Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 13

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After the tempestuous months consequent on O'Rane's arrival at Melton, the two succeeding terms were a time of slumber and peace. The omnibus study next to Prayer Room became vacant at Christmas, and on our return at the end of January we found Mayhew, Sinclair and O'Rane in possession. We found also an ominous hand-printing-press clamped on to the window-sill, and from this injudicious outcome of an uncle's Christmas largess Mayhew set himself to produce a weekly sheet rivalling "The Times" in authority, the "Spectator" in elegance, and the "Junius Letters" in pointedness of criticism and personality.

Before the term was a month old the Editor had sunk to the thankless and unclean position of compositor, while O'Rane, with his natural taste for ascendancy, poured forth an effervescent stream of leaders, lampoons, parodies, dialogues, stories and poems. It was not easy for anyone of less dominant personality to get his voice heard or his pen's product read during the periods of O'Rane's midsummer madness. At such times he seemed to lose every restraint of sobriety and in a riot of high spirits would be found organizing stupendous practical jokes or subjecting the very stones of Great Court to satirical tirades in facile impromptu verse. Throughout life his vitality was amazing, and from time to time at school and Oxford it seemed as though he must break out or choke.

Thanks to the printing-press, Mayhew found the circulation of the "Junior Mathesonian" rising with each issue. I have a complete set somewhere, and to read again the ebullitions of O'Rane's untiring pen is to see again the wild, black-eyed, lean-faced, Villonesque figure of the author. He was always at enmity with someone, and the last word in each altercation is usually to be found in his weekly "Dialogues of the Damned," in which the enemy of the moment is depicted explaining to the Devil his presence in hell.

Beresford, Second Master, headed the list. As a disciplinarian who had six several times failed to secure a headmastership elsewhere, he was a formidable authority on the rules and traditions of the school and knew to a nicety exactly where Burgess's loose grip and casual methods were lowering the prestige of Melton. Without in any way opposing the existing policy of letting the Sixth run the school, Beresford gladly conceded that the Sixth should at least set an example. This, he held, was not done when one member roamed dreamily along the Southampton road and engaged in conversation with the varied, disreputable, semi-seafaring tramps who begged their way through Melton to London and on whose account the great road was put out of bounds for all juniors. Burgess declined to limit bounds farther, but supported his colleague to the extent of a few words with O'Rane—a course that strengthened Beresford's conviction that Melton was going to the dogs and sowed plentiful resentment in the breast of O'Rane.

I see no purpose in following up in detail the quarrel with Greenwood (Dialogue III) over the Promenade Concert and the unexplained wrecking of No. 1 Music Room; nor with Ponsonby (Dialogue VII-) over the Freedom of the Press. The "J.M.," smudgily printed by Mayhew and ornately illustrated by Draycott, was certainly not intended to enter the shabby, panelled Common Room over Big Gateway. The internecine animosity of the great, however, is sometimes more marked than their discretion, and Hanson, who had not spoken to Grimshaw since their whist quarrel five years earlier, allowed himself to be seen in one of the bursting Common Room arm-chairs with his feet in the fender and his trousers scorching, engaged in delighted perusal of the Grimshaw Dialogue. Inasmuch as Grimshaw favoured the boys of his own house against all comers, he was unpopular, and the Grimshaw number of the "J.M." was received with grateful appreciation by all his colleagues, with the exception of Beresford, who had suffered in silence from an earlier week's attack. Succeeding issues were received with slightly less favour, as the minority of victims grew in number. With the appearance of "J.M. VII," Ponsonby decided to refer the case to Burgess and with the support of six actual fellow-sufferers and a dozen awaiting their turn, he constituted himself a deputation. The Head was sympathetic but not helpful. The paper, he pointed out, was issued only to subscribers and seemingly contained nothing of the blasphemous or obscene.

"If it were a matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness," said Burgess, "reason would that I should bear with you."

"I don't feel that any boy—let alone a Sixth-form boy—should be allowed to circulate studied insults to the Staff," rejoined Ponsonby.

"If it be a question of words and names," Burgess advised, "look ye to it."

