The Complete Stories (39 page)

  "Tactful of Graves."

  "You know, I sometimes think perhaps we've rather misjudged Graves."

  "You didn't think so in Hall."

  "No, but I've been thinking since."

  "You mean he's been greasing up to you."

  "Well, all I can say is, when he wants to be decent, he is decent. I find we know quite a lot of the same people in the holidays. He once stayed on the moor next to ours."

  "I don't see anything particularly decent in that."

  "Well, it makes a sort of link. He explained why he put O'Malley on the Settle. He's a student of character, you know."

  "Who? O'Malley?"

  "No, Graves. He said that's the only reason he is a schoolmaster."

  "I expect he's a schoolmaster because it's so jolly slack."

  "Not at all. As a matter of fact, he was going into the Diplomatic, just as I am."

  "I don't expect he could pass the exam. It's frightfully stiff. Graves only takes the Middle Fourth."

  "The exam is only to keep out undesirable types."

  "Then it would floor Graves."

  "He says schoolmastering is the most human calling in the world. Spierpoint is not an arena for competition. We have to stop the weakest going to the wall."

  "Did Graves say that?"

  "Yes."

  "I must remember that if there's any unpleasantness with Peacock. What else did he say?"

  "Oh, we talked about people, you know, and their characters. Would you say O'Malley had poise?"

  "Good God, no."

  "That's just what Graves thinks. He says some people have it naturally and they can look after themselves. Others, like O'Malley, need bringing on. He thinks authority will give O'Malley poise."

  "Well, it doesn't seem to have worked yet," said Charles, as O'Malley loped past their beds to his corner.

  "Welcome to the head of the dormitory," said Tamplin. "Are we all late? Are you going to report us?"

  O'Malley looked at his watch. "As a matter of fact, you have exactly seven minutes."

  "Not by my watch."

  "We go by mine."

  "Really," said Tamplin. "Has your watch been put on the Settle, too? It looks a cheap kind of instrument to me."

  "When I am speaking officially I don't want any impertinence, Tamplin."

  "His watch has been put on the Settle. It's the first time I ever heard one could be impertinent to a watch."

  They undressed and washed their teeth. O'Malley looked repeatedly at his watch and at last said, "Say your dibs."

  Everyone knelt at his bedside and buried his face in the bedclothes. After a minute, in quick succession, they rose and got into bed; all save Tamplin who remained kneeling. O'Malley stood in the middle of the dormitory, irresolute, his hand on the chain of the gas-lamp. Three minutes passed; it was the convention that no one spoke while anyone was still saying his prayers; several boys began to giggle. "Hurry up," said O'Malley.

  Tamplin raised a face of pained rebuke. "Please, O'Malley. I'm saying my dibs."

  "Well, you're late."

  Tamplin remained with his face buried in the blanket. O'Malley pulled the chain and extinguished the light, all save the pale glow of the bye-pass under the white enamel shade. It was the custom, when doing this, to say "Good-night"; but Tamplin was still ostensibly in prayer; in this black predicament O'Malley stalked to his bed in silence.

  "Aren't you going to say ‘Good-night' to us?" asked Charles.

  "Good-night."

  A dozen voices irregularly took up the cry. "Good-night, O'Malley ... I hope the official watch doesn't stop in the night ... happy dreams, O'Malley."

  "Really, you know," said Wheatley, "there's a man still saying his prayers."

  "Stop talking."

  "Please," said Tamplin, on his knees. He remained there for half a minute more, then rose and got into bed.

  "You understand, Tamplin? You're late."

  "Oh, but I don't think I can be, even by your watch. I was perfectly ready when you said ‘Say your dibs.'"

  "If you want to take as long as that you must start sooner."

  "But I couldn't with all that noise going on, could I, O'Malley? All that wrangling about watches?"

  "We'll talk about it in the morning."

  "Good-night, O'Malley."

  At this moment the door opened and the house-captain in charge of the dormitory came in. "What the devil's all this talking about?" he asked.

  Now, O'Malley had not the smallest intention of giving Tamplin a "late." It was a delicate legal point, of the kind that was debated endlessly at Spierpoint, whether in the circumstances he could properly do so. It had been in O'Malley's mind to appeal to Tamplin's better nature in the morning, to say that he could take a joke as well as the next man, that his official position was repugnant to him, that the last thing he wished to do was start the term by using his new authority on his former associates; he would say all this and ask Tamplin to "back him up." But now, suddenly challenged out of the darkness, he lost his head and said, "I was giving Tamplin a ‘late,' Anderson."

