The Loom of Youth Part 2

He was second that week. But Clarke discovered the theft. There was a fall. Many names were read in the weekly order, but Mansell's was not of them. At last Claremont reached him.

"Greek Prose, Mansell 19th; Greek Translation, Mansell 19th; Combined Order, Mansell 19th." A roar of laughter. "Well, Mansell, I don't think that a t.i.tter from your companions is a sufficient reward for a week's bad work."

The immediate result of this was that Mansell, realising that without some a.s.sistance, printed or otherwise, his chances of a good report were small, got leave from Clarke to fetch Gordon from the day-room to his study in hall to prepare the work together. Gordon at once thought himself a tremendous blood. There were advantages, after all, in being moderately clever.

About this time another incident helped to bring Gordon a little more before the public eye. There had been a match in the afternoon _v._ Milton A. Lovelace, as happens to all athletes at times, had an off day.

He missed an easy drop, fumbled two pa.s.ses, and when the School were leading by one point just before time, failed to collar his man, and Milton A won by two points. "The Bull" raged furiously. Lovelace took hall that night. He sat at the top of the table in the day-room and gazed about, seeking someone on whom to vent his wrath. There was a dead silence. Gordon was writing hard at a Latin prose. He looked up for a second while thinking of a word.

"Caruthers, are you working?" Lovelace snapped out.

"Yes."

"You liar, you were looking out of the window, weren't you?"

"Yes, but----"

"I'll teach you to tell lies to me. Come and see me at nine o'clock."

Very miserably Gordon continued his work. After about a quarter of an hour:

"Caruthers, will you take six, or a hundred lines?"

Gordon thought it was not the thing to take lines:

"Six."

"Will you have it now or afterwards?"

"Now."

"Hunter, go and get a cane from my study."

Trembling with fear, Gordon heard Hunter's feet ring down the stone pa.s.sage, saw him running across to the studies by the old wall. There was silence again; then the sound of feet; Hunter returned.

"Come out here, Caruthers."

It hurt tremendously; he went back wis.h.i.+ng he had taken the hundred lines. But the others thought it amazingly brave of him. Lovelace minor, handsome, debonair, a swashbuckler in the teeth of authority, came up afterwards and said:

"d.a.m.ned plucky of you. My brother's a bit of an a.s.s at times."

It was not really plucky, it was merely the fear of doing the wrong thing. But the House thought that, after all, there might be something in at least one of those wretched new kids. One or two people looked at him almost with interest that night in hall.

That was Gordon's first step. Afterwards things were not so hard.

Mansell began to think him rather a sport, as well as an indispensable aid to cla.s.sical studies, and Mansell counted for something. Meredith smiled at him one day.... A public School was not such a bad hole after all. And his cup of happiness seemed almost running over when one afternoon after a game of rugger he overheard Lovelace minor say to Hunter:

"That kid Caruthers wasn't half bad."

For he saw that the sure way to popularity lay in success on the field; and because it was the weak as the strong point of his character that he longed with a wild longing for power and popularity, it was already his ambition to be some day captain of the House, and to lead his side to glorious victories.

CHAPTER III: THE NEW PHILOSOPHY

"Of course 'the Bull' may be a jolly fine fellow and all that, but he does exceed the limit at times."

Lovelace minor was speaking; it was the evening after the Dulbridge Match. The school had been beaten by twenty-seven points to three, by a much faster and heavier side. Meredith had been ill and could not play.

Lovelace major had sprained his ankle in the first half, and though he had gone on playing was very little use. The match had all along been a foregone conclusion. But "the Bull" had lost his temper entirely.

Hunter, Mansell and Jeffries, a Colt, who ran a good chance of getting his House cap the next term, were discussing the matter. Gordon, who had come in to do Thucydides, was sitting in the background, a little shy and very interested.

"Is it true," said Jeffries, "that your brother threatened to resign the captaincy if he did not keep quiet?"

"Yes. By Jove, my brother let him have it. That's what 'the Bull' wants; he wants a fellow who's not afraid of him to stand up against him.

Fernhurst has been run by him long enough. He is a splendid fellow; and when he's sane I almost love him. But he has become an absolute tyrant.

