Читать книгу Ploughman of the Moon - Robert William Service - Страница 11

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It was a gallant struggle to bring up a family of ten on two hundred pounds a year, and Papa and Mama should be given all credit. Especially as they kept up a front of bourgeois respectability. Behind the scenes our standards were proletarian. We boys slept in the flannelette shirts we wore during the day and would have considered serviettes at table a form of swank. I was fifteen before I bought my first tooth-brush. But we were clean and healthy, for we had a bath with soap every Saturday night. I believe we all used the same hot water.

At home it was a struggle to make frayed ends meet, yet each day we trooped off to what was then the Finest School in Scotland. There we were lucky, for it was brand-new and only five minutes from our house. It was a show school. The city fathers were proud of its beauty. It was equipped for science, art and domestic economy. Visitors were shown round ad nauseum. It made the swanking private academies look cheap. The Masters had University degrees and were hand-picked, while the Head wore a stove-pipe hat. It was a dream school dumped down almost at our door.

Here I remained until my final expulsion. I had the same teacher for three years and came to have a liking for him. He was a bantam of a man, with bandy legs and a big red moustache like a viking. To me he was a hero because he had been a famous football right-winger, and had won his international cap. That far outweighed any scholarship in my eyes. For a while I worshipped him. Then one Saturday afternoon in a side street I saw him stagger out of a pub. Once he pitched and fell, picking himself up with difficulty. I shrank into a doorway. How thankful I was he had not turned my way! I was as hurt as if I had received a clout on the face. I never told a48 soul about it. Most boys would have blabbed, but nothing would have made me sneak on him. No longer was he a hero in my eyes.

I was inclined to dramatize my difference from other boys. One time the chap next to me was called up for speaking in class. The Master was going to punish him when I stepped forward.

"Please, Sir, I was speaking too. I deserve to be punished as well as him."

Said the Master: "You should say 'as well as he,' so I'll punish you for bad grammar." And he did too, quite enthusiastically. Thus I was snubbed for my quixotic priggishness.

My chief failing was a pertness that amounted to impertinence. One time I was punished for this, and I remember it because it was the last occasion I ever received the strap. I think I had been making sketches in class, and I did not question the justice of the chastisement. Unless one got a licking every few days one suffered from an obnoxious sense of virtue. It was up to us to qualify for another strapping, and to grin to the class on returning to our seats. In this case I may have felt that my quota of punishment was about due. However, the Master told me to wait until after school, which was a low-down trick, as it deprived me of the satisfaction of showing my classmates how pluckily I could take it. Always the exhibitionist, I was glad to hold the centre of the stage for a moment, even if it was a painful one.

Now our Master had a habit of saying: "You know, this hurts me more than it hurts you." We all thought this was rubbing it in, especially as he put on a sad expression as if he really meant it. That look of grief really enraged me; so after he had given me two with a gusto that made me squirm, he added his formula of regret. As I turned away I muttered something, and he called me back.

"It seems you have some criticism to make of my conduct. What did you say?"

"I said I wished it hurted me in the same way it hurts you."

"Ha! And no doubt you wish too that it hurted me in the same way it hurts you. You are a Realist. Well, in future I won't punish you physically. You can now go home and write for me a hundred times: "I am a Realist."49

So I went home and by lashing three pens together tried to reduce my task to a third. It probably took me more time than the actual job would have done, but I had the great glee of outwitting authority.

I was always thinking out ways to cheat the Powers That Be, and one of them was my patent palm-shield. I cut a sheet of transparent mica-like material to the shape of my hand and equipped it with an elastic band so that it lay flat on my palm. At a little distance it was invisible. The chaps were enthusiastic, so it was decided we must try it right away. We selected a Master who was short-sighted. We would have preferred him a little deaf, but one could not ask too much.

I had some difficulty provoking him into punishing me, for he was a mild man who taught mathematics; but at last I succeeded in rousing his wrath. He invited me to step onto the floor and produced a broad strap. All the chaps were agog with anticipation. Boldly I held out my right hand with its celluloid sheath. I saw his eyes glisten with satisfaction as he flung back the strap and swung it down with all his force. Clack! It was a sound like a pistol-shot. The air between my palm and its shield was so violently expelled the crack made me jump. It also made the Master jump. I plunged my hand into my pocket, and there I left my protective device. Then taking out my hand I wrung it as if in pain. The boys rocked with laughter. The Master was puzzled. He examined his strap, then my hand, then told me to go to my place. After which he turned on the grinning class, singled out six and gave each a proper one.

My invention was voted such a success some suggested I should patent it. Many wanted to borrow it but I did not believe in over-doing a good thing. I was trying to figure out a way of eliminating noise, when the Bad Boy of the school insisted on demonstrating it. He was hard-boiled and consequently a hero in my eyes, so I gave it gladly. But alas! he was over-confident and was detected. Thus the only invention I ever mothered, my Pupil's Palm Protector, died still-born.

