Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 5

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The first few days of the school year were always a busy time for the seniors. Matheson, a mild-eyed mathematician in Holy Orders, with a family defying even his powers of enumeration, observed the wholesome principle of leaving the monitors to take care of his house—a task which, I can say after six years' experience, one generation after another performed with efficiency, justice and a sense of responsibility. His official duties, so far as we could see, were confined to carving the joints at luncheon, giving leave-out, wandering in a transient, embarrassed fashion round Hall when the monitors were taking prep., and scrawling his endorsement of his colleagues' scurrility and invective at the foot of the monthly reports.

When not in form nor engaged in one or other of these functions, he retired to a faded study and struggled with the weekly acrostic in "Vanity Fair." Once each season, when the Cup Team had successfully challenged all comers for possession of the shield, Matheson would emerge dazedly from the half-light, summon the house to a supper in Hall, and after a prodigal distribution of steak-and-kidney pie, ham, tongue, cold fowl, brawn, jelly, meringues, jam roll, lemonade and diluted claret-cup, hold forth with shining eyes and throbbing voice on the glories of British Sport and the umbilical connection between the playing fields of Eton and the battle of Waterloo. It was always a tour-de-force of simple-minded sincerity; he spoke as one whose heart was stirred to its depths by the growing glories of his house. And we cheered encouragingly and thought the better of him for it.

There was little opportunity of making O'Rane's path smooth in the early days. At Loring's orders and in accordance with the immemorial "Substance and Shadow" institution, O'Rane was set at the feet of a senior fag, by name Mayhew, with instructions to learn all that was to be learned during his days of sanctuary. For a fortnight no master could send him to Detention School nor give him lines; he could dodge every practice game on Little End, wear button boots, break bounds, refuse to fag, cut roll-call, or talk in prep. with complete physical impunity. At the end of the second week he had theoretically tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Ignorance of rules could no longer be pleaded in extenuation of their breach, and justice went untempered by mercy, save in that no boy could be thrashed twice in ten days without written authorization from his housemaster or the Head.

On the last evening of grace I was seated in Loring's study after prep. when Mayhew came in with the cocoa saucepan and cups.

"Does O'Rane know the rules now?" Loring asked. "I haven't seen him on Little End so far."

"I think I've told him everything," Mayhew answered.

"Has he got his footer change yet?"

Mayhew hesitated in some embarrassment.

"He hadn't the last time I talked to him about it."

"He must look sharp," said Loring. "Four times next week, or—he knows the penalty."

Mayhew nodded, and the subject was dropped for a week. Then I was summoned to a Monitors' Meeting. Loring, as ever, lay full length on the floor in front of his fire, Tom Dainton sprawled in the arm-chair, little Draycott swung his legs in their carefully creased trousers from one corner of the table, and I occupied the only vacant seat in the window.

"About this fellow O'Rane," yawned Loring from the hearthrug. "He's cut Little End all this week, so I propose to have him up and inquire the reason. If none's forthcoming, he must die the death. All agreed?"

He dragged himself to his feet, picked his cane from the wastepaper basket and dealt two echoing blows to the lower panels of the door. The studies in Matheson's were in a line, opening out of the long Hall where the juniors lived and worked and ragged and had their lockers. Two kicks on a study door meant that the monitor inside required a fag, and it was the business of the junior in Hall at that moment—"lag of Hall," as he was called—to eliminate time and space in answering the summons. Two blows of a cane indicated a potential execution. A sudden silence descended on Hall; two light feet jumped over a form, there was a hurried knocking, and a breathless, scared junior thrust his head in at the door.

"Send O'Rane here."

Through the hushed Hall a sigh of relief went up from the forty odd boys who were not O'Rane. The name was shouted by one after another, like the summons of a witness in Court. "O'Rane! O'Rane! Spitfire, you're wanted! What's it for, Spitfire? Hurry up, they're muck sick if you keep 'em waiting!" Mayhew's voice sympathetically murmured, "Bad luck, old man!" Then there came a second knock at the door.

Loring stood with his back to the fire, bending his cane into an arc round one knee.