Thank G.o.d, he can't ride roughshod over my brother."

Mansell here broke in. Mansell was rather fond of summing up.

"It's like this. 'The Bull's' a gorgeous fellow, he loves Fernhurst, he wants to love everyone in it. But he does not understand our House. We are not going to sweat ourselves to win some rotten Gym Cup or House Fives; we haven't time for that. We are amateurs. We play the hardest footer and the keenest cricket of all the houses, and that's where we stop. He wants us to train every minute, go for runs in the afternoon, do physical exercises before breakfast so as to become strong, clean-living Englishmen, who love their bodies and have some respect for their mind." (A roar of laughter. It was as though 'the Bull' were speaking.) "Well, I don't care a d.a.m.n myself for my body or mind. All I know is that the House is going to get the Two c.o.c.k somehow, and that for six weeks we'll train like Hades, and then, when we've got the cup, we'll have a blind. We aren't pros who train the whole year round; we're amateurs!"

And Mansell was perhaps not far wrong.

"I say, you know," says Hunter, who had a cheerful way of suddenly flying off at a tangent, "talking of 'the Bull,' have you heard of the row in his house?"

Intense enthusiasm. Buller's was supposed to be "above suspicion."

"Oh, well, old Bull came round the dormitories last night and heard Peters and Fischer and some other lads talking the most arrant filth. He gave them all six in pyjamas on the spot, and Fischer is not going to be allowed to be house captain next year. Rather a jest, you know. Old Bull thought because his house was always in wonderful training that the spirit of innocence ruled over the place."

"Well, he must be an a.s.s then," said Mansell. "Why, look at Richmore, and Parry; and even old Johnson has little respect for a bourgeois morality."

Mansell was rather pleased with the last phrase; he was not quite certain what it meant. G.K. Chesterton used it somewhere, probably in his apology for George IV. It sounded rather nice.

"Well, it's obvious that a blood must be a bit of a rip; and Buller's is merely an asylum for bloods!"

This rather perplexed Gordon. He ventured a question rather timidly: "But is it impossible for a blood to be a decent fellow?"

"Decent fellow?" cried Jeffries. "Who on earth has said they were anything else? Johnson's a simply glorious man. Only a bit fast; and that doesn't matter much."

In a farewell lecture, Gordon's preparatory school master had given him to believe that it mattered a good deal, but he was doubtless old-fas.h.i.+oned. Times were changed; Gordon had ceased to be shocked at what he heard; he was learning what life was, and how strange and beautiful and ugly it was.

As the winter term drew to a close, Gordon grew more and more sure of himself. He had pa.s.sed by nearly all the other new boys. Foster, it is true, had got on well according to his lights, and was on more than friendly terms with Evans, the school slow bowler. But he was not much liked by his equals. Rudd was looked on quite rightly as an absolute buffoon; Collins got on fairly well, but was generally admitted to be a bit eccentric. Gordon was, without doubt, the pick of the crew. His position in form was a great help. Mansell's friends thought him a cheerful, amusing and respectable-looking person, and were quite pleased to have him about the place. Next term he was going to have a study with Jeffries. The Chief thought he had got on rather too quick. But he was usually among the first three in his form, and there was nothing definite to find fault with, and, after all, his friends were excellent fellows. There was nothing against them. Jeffries was genially selfish, always ready for a rag, a keen footballer, and had, like most other Public School boys, adopted a convenient broadmindedness with regard to cribbing and other matters.

"If the master is such an arrant a.s.s as to let you crib, it is his own lookout; and, after all, we take the sporting chance."

Lovelace minor was rather a different sort of person. Very excitable, he despised and deceived most of the masters; among his friends he was unimpeachably loyal. He loved games, but never took them sufficiently seriously to please "the Bull." He played for his own pleasure, not "the Bull's." He was a splendid companion.

Hunter was rather a nonent.i.ty; his chief attraction was that he usually had the last bit of scandal at his finger-tips; he was safe to be consulted on any point of school politics. It was his boast that he had sufficient evidence to expel half the Fifteen and the whole Eleven.