at the moment." To which Clanwell replied, putting a hand on Speed's shoulder: "You couldn't do better, my lad."

Speed was very nervous as he took his seat on the dais at five to seven and watched the school straggling to their places. They came in quietly enough, but there was an atmosphere of subdued expectancy of which Speed was keenly conscious; the boys stared about them, grinned at each other, seemed as if they were waiting for something to happen. Nevertheless, at five past seven all was perfectly quiet and orderly, although it was obvious that little work was being done. Speed felt rather as if he were sitting on a powder-magazine, and there was a sense in which he was eager for the storm to break.

At about a quarter-past seven a banging of desk-lids began at the far end of the hall.

He stood up and said, quietly, but in a voice that carried well: "I don't want to be hard on anybody, so I'd better warn you that I shall punish any disorderliness very severely."

There was some tittering, and for a moment or so he wondered if he had made a fool of himself.

Then he saw a bright, rather pleasant-faced boy in one of the back rows deliberately raise a desk-lid and drop it with a bang. Speed consulted the map of the desks that was in front of him and by counting down the rows discovered the boy's name to be Worsley. He wondered how the name should be pronounced—whether the first syllable should rhyme with "purse" or with "horse." Instinct in him, that uncanny feeling for atmosphere, embarked him on an outrageously bold adventure, nothing less than a piece of facetiousness, the most dangerous weapon in a new Master's armoury, and the one most of all likely to recoil on himself. He stood up again and said: "Wawsley or Wurssley—however you call yourself—you have a hundred lines!"

The whole assembly roared with laughter. That frightened him a little. Supposing they did not stop laughing! He remembered an occasion at his own school when a class had ragged a certain Master very neatly and subtly by pretending to go off into hysterics of laughter at some trifling witticism of his.

When the laughter subsided, a lean, rather clever-looking boy rose up in the front row but one and said, impudently: "Please, sir, I'm Worsley. I didn't do anything."

Speed replied promptly: "Oh, didn't you? Well, you've got a hundred lines, anyway."

"What for, sir?"—in hot indignation.

"For sitting in your wrong desk."

Again the assembly laughed, but there was no mistaking the respectfulness that underlay the merriment. And, as a matter of fact, the rest of the evening passed entirely without incident. After the others had gone, and when the school-bell had rung for evening chapel, Worsley came up to the dais accompanied by the pleasant-faced boy who dropped the desk-lid. Worsley pleaded for the remission of his hundred lines, and the other boy supported him, urging that it was he and not Worsley who had dropped the lid.

"And what is your name?" asked Speed.

"Naylor, sir."

"Very well, Naylor, you and Worsley can share the hundred lines between you." He added smiling "I've no doubt you're neither of you worse than anybody else but you must pay the penalty of being, pioneers."

They went away laughing.

That night Speed went into Clanwell's room for a chat before bedtime, and Clanwell congratulated him fulsomely on his successful passage of the ordeal. "As, a matter of fact," Clanwell said, "I happen to know that they'd prepared a star benefit performance for you but that you put them off, somehow, from the beginning. The prefects get to hear of these things and they tell me.. Of course, I don't take any official notice of them. It doesn't matter to me what plans people make—it's when any are put into execution that I wake up. Anyhow, you may be interested to know that the members of School House subscribed over fifteen shillings to purchase fireworks which they were going to let off after the switches had been turned off! Alas for fond hopes ruined!"

Clanwell and Speed leaned back in their armchairs and roared with laughter.