"O'Rane's in the Sixth," Ponsonby objected. "Unless he's degraded from Sixth-form rank, what am I to do?"

Burgess affected to think deeply.

"The Lord will provide," he said.

The "Dialogues of the Damned" are an incomplete series, arrested in mid-course at No. VII; the "J.M.," however, had a life of more than two years and only died when O'Rane, as captain of the school, had to edit the official "Meltonian."

A remove into the Sixth at Melton marked an epoch in most lives. There was, and is, only one Burgess in the scholastic system, and until you met him five hours a day for six days a week you could form no estimate of the range of his knowledge. Every school has its Under Sixth, its Villiers and its mixed assembly of brilliant boys awaiting their remove, mediocre boys who have come to stay and dull boys charitably piloted and tugged into the haven of rest because their housemasters do not care to make monitors of boys in the Fifth. In my time the lot of Villiers was not to be envied, for the dullards slept, the mediocre ragged, and the scholars had to do their best to snatch instruction from the ruins of Babel, assisted by a man whose boast would never have been that he was a ruler of men or an inspired teacher and whose blood almost audibly rushed to his head as he strove to maintain discipline.

Thirty years before Villiers had taken a first in Mods., and though the fine edge of his mind had lost its keenness, he held to the Mods. tradition that the Classics should be read in bulk. That, indeed, is the best thing I remember about the man or his system. We scampered through the "Odyssey," "Æneid," and plays of Sophocles at a great rate and with no attention to detail. Pure scholarship, if it ever came, was to come later, and in the meantime Villiers saved succeeding generations from the reproach levelled against a classical education—that the fruit of many years' plodding is to be measured by the assimilation of one book of Horace's Odes or a single play by Euripides. Villiers left us, and we left Villiers, with more than a smattering of great literature.

In the Sixth we read as much or as little as we pleased. Most of us had a scholarship in view, and the degree of our unpreparedness was the degree of attention with which we confined ourselves to the text. Beyond that minimum the rule was to sit and encourage Burgess to talk. Sometimes he would forget a book and, for want of fixed work, open a Lexicon and choose a word at random. He would give us the childhood and old age of that word, its parents and uttermost collaterals; and from a single word he would treat of ethnology as revealed by language and comparative civilization as measured by the limits of a vocabulary. And from comparative civilization to the institutions and faiths on which a society is built up—the religion and magic that shroud the dark days of the human mind.

Even to a temperamental iconoclast such as O'Rane, I fancy Burgess came as a revelation. At the term's end he showed me a manuscript book entitled "Notes on Theophrastus." To do Burgess justice we had read three pages in thirteen weeks; the rest of the book was consecrated to obiter dicta: "The Trade Routes of Turkestan"; "Lost Processes in Stained Glass"; "The Origin of Playing Cards"; "The Margin of Error in Modern Field Artillery"; "The Institution of Arbitrage"; "The Minaret as a Feature in Architecture"; "Surgery in Mediæval China"—and a score of other subjects. Theophrastus bored us, and we decided to take him as read. The decision once adopted, there was no difficulty in keeping Burgess away from the text.

On reflection I think that O'Rane may, in his turn, have been a revelation to Burgess as much as to the rest of the form. If omniscience were the order of the day, O'Rane seems to have decided to be omniscient. It was a fixed principle with him never to bring books into form. Burgess would look wearily round and say, "O'Rane, wilt thou read from 'Protinus Aeneas celeri certare sagitta,' laddie?" And Raney, with his hands clasped behind his back and eyes gazing across to the big open fire, would recite thirty, fifty or a hundred lines as Burgess might decide, in a voice that would cause him to be taken untrained on any stage. In part it was a studied pose, in part I believe he never forgot anything he had twice read. And his memory was minutely accurate. I recall a disputation on one of Bentley's emendations of Horace; neither Burgess nor O'Rane had a book, but each was prepared to go to the stake for his own version. Sutcliffe was eventually dispatched to School Library, and a reference to the text showed that Burgess was wrong.

"Where were you before you came here?" Loring asked that evening, when O'Rane and I were sitting in his study after prayers.