  "Well, remind me in the morning and for Christ's sake don't make such a racket over it."

  "Please, Anderson, I don't think I was late," said Tamplin; "it's just that I took longer than the others over my prayers. I was perfectly ready when we were told to say them."

  "But he was still out of bed when I put the light out," said O'Malley.

  "Well, it's usual to wait until everyone's ready, isn't it?"

  "Yes, Anderson. I did wait about five minutes."

  "I see. Anyhow, lates count from the time you start saying your dibs. You know that. Better wash the whole thing out."

  "Thank you, Anderson," said Tamplin.

  The house-captain lit the candle which stood in a biscuit-box shade on the press by his bed. He undressed slowly, washed and, without saying prayers, got into bed. Then he lay there reading. The tin hid the light from the dormitory and cast a small, yellow patch over his book and pillow; that and the faint circle of the gas-lamp were the only lights; gradually in the darkness the lancet windows became dimly visible. Charles lay on his back thinking; O'Malley had made a fiasco of his first evening; first and last he could not have done things worse; it seemed a rough and tortuous road on which Mr. Graves had set his feet, to self-confidence and poise.

  Then, as he grew sleepier, Charles's thoughts, like a roulette ball when the wheel runs slow, sought their lodging and came at last firmly to rest on that day, never far distant, at the end of his second term; the raw and gusty day of the junior steeplechase when, shivering and half-changed, queasy with apprehension of the trial ahead, he had been summoned by Frank, had shuffled into his clothes, run headlong down the turret stairs and with a new and deeper alarm knocked at the door.

  "Charles, I have just had a telegram from your father which you must read. I'll leave you alone with it."

  He shed no tear, then or later; he did not remember what was said when two minutes later Frank returned; there was a numb, anaesthetized patch at the heart of his sorrow; he remembered, rather, the order of the day. Instead of running he had gone down in his overcoat with Frank to watch the finish of the race; word had gone round the house and no questions were asked; he had tea with the matron, spent the evening in her room and slept that night in a room in the Headmaster's private house; next morning his Aunt Philippa came and took him home. He remembered all that went on outside himself, the sight and sound and smell of the place, so that, on his return to them, they all spoke of his loss, of the sharp severance of all the bonds of childhood, and it seemed to him that it was not in the uplands of Bosnia but here at Spierpoint, on the turret stairs, in the unlighted box-room passage, in the windy cloisters, that his mother had fallen, killed not by a German shell but by the shrill voice sounding across the changing room, "Ryder here? Ryder? Frank wants him at the double."

  II

  Thursday, September 25th, 1919. Peacock began well by not turning up for early school so at five past we walked out and went back to our House Rooms and I read Fortitude by Walpole; it is strong meat but rather unnecessary in places. After breakfast O'Malley came greasing up to Tamplin and apologized. Everyone is against him. I maintain he was in the right until he reported him late to Anderson. No possible defence for that—sheer windiness. Peacock deigned to turn up for Double Greek. We mocked him somewhat. He is trying to make us use the new pronunciation; when he said o'ú there was a wail of "ooh" and Tamplin pronounced subjunctive soo-byoongteeway—very witty. Peacock got bored and said he'd report him to Graves but relented. Library was open 5–6 tonight. I went meaning to put in some time on Walter Crane's Bases of Design but Mercer came up with that weird man in Brent's called Curtis-Dunne. I envy them having Frank as house-master. He is talking of starting a literary and artistic society for men not in the Sixth. Curtis-Dunne wants to start a political group. Pretty good lift considering this is his second term although he is sixteen and has been at Dartmouth. Mercer gave me a poem to read—very sloppy. Before this there was a House Game. Everyone puffing and blowing after the holidays. Anderson said I shall probably be centre-half in the Under Sixteens—the sweatiest place in the field. I must get into training quickly.

  Friday 26th. Corps day but quite slack. Reorganization. I am in A Company at last. A tick in Boucher's called Spratt is platoon commander. We ragged him a bit. Wheatley is a section commander! Peacock sent Bankes out of the room in Greek Testament for saying "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest" when put on to translate. Jolly witty. He began to argue. Peacock said, "Must I throw you out by force?" Bankes began to go but muttered "Muscular Christianity." Peacock: "What did you say?"; "Nothing, sir"; "Get out before I kick you." Things got a bit duller after that. Uncle George gave Bankes three.

