Shame and Consciences
adapted by Mihangel
27. The extreme penalty
Foreheads were not wiped before the question arose, "What shall we do till lock-up?" For the Eleven the answer was simple: to talk it all over in that sanctum of swelldom, the back room at Maltby's. Their latest member had a tremendous telegram to send to his people, but after that, to the team's surprise, he did not join them. Neither did the Captain of Cricket, though for once in his captaincy he would have been really welcome.
Evan had retired to his house, not a bit as though the school belonged to him and with little of the habitual strut (now that he had something to strut about) in his unsteady gait. Jan had installed himself in Heriot's, quite unnecessarily prepared to dodge Evan, or to protect himself with a third person if run to ground. The third person was naturally Chips, who had gone mad on the Upper and was now working off the fit in a parody of The Battle of Blenheim in place of an ordinary prose report of the most famous of all victories.
After an hour or so, though there was no sign of Evan and little likelihood of his appearing now, Jan was still dodging like an uneasy spirit in and out of Chips's study. Once he remarked that there was an awful row in the lower passage, implying that Chips ought to go down and quell it. But Chips had never been a Crabtree in the house, and at present he was too deep in his rhyming dictionary to hear either the row or Jan.
Lock-up at last. The little block of ivy-mantled studies became a factory of proses and verses, all Latin except the Greek iambics of those high up in the school, and all to be signed by Heriot after prayers that night or first thing in the morning, to show that the Sabbath had not been profaned by secular work.
Nine o'clock. Prayers approached, and yet Jan still sat unmolested in his disorderly study, and yet the heavens had not fallen with the wrath of Heriot or of anybody else. Could it be that for the second time Jan was to be let off by the soft-heartedness of a master who knew enough to hang him? Hardly! Hardly from Haigh, of all men! Yet he had been awfully decent about it all. It was a revelation to Jan that after all there was so much common decency in his oldest enemy...
Now he would soon know. There was the old harsh bell, rung by Morgan outside the hall, across the quad.
Prayers.
Jan had scarcely expected to go in to prayers again, and as he went he remembered his first impressions of them at the beginning of his first term. He remembered the small boy standing sentinel in the flagged passage leading to the green-baize door, and all the fellows armed with hymn-books and chatting merrily in their places. That small boy was a big fellow in the Sixth Form now, and the chat was more animated but less merry than it had seemed to Jan then. Something was in the air. Could it have leaked out before the sword descended? No. It must be something else. Everybody was eager to tell him about it, as he repeated ancient history by coming in almost last.
"Have you heard about Devereux?"
"Have you heard, Rutter?"
"Haven't you heard?"
His heart missed a beat.
"No. What?"
"He's down with measles!"
"That all!" exclaimed Jan, as his heart recovered.
If his own downfall had been in vain!
"It's bad enough," said the big fellow who had stood sentinel four years ago. "They say he must have had it on him when he was in, and the whole thing may make him jolly ill."
"Who says so?"
"Morgan. He's just heard it."
Poverty of detail was eked out by fertile speculation. Jan was hardly listening. How would this new catastrophe affect himself? Evan was as strong as a horse, and had his magnificent century to look back upon from his pillow. That was enough to see anybody through anything. And now there was no question of his coming forward and owning up, for who was going to carry a school scandal into the Sanatorium, even if the school ever heard the story?
And yet somehow Jan felt as though a loophole had been stopped at the back of his brain, and on investigating he was ashamed to discover what the loophole had been. Evan would have found out, and would never have let him bear the brunt. In the end Evan's honesty would have saved them both, because nothing paid like honesty with dear old Thrale. That was what Jan saw, now that seeing it could only make him feel a beast. It was almost a relief to realise that Evan would still be ruined if the truth leaked out through other lips. Which sealed his own closer than before.
The Heriots were very late in coming in. Why was that? But at last the sentinel hissed "Hush!" and sister and brother entered in the usual silence.
Miss Heriot took her place at the piano under the shelf bearing the now solitary cup of which Jan might almost be described as the solitary winner; at any rate the present house eleven consisted, like the historic Harrow eleven, of Rutter "and ten others." The ten others -- the thirty others -- then present could not have guessed a tenth or a thirtieth part of what was in their bowler's mind that night.
The Heriots always chose a good hymn. Tonight it was No 477 Ancient and Modern, rather a favourite of Jan's. He found himself braying out the tune from the Sixth Form table, while Chips lorded it like every captain of the house with his back to the empty grate, fondly imagining that he was singing bass. Neither of them did much credit to the most musical school in England, and now only one of them could go about saying that he had ever been there. Then the words that Jan was singing sank in.