"Guess I was in most places," O'Rane answered from the depths of the arm-chair and a book.

"Where were you educated, fathead? And don't 'guess,' it's a vile Americanism."

Loring affected great precision of speech.

"I—fancy—I—received—instruction—from—numerous—persons—in—a—var-i-ety—of—places." And then with a sudden blaze of light in his big eyes:

"Much have I seen and known, cities of men,

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all...

My God! 'honoured of them all!'" He stopped suddenly.

"The next time you break out, you'll get the cocoa-saucepan at your head," I warned him. "Now answer Jim's question."

O'Rane sat staring at the fire until Loring threw a wastepaper basket at him.

"If you start scrapping——" he began. "Oh, what was your dam' silly question? Dear man, I was born in Prague, and, as I never stayed six months in the same country till I came to England, you can see my education was a bit of mixed grill. Father ..." he hesitated; it was the first time I had heard him mention any relation, " ... father used to teach me a bit himself. And once or twice I had a tutor. And for the most part he used to lay on a local priest. That's why I can hardly understand the way you chaps pronounce Latin and Greek. And then the Great Interregnum, the Wanderjahre...."

"Most of your life's been that," I commented.

"Ah, I did this stunt alone—before I came here. After the war."

"The Greek War?" Loring asked.

"Surely. They killed my father, did the Turks. And when I'd buried him there was nothing much to wait for. He'd given every last penny to the Greeks, so I cleared out and came to England by way of Japan and the States and a few other places. It was all valuable experience," he added, with a concentrated bitterness that made my blood run cold. When O'Rane spoke in that tone, I could imagine him primed and anxious for murder.

"And drunk delight of battle with my peers

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,"

he went on. "'Delight of battle'! Oh, my God! These poets and modern war!"

"Did you see anything of it?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I was a kid of thirteen. I saw the—results ... when they brought my father back to the Piræus."

Loring had been lying on his back with his hands locked under his head. He roused himself now to turn on one side and face O'Rane.

"Was your father Lord O'Rane?" he asked.

Raney's face grew hard and defiant.

"He was."

Loring nodded. "When he was killed the Guv'nor noticed the name. I rather think your property marches with some of ours. You're County Longford, aren't you?"

"The property is. I, Lord Chepstow, am what you would doubtless call a bastard."

Loring sprang to his feet.

"Raney, you damned little swine——!"

"It's true!" O'Rane answered, jumping up and facing him.

"It's not true that I would ...!"

"Oh, perhaps not. But I've been called it—and by lineal descendants of the Unrepentant Thief, too. You've got nickel-plated manners, of course."

"If you were worth a curse, you'd apologize," said Loring, hotly.

O'Rane reflected.

"What for?" he demanded. "I'm not ashamed of my father, Loring."

"You'd be a pretty fair louse if you were. Don't make me lose my temper again, you little beast."

O'Rane held out his hand with a curious, embarrassed smile.

"Sorry, Loring. Is that good enough?"

"We can rub along on that."

Some years later my guardian, Bertrand Oakleigh, appeased my curiosity on the subject of the O'Rane fortunes. "The Liberator," after a crowded boyhood of agitation and intrigue, became so deeply implicated in certain acts of Fenianism that he had to leave Ireland in disguise and live abroad for the rest of his life. For thirty years he wandered from one capital to another, preaching insurrection and being disowned by the Government of his own country. When the Foreign Office papers of the period are made public, his name will be found forming the subject of heated diplomatic dispatches. As a neutral his conduct was far from correct in the Polish rising of '63 and the Balkan trouble of '76. When he lived as the guest of the exiled Louis Kossuth, pressure was brought to bear by the secret police, and he moved north into Switzerland. There he met Mrs. Raynter, one of the famous three beautiful Taverton sisters. The influence of Lord O'Rane's personality was not confined to political audiences: she lived with him for three years, and died in giving birth to a son. When Lord O'Rane himself succumbed to wounds received in the Græco-Turkish War, he was only in the fifties. The measure of his power and sway is to be found less in any positive achievement than in the terror he inspired in the less stable Governments of Europe from Russia to Spain.