"Have you been down to Little End this week?" he asked.

"No."

"You know you have to go four times a week?"

"Yes."

"Have you leave off from Matheson?"

"No."

"Do you wish to appeal?"

Within living memory no boy in Matheson's had ever exercised his right of appeal—a tribute, I hope, to the substantial justice of succeeding generations of monitors. O'Rane looked round at the four of us with a mixture of sullenness and timidity in his expressive black eyes.

"Guess I'm up against some blamed rule?" he hazarded.

Loring nodded.

"Then there's mighty little use in plaguing old man Matheson."

Loring threw his cane over to Draycott, the captain of football. "Clear Hall," he said to O'Rane.

On receipt of the order there was a scuffling of feet as forty boys jumped up from tables, forms and window-seats. "Clear Hall" was taken up as the marching refrain, and, as the monitors filed in by one door, the last stragglers hurried out by the other, and eighty critical, experienced ears were expectantly strained to appraise the artistry of Draycott's execution. Loring, who was equally averse from thrashing a boy or being present when another carried out the sentence, crossed the room and gazed out of the window.

It was soon over. O'Rane hurried out of Hall, breathing quickly and with rather a flushed face. As he opened the door, interested voices chorused, "Bad luck, Spitfire!" "Who did it?" "I say, you got it pretty tight, Spitfire!" "Was it Draycott? He's not bad for a beginner." We filed back to the study; the date, offence and victim's name were entered in the Black Book and initialled by Draycott, and we dispersed to our own quarters.

A week later Loring ambled into my study with the remark that O'Rane had still failed to put in an appearance on Little End.

"I don't know what's the matter with him," he said. "If he thinks by just being obstinate...." He left the sentence unfinished. All his life Loring had the makings of a martinet, and when roused from his constitutional lethargy could himself be as obstinate as most people. "He's laying up trouble for his little self when the week's out, if he isn't careful."

"What sort of a fag is he?" I asked.

"Oh, not bad. Always looks as if he'd like to throw the boots at my head instead of taking 'em to the boot-room. That's just his fun, though—the playful way of the vengeful Celt. The only thing I care about is that he takes them there."

"I expect he'll shake down in time," I said.

Loring shrugged his shoulders and yawned. "He's pretty generally barred in Hall. Never speaks to anyone, and, if anyone speaks to him, it usually ends in a scrap. He's got the temper of the very devil. The best thing that could happen to him would be if twenty of them sat on his head and ragged him scientifically, just to show him he's not God Almighty's elder brother, even if he did get into the Under Sixth straight away."

The end of the week showed no improvement, and O'Rane was once more had up and thrashed. A fortnight later the procedure was faithfully repeated. It was a Saturday night, and when execution had been done, I stayed behind in Loring's study after Draycott and Dainton had left us. There was no prep., and the juniors were reading, fighting, singing, and roasting chestnuts till prayer-time.

"You know I'm about sick of this," remarked Loring, meditatively stirring the fire with the richly carved leg of a chair purloined from Draycott's study.

"O'Rane?" I asked.

"Yes; Dainton pretty well cut him in two to-night. It's like hitting a girl."

"He's a tough little beast," I remarked for want of something better to say.

"He's a pig-headed little devil," Loring rejoined irritably. "What does he think he gains by it? Does he imagine we shall get tired of it in time?"

"Don't ask me," I said.

He rolled over on one side and banged the door with the chair-leg. "Send O'Rane here," he said, when a fag answered the summons, and to me as the door closed, "I propose to ask him."

O'Rane, when he appeared, looked white and tired, but there was a sullen, smouldering fire in his dark eyes, and his under-lip was thrust truculently forward. Silently he put the saucepan on the fire, produced cocoa and a cake from one of the cupboards and set about opening a fresh tin of condensed milk.

"Is there anything else you want?" he asked, when the task was finished.

"Yes; I should like a moment's conversation with you. Take the arm-chair."

Silently the order was obeyed. As I looked at the thin wrists and ankles, the slight frame made the slighter by the loose American-cut trousers, I appreciated the justice of Loring's remark about 'hitting a girl.'