  Saturday 27th. Things very dull in school. Luckily Peacock forgot to set any preparation. Pop. Sci. in last period. Tamplin and Mercer got some of the weights that are so precious they are kept in a glass case and picked up with tweezers, made them red hot on a Bunsen burner and dropped them in cold water. A witty thing to do. House Game—Under Sixteen team against a mixed side. They have put Wykham-Blake centre-half and me in goal; a godless place. Library again. Curtis-Dunne buttonholed me again. He drawled "My father is in parliament but he is a very unenlightened conservative. I of course am a socialist. That's the reason I chucked the Navy." I said, "Or did they chuck you?" "The pangs of parting were endured by both sides with mutual stoicism." He spoke of Frank as "essentially a well-intentioned fellow." Sunday tomorrow thank God. I may be able to get on with illuminating "The Bells of Heaven."

  III

  Normally on Sundays there was a choice of service. Matins at a quarter to eight or Communion at quarter past. On the first Sunday of term there was Choral Communion for all at eight o'clock.

  The chapel was huge, bare, and still unfinished, one of the great monuments of the Oxford Movement and the Gothic revival. Like an iceberg it revealed only a small part of its bulk above the surface of the terraced down; below lay a crypt and below that foundations of great depth. The Founder had chosen the site and stubbornly refused to change it so that the original estimates had been exceeded before the upper chapel was begun. Visiting preachers frequently drew a lesson from the disappointments, uncertainties and final achievement of the Founder's "vision." Now the whole nave rose triumphantly over the surrounding landscape, immense, clustered shafts supporting the groined roof; at the west it ended abruptly in concrete and timber and corrugated iron, while behind, in a wasteland near the kitchens, where the Corps band practised their bugles in the early morning, lay a nettle-and-bramble-grown ruin, the base of a tower, twice as high as the chapel, which one day was to rise so that on stormy nights, the Founder had decreed, prayers might be sung at its summit for sailors in peril on the sea.

  From outside the windows had a deep, submarine tinge, but from inside they were clear white, and the morning sun streamed in over the altar and the assembled school. The prefect in Charles's row was Symonds, editor of the Magazine, president of the Debating Society, the leading intellectual. Symonds was in Head's; he pursued a course of lonely study, seldom taking Evening School, never playing any game except, late in the evenings of the summer term, an occasional single of lawn tennis, appearing rarely even in the Sixth Form, but working in private under Mr. A. A. Carmichael for the Balliol scholarship. Symonds kept a leather-bound copy of the Greek Anthology in his place in chapel and read it throughout the services with a finely negligent air.

  The masters sat in stalls orientated between the columns, the clergy in surplices, laymen in gowns. Some of the masters who taught the Modern Side wore hoods of the newer universities; Major Stebbing, the adjutant of the O.T.C., had no gown at all; Mr. A. A. Carmichael—awfully known at Spierpoint as "A. A.," the splendid dandy and wit, fine flower of the Oxford Union and the New College Essay Society, the reviewer of works of classical scholarship for the New Statesman, to whom Charles had never yet spoken; whom Charles had never yet heard speak directly, but only at third hand as his mots, in their idiosyncratic modulations, passed from mouth to mouth from the Sixth in sanctuary to the catechumens in the porch; whom Charles worshipped from afar—Mr. Carmichael, from a variety of academic costume, was this morning robed as a baccalaureate of Salamanca. He looked, as he stooped over his desk, like the prosecuting counsel in a cartoon by Daumier.

  Nearly opposite him across the chapel stood Frank Bates; an unbridged gulf of boys separated these rival and contrasted deities, that one the ineffable dweller on cloud-capped Olympus, this the homely clay image, the intimate of hearth and household, the patron of threshing-floor and olive-press. Frank wore only an ermine hood, a B.A.'s gown, and loose, unremarkable clothes, subfusc today, with the Corinthian tie which alternated with the Carthusian, week in, week out. He was a clean, curly, spare fellow; a little wan for he was in constant pain from an injury on the football field which had left him lame and kept him at Spierpoint throughout the war. This pain of his redeemed him from heartiness. In chapel his innocent, blue eyes assumed a puzzled, rather glum expression like those of an old-fashioned child in a room full of grown-ups. Frank was a bishop's son.