The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at thy behest ...
The darkness was falling, and he fell silent. Unless ... But there was no telling from Heriot's voice as he read the prayers. It was the same unaffected voice which had appealed to Jan on his very first night in hall. The prayers were the same, a selection used only in that house. Jan now knew them all off by heart, but listened with no less care in order to remember them at the ends of the earth.
"O Lord, who knowest our peculiar temptations here, help us to struggle against them. Save us from being ashamed of our duty. Save us from the base and degrading fear of one another ..."
Well, he had stood up sufficiently, he hoped, to the other old members of the Eleven, and without too much fear. As for his duty, he had tried to meet the obligation of friendship, hadn't he? Even if it had brought him to grief ...
"Grant that we may always remember that our bodies are the temple of the living God, and that we may not pollute them by evil thoughts or evil words or evil deeds ..."
Well, foul language had never been his habit, though he had said words, sometimes, which some might have seen as evil. As for evil thoughts and evil deeds, he knew what they meant in the context, and to them he had to plead ... well ...
"Give us grace never to approve in others what our consciences tell us is wrong, but to reprove it either by word or by silence. Let us never ourselves act the part of tempter to others, never place a stumbling-block in our brother's way, or offend any of our companions ..."
Well, he had never played the tempter or placed stumbling-blocks, whatever else he had done. As for reproof, he had never been so particular as old Chips who in his early days had gone to the foolhardy length of reproof by word, and who even now was rising from his knees as though he had been really praying. But Jan knew he had not been, any more than had Jan himself, who had only been thinking his own thoughts, though kneeling there without doubt for the last time.
And yet another doubt ran through him as Heriot took his usual stand in front of the grate, and some of the fellows made a dash for milk and dog-rocks at the bottom of the long table, but more clustered round the fireplace to hear Heriot and Jan discuss the match. They actually did discuss it for a minute or two, but Heriot, despite his intentions, was dry as tinder. When he suddenly announced that he would sign all verses in the morning, but would like to speak to Rutter for a minute, Jan followed him through into the private side with a stabbing conviction that it all was over.
"I've heard Mr Haigh's story," said Heriot very coldly in his study. "Do you wish me to hear yours?"
"No, sir."
Jan did not wince at Heriot's tone, but Heriot did at his. The one was to be expected, the other almost brazen in its unblushing readiness.
"You have nothing whatever to say for yourself, after all these years, after --"
Heriot pulled himself up with a jerk of the grizzled head and a fierce flash of the glasses.
"But from all I hear I'm not surprised," he added with bitter significance. "I find I've been mistaken in you all along."
Yet Jan did not see the significance at the time, and the bitterness only allowed him to seem indifferent.
"There's nothing to say, sir. I was shamming right enough, and I suppose Mr Haigh has told you why."
"He has indeed! The matter has also been reported to the Headmaster, and he wishes to see you at once. I need hardly warn you what to expect."
"No, sir. I expect to go."
"Evidently you won't be sorry, so I shan't waste any sympathy on you. But I must say I think you might have thought of the house!"
Jan had not thought of it that way, and sympathised. He did not spot an unworthy but most human element in Heriot's outlook. The house would not be ruined for life. But Jan, in his determination to put a stiff lip on every phase of his downfall and never to betray himself by breaking down, had over-acted like most unskilled players. He had already created an impression of coarse bravado on a mind ready to stretch any possible point in his favour.
But there was no time to think about Bob Heriot now, when truly terrible retribution awaited him from the redoubtable old Jerry. About a hundred yards of the soft summer night, and he would stand in that awful presence for the last time. It was all very well for Jan still to call him "old Jerry" in his heart, and to ask himself what there was to fear so acutely from a man of nearly seventy who could not eat him. His heart quaked none the less, and he dared to dawdle on the way, recalling his past relations with the great little old man. There was the time he was nearly flogged after the Abinger affair. Well, Jerry might have been far more severe than he had been. There was the aftermath of the haunted house. There was that early occasion when Jan was told that another time he would not sit down so comfortably, and Chips's story about his friend Olympus. Such grim humour appealed to Jan. But it was a humour that became terrible whenever Jerry held the whole school responsible for some individual crime. He would show that they were all dogs and curs together, lash them with his tongue, and dismiss them with "Dogs, to your kennels!" And go they would, feeling beaten mongrels every one, never laughing at the odd old man, never even reviling him, often loving but always fearing him.