When I was close to thirteen we had a wonderful summer and I spent three glorious months by the sea. In that time I changed50 almost beyond recognition. I came back a head taller, with a cracked voice and the hint of a moustache. Physically I felt the equal of any Master in school, so that I went round with a chip on my shoulder. When a teacher growled: "You deserve a proper thrashing," I gave him a contemptuous stare as much as to say: "Try it."

Oh, I know I should have been ashamed of myself, taking advantage of my strength to bully my Masters. They could not have a brawl with me that would end in a fight. I put them in an awkward position and they knew it. A year ago they would have beaten me, now they left me alone. I am afraid I was not a very nice boy, but all my life I have resented authority. It is by a man's vices you know him best. My record is one of shame and unworthiness. But all my faults and follies are part of me; so in painting a self-portrait let truth prevail. In most of my classes I was lazy, unambitious, and a dreamer. If the subject did not interest me my mind wandered. I drudged through mathematics, was fair at French and good at German. Grammar and spelling bored me, and all my life they have never seemed to matter much. History kindled my imagination while geography brought me dreams of far lands. But in one class I was superlatively good—English Literature. Oh, how I adored it! There I shone a star and astonished even the Master by my knowledge.

The reason is that I had become a ravenous reader. I devoured books with febrile intensity. Night after night I would sit in the nursery under the whining gas-light until long after midnight. I read any book that interested me, but chiefly fiction. My appetite seemed insatiable. To begin with I exhausted the boys' books; Ballantyne, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne and others. Then I went on to more adolescent fare. My first novel was Ivanhoe. However, it was the only one by Scott I could ever get through. The others I found boringly descriptive. Harrison Ainsworth was more to my taste, and I read nearly everything he wrote. My first Dickens novel was Pickwick which I enjoyed, while I read most of the others with delight. Captain Marryat was a prime favourite and Samuel Lever pleased me. I liked humour and character, but a lively story interest was my chief demand.51

Every Saturday Mama would give me a penny for a book at Miss Bell's Circulating Library, on condition that I got one for her. Her favourites were Mrs. Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, but later in life she read detective stories with absorption. My own taste improved rapidly, so that I came to recognize quality in writing and to appreciate characterization and atmosphere. Between ten and twenty I did the bulk of my life-reading. What little knowledge I have of the classics I gained in those years. That was to follow later, however; in the meantime I pursued my adventures in the fiction of the day. It was exciting enough. Stevenson, Rider Haggard, James Read, Besant and Rice—all held me spellbound, till I heard Papa shouting: "Come to bed!" And with head seething I crawled up the cockroach-haunted stairs to my room.

One day the Master announced to the class: "We have among us a budding Ben Jonson or maybe a suckling Shakespeare." With that he produced a manuscript he had found in my desk. It was a five-act historical tragedy and consisted of a scenario and the first act. In the end all the characters perished in a bath of blood.

The class laughed, so again I felt that sense of shame. I was furious with the Master, and if one of the boys twitted me about it in the playground, I flared up and was ready to fight.

After literature, my favourite was the drawing class. I loved to draw and would spend hours with pen and ink copying from books. Thus engrossed, time seemed to pass with amazing rapidity. When I was not boring into a book I was poring over an illustration and trying to reproduce it. I would gloat over the work of Phil May, Will Owen or Ravenhill, enjoying its smallest detail.

It was this love of drawing that took me every Saturday to the Public Library where I would take out old volumes of Punch. The jokes were often less than funny, but the pictures were more than interesting. So boyish was I that one of the clerks objected to issuing me a book and called the head of the department. "How old are you?" he asked.

"Eleven, sir," I told him; whereat he looked at me benevolently through his spectacles.52

"Well, you're the youngest reader we've ever had; but you seem to have a good head on your shoulders, so we won't discourage you."

Ah, those Saturdays in the Public Library, and my joy as I trudged three miles of streets to my city of books! At noon I would go to an eating place and have cake and tea over a marble-topped table. It cost twopence, but it was a feast to me. What matter the poor fare! I was young and free, and my capacity for bright dreams was unlimited. Never was I more happy, and this because I felt so blissfully alone. When other boys of my age were playing games and idling away their leisure, I was living in an imaginative world of my own.

I was never popular at school. I was too much of a lone dog and I disliked games. Only on the football field was I in demand because I weighed ten stone. As centre forward I was valuable in the scrum, but I thought it very stupid spending half the game in a pushing mob. I really preferred Soccer to Rugger. However, we were little snobs and thought the former too plebeian.

There was much competition to get into the team, so that we who made it were inclined to be cocky. We wore tasselled caps in the school colours. My shorts were very short, and when I walked to the football field I kept my macintosh partly unbuttoned, so that my bare knees might show. I imagined people saying: "Fine specimen of a lad. No doubt Captain of his school." Whereas no doubt they were thinking: "Silly young ass. Thinks himself a puling International." Maybe I did dramatize myself to some extent. Youth must have its dreams, its vanities. It needs a certain equipment of conceit to affront the realities of life. But the only time I distinguished myself in school football was when I split my shorts, and the opposing team was so convulsed with laughter at the sight of my bare buttocks that they allowed me to run in and score a try.