"What have I done now?" he asked wearily.

Loring propped his back against the wall.

"Look here, young man, does it amuse you to be thrashed once in ten days?"

O'Rane's eyes burned with defiance.

"Guess I can hold out as long as you."

"That wasn't my question," said Loring. "Does it ...?"

"D'you think it amuses anyone to be thrashed by Dainton?"

"No. And it doesn't amuse Dainton to thrash you, or the rest of us to have to look on. I don't know whether you think you'll tire us out. If you do, it's only fair to warn you that as long as I am head of this house I propose to see that the rules are obeyed."

O'Rane rose from his chair as though the interview were ending.

"Guess I've stuck out worse than this in my time," he observed.

Loring waved him back to his chair. "What's the difficulty?" he demanded. "Why won't you play footer like everybody else?"

O'Rane snorted contemptuously.

"I came here to be educated, not to kick a dime ball about."

We were in the days prior to "Stalky and Co."; "The Islanders" lay in the womb of time; never before had I heard public-school sport criticized, at any rate inside a public school. Loring expounded the approved defence of games: their benefit to health, the fostering of a communal spirit, good temper in defeat, moderation in triumph. For a man who had abandoned Big Side on the day when attendance there ceased to be compulsory for him, the exposition was astonishingly eloquent.

"Guess I didn't come here for that," was all O'Rane would answer.

"Afraid you'll find it's one of the incidentals," Loring rejoined. "I've been through it, Oakleigh's been through it, we've all been through it. It's part of the discipline of the place—like fagging. You don't refuse to do that."

"I'd cleaned a saucepan or two before I came here. 'Sides, that doesn't take time like footling away an afternoon on Little End."

Loring sat with his chin on his knees, perpending his next words. I took occasion to ask how O'Rane spent his precious afternoons.

"In the library mostly. Sometimes in the town hall. Old man Burgess gave me leave."

"What in the name of fortune d'you find to do there?" I asked.

"It's the only place hereabouts where they keep continental papers. I've got some leeway to make up."

We sat in silence till the saucepan boiled, and Loring started handing round the cocoa.

"Then we're to have a repetition of this business every ten days till you get into the Sixth? Tell me—frankly—are you enjoying yourself here?"

"Reckon I didn't come here to enjoy myself."

Loring sighed impatiently.

"Do, for the Lord's sake, stick to the question," he said.

O'Rane's lips curled in a sneer that was almost audible before he spoke.

"I'm having a real bully time in a nickle-plated public school with the English aristocracy crawling round like ants on a side-walk." The words poured out in a single breath. "Guess I can't help enjoying myself."

"D'you get on well with the other fellows?"

"Would you get on well in the middle of a flock of sheep?"

Loring shook his head with a gesture of despair.

"You know, you're not giving yourself a fair chance," he told him. "What's the point of going through life with your hand against every man?"

"And every man's hand against me."

"I dare say. Whose fault is it, you silly ass?"

O'Rane laughed ironically.

"Mine without a doubt."

Loring tried a fresh cast.

"How d'you get on with Villiers?" he asked.

"Like oil and water. He sees fit to make fun of me before the form—says I can't talk English because I say 'grass' and not 'grarse' like the sheep. If I can't talk English, I can't—but I can talk to him in Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Gaelic and Magyar. Then he reports me to the Head."

I did my best not to laugh, but his palpable sense of injustice was sufficiently sincere to be ludicrous.

"I now understand why you go by the name of Spitfire," Loring remarked.

"The dago that first called me that has a broken thumb to remember it by."

At this moment the prayer-bell began to ring, and O'Rane jumped up from his chair. As I strolled in to prayers, Loring called down grievous curses on the race to which O'Rane and I belonged.

"What are we going to do with him, George?" he demanded. "This is mere cruelty to children."

The answer came after call-over. O'Rane passed us at the foot of the stairs on his way to Middle Dormitory. There was the ghost of a smile on his lips as he bade us good-night.

"Good-night, O'Rane," I responded.

"We shall meet in ten days' time."

Loring linked arms with me and entered Draycott's study.

"The fellow's mad, you know," he decided.