Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 10

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The episode of the Shelton Greek Verse Prize marked a turning-point in O'Rane's early career at Melton and revealed to me for the first time his resourcefulness and concentrated determination no less than his innate and unconscious love of the dramatic. The story was all over the house that evening and was to spread throughout the school next day. Ishmael found himself of a sudden venerated and courted, and to do him justice he was far too young and human to remain uninfluenced. "Spitfire" dropped into desuetude as a nickname and was replaced by "Raney"; there were no more concerted "raggings" or resultant cut heads, and the former eccentricities of an outsider became the caprices of a hero. In a night and a morning O'Rane became a political leader.

The change was effected with little or no sacrifice of principle. He still came up for judgement before us once every ten days and was formally and efficiently chastised until the end of term, when he received his remove into the Sixth. The flow of his criticism was unchecked, but no longer so bitterly resented. With a little assistance from Sinclair and Mayhew, his social qualities were brought into play: we would hear his voice leading an unlawful sing-song in Middle Dormitory, occasionally he contributed to Mayhew's manuscript "Junior Mathesonian," and an echo of wild stories came to us with all the violence and bloodshed of the late Græco-Turkish War, to be followed by anecdotes of life in the Straits Settlements and Bret Harte tales of the Farther West. No one believed a half of what he said, but the stories—as stories—were good. His personality developed and lent weight to his opinions and criticism; he grew gradually more mellow, less alien in speech and habit of mind. His face became less thin, and the practice of promiscuous expectoration left him.

I was to have ocular proof of his new ascendancy before the end of the term. The evening of the last Saturday I was condemned to spend in Hall. There was a high, three-panelled board over the fireplace, carved with the names of monitors and members of either Eleven, and, as I was at that time credited with some facility in the use of a chisel, the unanimous vote of my fellows entrusted me with the arduous task of bringing the jealously guarded record up to date. Planting a chair in the fireplace, to the enduring mortification of a chestnut-roasting party, I settled to my work. The fags gradually resumed their interrupted occupations, and in the intervals of hammering I caught fragments of triangular conversation.

"I say, Raney," Palmer began, "is it true you're coming to watch the Cup Tie on Tuesday?"

O'Rane, seated for purposes of his own on the top of the lockers, six feet up the side of the wall, grunted and went on reading.

"It isn't compulsory, you know," Palmer went on. "You won't be thrashed if you don't."

"Silence, canaille," O'Rane murmured.

"I suppose you know the way to Little End? Across the court and under the arch.... I'll show you, if you like. The Matheson colours are blue and white. The game's quite easy to follow. There are two goals...."

O'Rane yawned indolently, closed his book and threw it at the speaker.

"See here, sonny, you'll rupture yourself if you do too much funny-dog. I'm just coming to your dime-show to watch you beach-combers doing your stunt. And when it's all over I want you to start in and tell me what good you think you've done."

One or two voices raised themselves improvingly in defence of sport, the tradition of fair play, working for one's side and not for one's self, physical fitness and the like—much as Loring had done a few weeks earlier.

"You bat-eared lot!" was O'Rane's withering commentary.

"Everyone knows you're an unpatriotic hog," observed Venables.

"'Cos I don't kick a filthy bit of skin about in the slime? You lousy, over-fed lap-dog, a fat lot you know about patriotism! See here, Venables, what use d'you think you are? Can you ride? No. Can you shoot? No. Can you row? Can you swim? Can you save yourself a God-Almighty thrashing any time I care to foul my hands on you?"

"If you fought fair...." Venables began indignantly.

"I fight with my two hands same as you. 'Course, if you fool round with your everlasting Queensberry Rules, don't be surprised if I hitch you out of your pants and break an arm or two. And, meantime, you sit and hand out gaff about patriotism and the fine man you're growing into by playing football. All the time you know you'd be turned up and smacked if you didn't, and you don't cotton on to that. I've a good mind to take you in hand, Venables."

Mayhew, who was struggling with the current number of his paper, laid his pen down and addressed the meeting.

"Proposed that O'Rane do now shut his face," he suggested.

"Seconded!" cried Sinclair, who was lying on his back in the middle window-seat, drinking cocoa through a length of rubber tubing stolen from the laboratory.

O'Rane smiled and drummed his heels against the echoing locker doors.

"Sinks, come here!" he commanded.

There was no movement on Sinclair's part.

"Laddie!" O'Rane's voice took on the very spirit of Burgess. "I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. I pray thee come to me lest a worse thing befall thee. For and if thou harden thine heart, peradventure I may come like a thief in the night and evilly entreat thee so that thou shalt wash thy couch with thy tears. Then shall thy life be labour and sorrow."

Unprotesting and under the eyes of Hall, Sinclair rolled off the window-seat and ambled round to O'Rane's corner.

"What's the row?" he demanded.

"I'm going to make a man of Venables—make men of them all," was the reply.

There was a whispered consultation, and I caught "Mud-Crushers"—contemptuous appellation of a despised Cadet Corps. "No, I'm blowed if I do," Sinclair flung up to the figure on the lockers. "I will if you will," whispered O'Rane. A moment's hesitation followed. "It'll be rather a rag," Sinclair admitted.

"We'll start on Palmer," O'Rane pronounced. "He's the biggest. Hither, Palmer."

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Palmer, still with a cross of sticking-plaster on his forehead, look up from his book.

"Go to——," he began valiantly enough, and then anticlimactically as he caught sight of me, "What d'you want?"

"Thee, laddie. Sinks and I are old men, broken with the teares and sorrows of this life. If you don't come, I don't mind telling you you'll get kidney-punch in Dormitory to-night. That's better. I'm joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. Sinks is joining too. He didn't want to, but I threatened him with kidney-punch."

"More fool him," returned Palmer, preparing to go back to his book.

"Half a sec.," cried Sinclair, with a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Raney and I are joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. If you don't join too, and recruit Cottrell, you'll get kidney-punch from us both."

Palmer looked his persecutors up and down. He was no coward and would have left enduring marks on Sinclair, but of O'Rane's disabling, Japanese methods no one had yet made beginning or end.

"But what's the good of my mucking about in a filthy uniform?" he demanded. "I'm going to be a land agent."

"Decide. Don't argue," ordered O'Rane. "Think how useful a little rifle practice will be when you're invited to murder hapless driven birds."

"But it's all rot...."

O'Rane waved him away. "If you will arrange to be in bed at 9.45 to-night, Sinks and I will give ourselves the pleasure of waiting on you."

Palmer hesitated a moment longer.

"Oh, anything for a quiet life," he exclaimed.

"Now go and recruit Venables," said O'Rane. "Sinks and I are old men, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. We should hate to be dragged into a vulgar brawl, but you may use our names as a guarantee of good faith. I saw a man killed with a kidney-punch out in Kobe once."

The recruiting was going briskly forward when I gathered up my mallet and chisel, picked the chair out of the fireplace and returned to my study. Early in life O'Rane had learned three lessons in collective psychology: a sense of humour is a strong ally; fifty sheep follow when one has butted a gap in a hedge; and the basis of democracy is that all men are entitled to see that their neighbours suffer equally with themselves.

After Third Hour on Monday a batch of forty-three recruits (the Corps was unfashionable in Matheson's) presented themselves at the door of the Armoury graded according to height. I was passing through Cloisters with Tom Dainton, and we heard Sinclair's voice leading the marching song: