Shame and Consciences
adapted by Mihangel
8. Likes and dislikes
Games, Jan found, loomed large in the life of the school. Of cricket, he already knew a little. But the winter games were novelties. Fives, with all the alacrity of eye and hand and body which it demanded, proved to be fun, especially the impromptu knock-ups in odd moments. Football was different. His only experience had been kicking a ball around the lawn with Master Evan, and the school version of the game was played to its own unique rules. Serious football, he discovered, required a dogged stamina and team-work, and he soon came to enjoy it more than anything else in his new surroundings. In time, he became competent without being brilliant.
In time, too, he became accustomed to what followed football. The lavatory at Heriot's, where the boys changed, comprised a row of wash-stands, a tap, and one shower-bath which was usually monopolised by the lords of the house. When washing off the mud and sweat, you did so totally naked. To all the rest, nurtured in preparatory schools, this was clearly not in the least remarkable. To one of Jan's modest upbringing -- he had invariably kept his trousers on when sluicing at the stable pump -- it was profoundly shocking to display his own nakedness in public and to see others flaunting theirs. But, as with most of the many novelties, he grew used to it.
It was either fives or football every afternoon. By the middle of October Jan now and then began to feel there might be worse places than a public school. He had learnt his way about. He could put a name to all his house and form. He was no longer strange, and he might have disliked things more than he did. There was much that he did instinctively dislike; but there was much that he could not help enjoying, over and above the football and the fives. There was the complete freedom out of school, the complete privacy of his study, above all the amazing absence of anything in the way of espionage by the masters.
These were surprises to Jan. But they were counterbalanced by some others, such as the despotic powers of the praepostors or pollies, which only revived the spirit of antagonism in which he had come here. The pollies wore straw hats, had fags, and wielded hunting-crops to keep the spectators in line at football matches. This was a thing that made Jan's blood boil, and he marvelled that no one else seemed to take it as an indignity, or to resent the authority of these tyrants. Then there were boys like Shockley whom he could cheerfully have attended to the scaffold. And there was one man he very soon detested more than any boy.
That man was Mr Haigh, the master of the Middle Remove, and Jan's view of him was perhaps no fairer than his treatment of Jan. Haigh, when not passing unworthy pleasantries and laughing a great deal at very little, was a serious and even passionate scholar. He had all the gifts of his profession except coolness and a good judgement of boys. His enthusiasm was splendid. The willing dullard caught fire in his form. The gifted idler was obliged to work. He had hammered knowledge into all sorts and conditions of boys.
But here was one who could wring the sense out of a page of Virgil, and then calmly ask Haigh to believe him incapable of analysing a sentence or of scanning a line! Of course Haigh believed no such thing, and of course Jan could not explain why he was so outrageously deficient. When pressed, Jan invariably sulked, and Haigh invariably lost his temper and called Jan elaborate names. The more offensive they were, the better Jan earned them. He was inclined to be sulky by nature, and he made himself sulkier when he found that it exasperated Haigh more than the original offence.
Another object of Jan's dislike was Loder, the captain of his house, not only a polly who lashed your legs with a hunting-crop, but by reputation -- and in fact -- a prig and a weakling. Loder had grand ideas about keeping order in the house, but his actual tactics were to pounce on friendless wretches like Chips or Jan, and not to interfere with stalwarts of the Shockley gang, or even with popular small fry like young Petrie. Nor did Jan have to be caught out of his study after lock-up, or throwing stones in the quad, to incur his noisy wrath.
Loder heard of the daily trouble with Haigh. This was all over the house, thanks to Shockley & Co. Unexpectedly, their lurid tales provoked a certain admiration for "the new man who didn't mind riling old Haigh." That, to all those who had already been gored in the Middle Remove, implied the courage of the matador; to all except the serious Loder. Passing Jan's door one day, this exemplary polly looked in to tell him that he was a disgrace to the house, and stayed to ask what he meant by having such a filthy study. It was not filthy, but it was certainly ankle-deep in books and papers, with bare walls still bristling with the last tenant's nails, and it was not improved by a haunting smell of sulphur and tallow due to the recent firing of a box of wax matches.
"It doesn't say anything about untidy studies in the School Rules, Loder," said Jan, tilting his chair back and glowering.
"Don't you give me any cheek!" cried Loder, looking dangerous.
"But it does say that a boy's study is his castle!"
Jan had to pick himself up, and then his chair, with an ear that tingled no more than he deserved. But that did not rankle. He had made a swaggering polly look the fool he was, and no smack on the head could rob him of the memory.
Small wonder that, with such a temper, Jan remained practically friendless. He might have made friends among the smaller fry, but he did not. One unathletic but clever lad did make friendly advances, but because they betrayed some curiosity about his people and his home, Jan repulsed them. It was only human that he should be so suspicious. The pity was that this made him seem more forbidding and hostile than he really was. But among all his dislikes and suspicions there was no longer any distrustful thought of Evan, though they had not spoken since that first Saturday, and though they often passed in the street without exchanging even a nod.
Otherwise his likes were not as strong or as ready as his dislikes. Yet Jan soon found himself admiring a number of fellows to whom he never dreamt of speaking before they spoke to him. Chief of these was Cave major, who was already in the cricket Eleven and who got his football colours after the first match. How the house clapped him in hall that night! The only notice he had ever taken of Jan was to relieve him of Chips's yellow-back novel, which the great man read and passed on to a fellow-member of the football Fifteen in another house. To the owner of the book, that was compensation enough, for Chips, like Jan, had never encountered quite so heroic a figure as the great Charles Cave.
Then there was Sprawson -- Mother Sprawson to Cave and Loder -- who was reputedly a great runner. He amused Jan immensely by carrying an empty spirit flask in his pocket and sometimes behaving as if he had just emptied it. He was rather a bully, but more of a humorist, who would administer a whole box of pills prescribed for himself to some unfortunate urchin in no need of them. Yet when he drew Jan as partner in the house fives and was therefore knocked out in the first round, nobody could have taken a defeat or treated a partner better. At closer range, Jan developed a finer appreciation of Joyce, with his bad language and his good heart, and of Bingley and his joyous interest in violent crime.
As for old Bob Heriot, he completely upset all Jan's ideas about schoolmasters. He was never in the least angry, yet even Cave major looked less dashing in his presence, and the likes of Shockley ludicrously small. Not that his house saw too much of Heriot. He was not the kind of master who is continually in and out of his own quad. His sway was felt rather than enforced. But, most nights after prayers, he had a brisk and cheery word with the flower of the house, and Jan and others of his size often lingered in the background to hear what he had to say. He never embarrassed them by taking too much notice of them in front of their betters, and never chilled them by taking none at all. The Shockley fraternity had not a good word to say for poor Mr Heriot. And that, in Jan's eyes, was not the least of his merits.
On Sunday evenings it was Heriot's practice to make a round of the studies, staying for a few minutes' chat in each, and on the third Sunday of term he gave Jan rather more than his time allowance. But he seemed not to notice the ugliness of the bare walls or the waste paper littering the floor and, though he did speak of Jan's difficulties in form, he treated them too in a way very different from Loder's. Haigh had in fact said a good deal about them to Heriot, and Heriot very little to Haigh, whose tongue was as intemperate out of school as in. But, to Jan, Heriot spoke plainly.
"It's obvious that you were placed a form too high. Such mistakes will happen -- there's no way of avoiding them altogether. The question is, shall we try to rectify this one? It's rather late in the day, but I've known it done. The Headmaster might allow it again. I mean, of course, that he might allow you to come down to Mr Walrond's form, or even into mine."
Jan displayed a momentary excitement, and then sat stolidly embarrassed.
"It would be a desperate remedy, Rutter. It would mean you being a fag, after first escaping fagging altogether. In fact, it would be starting all over again. It might make your work easier for you the whole time you're here. But I shall quite understand if you prefer the evils you know."
"It isn't the fagging, sir," Jan blurted out. "It isn't that I shouldn't like to be in your form. But I don't want to run away from Mr Haigh!" he mumbled through his teeth.
"Well, you'd only have to fight another day, if you did." So the matter went no further, and not another boy or master ever knew that it had gone so far.
But the one of whom Jan saw most, and the only one to whom he spoke his odd mind freely, was Chips. Chips was another oddity, but an utterly different oddity. Chips had always been intended for a public school, but in some ways he was far less fit for one than Jan. To be at this school was to realise the dream of his life, but it was not the dream that it had been before it came true. He took this to heart, though he was strong enough to keep it to himself, and Jan was the last person he would have admitted it to. He still stood up for the school in all their talk, and gloried in being where he was, but it was obvious that he was not as happy as he tried to appear.
Chips's troubles were not in form but almost entirely out of school, which was just where Jan got on best. Chips's skin was thinner. The least taunt hurt his feelings, and he hid them less successfully than Jan. He was altogether more squeamish and upright. He evidently read his bible daily. Not that he jawed about religion, but he oozed moral rectitude. He hated dirty talk, for example. Under pressure he had the courage to protest, but not the personality to make any protest effective. Such things ran like water off Jan's broader back; he was not particularly attracted or repelled. But Chips, being ostentatiously pious, was freely taunted as "pi;" and, in spite of all his principles, this rankled.
One bad half-hour the pair spent together almost every day was between breakfast and second school. It was standard practice for fellows in the same house and form to prepare their construe together. Most mornings this took Chips and Jan into Shockley's study, where Buggins and Eyre major completed the group. On a Virgil morning there would be times when Chips felt himself a worm for sitting still, and even on a Thucydides morning (or Thicksides as he was known) there was a lot of incidental swearing. But Chips -- whose Greek was his weak point -- endured it all as long as the work was fairly done.
One morning, however, as Jan was about to join the others, Chips burst in upon him, out of breath, and stood with his back to Jan's bare wall.
"They've gone and got a crib!" he gasped.
"What of?"
"Thicksides."
"And a jolly good job!"
Chips looked as though he could not believe his ears. "You don't mean to say you'll use it, Tiger?"
"Why not?"
"It's so -- I mean it seems to me -- so -- so jolly unfair!"
"Not as unfair as sending you to a hole like this against your will, and putting you two forms too high when you get here."
"That's another matter," said Chips, for once without standing up for the hole, perhaps because he knew that Jan had called it one for his benefit.
"No. It's the same thing. Is that beast Haigh fair to me?"
"I don't say he is --"
"Then I'm blowed if I see why I should be fair to him."
"I wasn't thinking of Haigh, Tiger. I was thinking of the rest of the form who don't use a crib."
"That's their look-out," said the Tiger, opening the door with the little red volume of Thucydides in his other hand.
"Then you're going to Shockley's study just the same?"
"Rather! Aren't you?"
"I've been. I came out again."
"Because of the crib?"
"Yes."
"Did you tell them so, Chips?"
"I had to. And ... and of course they heaved me out. Tiger, I'll never do another line with the brutes!"
He turned away, quite husky. Jan watched him with a shrug and a groan, hesitated, and then slammed his door.
"Aren't you going, Tiger? Don't mind me, you know! I can sweat it out by myself."
"Well, you're not going to," growled Jan, flinging the little red book on the table. "I'd rather work with an old ass like you, Chips, than a brute like Shockley."
So that alliance was cemented, and Chips was Jan's friend for life. But Jan was slower to reciprocate. He was much less emotional, he showed his feelings less, and his calling Chips an old ass was by no means just an endearment. There was a good deal about Chips that appealed to Jan as little as to the rest of the house. He was undoubtedly pi. He thought too much of his study. He took all kinds of magazines and went in for the competitions, being mad about many things including cricket, but no earthly good at fives, and not allowed to play football. He had some bronchial trouble that prevented him from running and often kept him out of first school. "Sloper" and "sham" were neither of them quite the name for him, but both became unpleasantly familiar in Chips's ears during the first half of his first term. There was just enough excuse for them to keep such a lusty specimen as Jan rather out of sympathy with a fellow who neither got up in the morning nor played games like everybody else.
Nevertheless they could hardly have seen more of each other than they did. They went up and down the hill together, for Chips was always at Jan's elbow after school, and never sooner than when Jan had made a special fool of himself in Haigh's form. Chips was not deterred by the jibes of the others nor by the sullen silence in which the Tiger treated his loyalty and their scorn. If Jan had recovered enough to play fives after twelve, Chips was there watching over the back wall, and when Jan went to football in the afternoon, Chips went with him in his overcoat and followed the game wistfully at a distance. Together they came down afterwards, among the tired players shod in mud and tramping heavily along the twilit street. Now was Chips's chance for the daily papers before the roaring fire in hall, while Jan changed with the others in the lavatory, and as long as either had a tizzy -- as the school called a sixpence -- there was just time for cocoa and buns at the nearest confectioner's before third school.
The nearest confectioner's was not the fashionable Maltby's in the market place, but was quite good enough for the rank and file. The cocoa was coarse and thick and the buns not always fresh, but the boys had dined at half past one and tea in hall was not until half past six. Even then there was only bread and butter to eat unless a fellow had his own supplies. Jan had not been provided with a tuck-box at the beginning of term, or with many shillings by way of pocket money. He would have starved rather than write for either, for it was only rarely that he received as much as a letter from his new home. But it did strike him as strange that a public-school boy should regularly go hungrier to bed than a coachman's son in his father's stables.
Milk and dog-rocks were indeed provided last thing at night and first thing in the morning. But if you chose to get up late there was hardly time for a mouthful as you sped out of your quad and along the street to prayers, buttoning your waistcoat as you ran. So it was on the morning after the first-round matches of the Under Sixteen competition. Heriot's had won an exciting game, and Jan was conscious of having done his share in the bully, as the scrum was then called. He was muscular for his age, and had grown perceptibly in even these few weeks at school. His sleep had been haunted by an intoxicating roar of "Reds!" (his side's colour for the day) and stinging counter-cries of "Whites!" At least once he had actually heard "Tiger!" shouted in approval by some big fellow. And he heard it all again as he dressed and dashed out, on a particularly empty stomach, into a dark and misty morning. He heard it above his own palpitations all through prayers. On his knees he was down in another bully, smelling the muddy ball, thirsting to feel it at his feet again.
It happened to be a morning of mathematics, and as he left prayers Jan felt thankful that he was not in Haigh's class for this, but in the Spook's. The Spook was a particularly innocuous master, who did not have a house but had a classroom in his own quarters in the town.
"The Thirteenth Proposition of the First Book of Euclid," sighed the Spook, exactly as though he were giving out a text in chapel. "Many of you seem to have found so much difficulty over this that I will run through it again, if you will kindly hold your tongues. Hold your tongue, Kingdon! Another word from you, Pedley, and you'll have whipping in front of you -- or rather behind you!"
This little joke was a stock one of the Spook's, and was received in the usual way. At first a little titter, until the Spook himself assumed a sickly smile, at which the titter grew into a roar, the roar in a bellow, and the bellow into a prolonged and insolent guffaw which the cadaverous but smiling Spook seemed to enjoy as much as the smallest boy. Jan alone did not join in. To him it sounded as if it was in another room, and the figure of the Spook standing before his blackboard was becoming nebulous and wavering.
"The angles that one straight line makes with another straight line" -- Jan could hardly hear him -- "are together equal ... together equal ... together equal ..."
The Spook had paused, staring at him with open mouth, yet the words went on ringing in Jan's swimming head, further and further away, as he fell headlong into the pit of unconsciousness.
He came to earth and life on a dilapidated couch in the Spook's study, where the Spook himself was laying him down and muttering, "A little faint, I fear!"
Jan had never fainted before, and was glad he had chosen the only first school of the week that was given over to mathematics. He would not have liked to come round in the arms of Haigh. The Spook was kindness itself, detained him in his study half the morning, and regaled him with tea and toast and things to read. Heriot also looked in before second school but, compared to the Spook, was rather brusque and unsympathetic until Jan said he hoped he would be allowed to play football that afternoon, as he had never felt better in his life. Heriot replied that that was a question for the doctor, who would be in to see him soon.
The doctor came. Jan could not remember the last time a doctor had seen him. This one sat over him with a long face, felt his pulse, peered into his eyes, looked as wise as an owl at the other end of his stethoscope, and asked questions that put Jan very much on his guard.
"So you've been playing football for your house?"
"Yessir -- Under Sixteen."
"I suppose you played football before you came here?"
"No, sir." Jan was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
"Weren't you allowed?"
The question came quickly, but Jan took his time over it. Obviously the doctor little dreamt that this was his first school. On no account must he suspect it now. And it was true that his father had once forbidden Jan to play football with Master Evan, because he played so roughly.
"No, sir."
"You weren't allowed?"
"Do you know why?"
"No, sir."
"Well, I think I do. And you mustn't play here either, at any rate for the present."
Jan shot upright on the sofa.
"Your heart isn't strong enough."
"My heart's all right!"
"Perhaps you'll allow me to be the best judge of that. You may go back to your house, and I will send a line to Mr Heriot. There's no reason why you should lie up. This is Saturday, you'll be quite fit for school on Monday. But no football, mind, until I give you leave."
Jan had tied his own tongue. He could not explain to the doctor, he could not explain to Heriot. He did not know why he had fainted that morning, for the first time in his life. He only knew that it was not his heart, that he had never felt better than after yesterday's match. And now he was to be deprived of the one thing he liked at school, the one thing he was getting good at, his one chance of showing what was in him to those who seemed to think there was nothing at all. Another Under Sixteen house match was to be played next week, against Haigh's this time, and he would be allowed only to stand by yelling "Reds!", to have his shins lashed by some beastly polly, to hear himself bracketed with Chips as a sham and a sloper -- and to know it was true!
That was the worst of it. His heart was all right. It was all a complete misunderstanding and mistake. It was a mistake that Jan could set right by going to Heriot and explaining why he had never played football before, and why it was barely true to say that he had not been allowed.
But Jan was not going to anybody to say anything of the kind.
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