Jan now feared him the more, because he had recently been learning to love Mr Thrale. Though still only in the Lower Sixth, as Captain of Cricket he had come in for various ex-officio honours in the shape of breakfasts and audiences formal and informal. On all these occasions Jan had been embarrassed and yet braced, puzzled by parables but enlightened in flashes, stimulated in soul but awed from skin to core. And now the awe was undiluted, crude, and overwhelming. He felt that every word from that trenchant tongue would leave a scar for life, and the scorn in those old eyes haunt him to his grave.
Subconsciously he was thinking of the judge and executioner in his gown of office, on his carved judgement seat, as the day's crop of petty offenders faced him after twelve. In his library Jan had seldom before set foot, and never with the seeing eye that he brought tonight. The smallness and simplicity of it struck him through all his tremors. It was not much larger than the large studies at Heriot's. Only a gangway of floor surrounded a great desk in a litter after Jan's own heart. Garden smells came through an open window, and with them a maze of midges to dance round the one lamp set amid the litter. And in the light of that lamp, a pale face framed in silvery hair, wide eyes filled with heart-broken disgust, and a mouth that might have been closed for ever.
At last it came to life, and Jan heard a brief and dispassionate recital of all that Haigh had heard and seen in the fatal hour when pretended illness kept Jan from the match. Again he was asked if he had anything to challenge or to add, and again Jan had no answer and could only shake a bowed head humbly. Jerry was far less fierce than he had expected, but a hundred times more terrible in his pale grief and scorn. It was impossible even to remember that Jan was not the vile thing he was made out to be.
"If there is one form of treachery worse than another," said Mr Thrale, "it is treachery in high places. The office that you have occupied, Rutter, is rightly or wrongly a high one in this school; but you have dragged it in the dust, and our honour stands above our cricket. On the eve of our school matches, when we had a right to look to you to keep our flag flying, you have betrayed your trust and forfeited your post and your existence here. Even if it were the end of cricket in this school, I would not keep you another day."
Jan looked up suddenly.
"Am I to go on a Sunday, sir?"
The thought of returning to the Norfolk rectory in dire disgrace had suddenly taken frightening shape. On a Sunday it would be too awful, with the somnolent household in a state of either complacent indolence or sanctified fuss, assimilating sirloin or starting for church, depending on when he arrived.
But Mr Thrale was considerate. "You will remain till Monday. Meanwhile you are to consider yourself a prisoner on parole, and mix no more in the society for which you have shown yourself unfit. So far as this school goes you are condemned to death for lying, betrayal and mock-manly meanness. Murder will out, Rutter, but you are not condemned for any undiscovered crime of the past. Yet if it is true that you ever got out of your house at night --"
Jan could not meet the awful look as Mr Thrale made a dramatic pause. But he filled it by mumbling that it was quite true, he had got out once, over two years ago.
"Once is enough to deprive you of the previous good character that might otherwise have been taken into consideration. I do not say it could have saved you. But nothing can save the traitor guilty of repeated acts of treason. A certain consideration you will receive at Mr Heriot's hands, by his special request, until you go on Monday morning. And that, Rutter, is all I have to say to you as Headmaster of this school."
It is in this way that the convicted murderer is handed over to the High Sheriff for execution. But just as other judges soften the dreadful language of the law with more human words of their own, so did Mr Thrale talk to Jan as man to man. He asked him what he was going to do, and begged him not to see his whole life as necessarily ruined. The greater the fall, the greater the merit of rising again -- almost the greater the sport! Let him take life as a game, bowl out the devil that was in him, and pull his own soul out of hell. He enlarged on the lust of drink, bluntly but with gentle understanding, as a snare set for just and unjust alike, a curse most accursed in its destruction of the moral fibre. Jan, listening humbly, felt as if his own body and soul had been already undermined. He thought he saw tears in the old man's eyes. He knew he had them in his own. The harangue, begun between man and man, ended almost as father to son, with a handshake and "God guide you!" There was even the offer of a letter which, while not glozing over the worst, would say what could still be said and might be useful if Jan were man enough to show it in Australia.
But meanwhile he had been expelled from school, expelled in his last term, while Captain of Cricket, on the crest of his one triumph as captain. And on his way back to his house Jan stopped in the starlit street, and astonished himself.
As he suddenly remembered the actual facts of the case, he laughed aloud.
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