CHAPTER XXXI
VALE
The only two fellows who were leaving out of Heriot's house had been dining with the Heriots on their last night. One of them, after holding forth to Miss Heriot like a man and a brother, had gone on to the Sanatorium to take leave of a convalescent; the other accompanied Mr. Heriot into the jumble of books and papers, old oak and the insignia of many hobbies, which made his study such an uncomfortable yet stimulating little room. It appeared smaller than ever when invaded by two tall ungainly men; for the young fellow, though never likely to be as lanky as the other, but already sturdier in build, stood about six feet from his rather flat soles to the unruly crest of his straight light hair. A fine figure of a man he made, and still under nineteen; yet his good and regular features were perhaps only redeemed from dulness by a delightfully stubborn mouth, and by the dark eyes that followed Heriot affectionately about the room.
"There's one thing we've had in common from the start," said Heriot, "and that's our infernally untidy studies! I remember Loder speaking to me once about yours. I brought him in here to discuss the point, and he went out agreeing that indifference to your surroundings doesn't necessarily spell the complete scoundrel. But it isn't a merit either, Rutter, and I expect Carpenter to embellish life more than either of us."
"I wonder what he'll do, sir?"
"Get things into the Granta for a start. Not all his things; his style wants purging. Smoke, Rutter?"
Heriot was filling his own pipe; but it was one thing for a master to consider himself free to smoke before a leaving boy, on the last night of the term, in defiance of Mr. Thrale's despotic attitude on the point, and quite another thing for him to offer the boy a cigarette. Jan declined the abrupt invitation with an almost shocked embarrassment.
"I thought a cigarette was no use to you," said Heriot, laughing. "And yet you've never gone back to your pipe, I believe?"
"Sir!"
Heriot was smiling the beatified smile that always broke through his first cloud.
"You don't suppose I didn't know, Rutter, that you used to smoke when you first came here?"
"You never let me see that you knew it, sir."
"You never let me catch you! I 'smelt it off you,' as they say, all the same; but I shouldn't have done so if I hadn't known all those things I was not supposed to know."
"It was magnificent of you to hush them up as you did!"
"It was a duty. But it wouldn't have been quite fair to trade on one's knowledge at the same time."
"Every master wouldn't look at it like that."
"Perhaps I had a sneaking sympathy as well," laughed Heriot, when he had blown a fresh cloud. "Still, I should have caught you if you hadn't given it up; and I've often wondered why you ever did."
"It was all Mr. Relton," said Jan after a pause. "I promised him I wouldn't smoke if I got into the Eleven."
"Relton, eh?" Jan found himself gazing into still spectacles. "I've been wondering lately, Rutter, whether you're the fellow he thought he saw at the fair?"
Jan was more taken aback than he had been about the smoking. This was the first time Heriot had ever mentioned the ancient escapade which had come to light with so much else a month ago. It was the one thing they had not threshed out since the Sunday after Founder's Day, and yet on that awful Saturday night Jan felt that Heriot had been twice on the edge of the subject, and twice stopped short because he could not trust himself to discuss it calmly. Getting out of the best house in the school was an offence not to be condoned or belittled by the best house-master, even after two long years and a quarter. So Jan had felt till this minute; even now he had to face a lingering austerity behind the fixed glasses.
"Did he tell you he saw somebody, sir?"
"Not in so many words. He came in and asked what I thought would happen to a fellow who got out and went to the fair. I told him what I knew would happen. Then he began to hedge a bit, and I smelt a rat before he went. But I little dreamt it was a rat from my own wainscot! However, I'm not going to ask any questions now."
Cunning old Heriot! Jan made a clean breast on the spot, conceiving that the whole truth said more for Dudley Relton than Bob Heriot was the man to gainsay when he heard it. But Jan added a good deal on his own account, ascribing even more than was justly due to that old night's work, and yet extracting an ultimate admission that meant much from Mr. Heriot.
"I'm glad he took the law into his own hands, Jan; it would be an affectation to pretend I'm not, at this time of day. But I'm thankful I never knew about it when he was here! What beats me most is your own audacity in marching out, as you say, without the least premeditation, and therefore presumably without any sort or shape of disguise?"
Jan took his courage between his teeth.
"I not only walked out of your own door, sir, but I went and walked out in your own coat and hat!"
Heriot flushed and flashed. He could not have been the martinet he was without seeing himself as such, and for the moment in a light injurious to that essential quality. Then he laughed heartily, but not very long, and his laughter left him grave.
"You were an awful young fool, you know! It would have been the end of you, without the option of a præpostors' licking, if not with one from me thrown in! But you may tell Dudley Relton, when you see him out there, that I'm glad to know what a debt I've owed him these last three years. I won't write to him, in case I might say something else while I was about it. But Lord! I do envy you both the crack you'll have in those forsaken wilds!"
Mr. Heriot perhaps pictured the flourishing port of Geelong as a bush township, only celebrated for Dudley Relton and his young barbarians. Colonial geography, unlike that of Ancient Greece, was not then a recognised item in the public-school curriculum. It may be now; but on the whole it is more probable that Mr. Heriot was having a little dig at the land to which he grudged Jan Rutter even more than Dudley Relton. And Jan really was going to the wilderness, or a lodge therein where one of the uncles on his mother's side ran sheep by the hundred thousand. It was said to be a good opening. Jan liked the letters he had read and the photographs he had and if that uncle proved a patch on the one in the Indian Army, he was certain to fall on his feet; but his house-master held that after a more or less stormy schooling the peace (with cricket) of the University would have replenished the man without impairing the eventual squatter. The immediate man was Mr. Heriot's chief concern; but when the thing had been decided against him, after a brief correspondence with the Revd. Canon Ambrose, he saw the best side of a settled future, and took an extra interest from his own point of view.
"What are your sheep going to get out of your Public School?" said Heriot. "Will you herd them any better for having floundered through the verbs in μι? Don't you think a lot that you have learnt here will be wasted?"
"I hope not, sir," replied Jan, with the solemn face due to the occasion, though there was an independent twinkle behind Heriot's glasses.
"So do I, indeed," said he. "But I shall be interested; you're a bit of a test case—you see—and you may help us all."
"I only know I'm jolly glad I came here," said Jan devoutly. "I wasn't once, but I am now, and have been long enough."
"But what have you gained?" asked Heriot. "That's what I always want to know—for certain. A bit of Latin and a lot of cricket, no doubt; but how far are they coming in? If you get up a match at the back of beyond, you'll spoil it with your bowling. On the other hand, of course, you'll be able to measure your paddocks in parasangs and call your buggy-horses Dactyl and Spondee—or Hex and Pen if you like if better!"
Jan guffawed, but there was an unsatisfied sound about Heriot's chuckle.
"I want a fellow like you, Rutter, to get as nearly as possible 100 per cent, out of himself in life; and I should like to think that—what?—say 10 or 20 per cent, of the best of you came from this place. Yet you might have learnt to bowl as well on any local ground. And I wonder if we've taught you a single concrete thing that will come in useful in the bush."
"I might have been a pro. by this time," said Jan, set thinking of his prospects in his father's life-time. "I certainly was more used to horses when I came here than I am now."
"It isn't as if we'd taught you book-keeping, for instance," continued Heriot, pursuing his own line of thought. "That, I believe, is an important job on the most remote stations; but I doubt if we've even fitted you to audit books that have been kept for you. The only books we have rubbed into you are the very ones you'll never open again. And what have you got out of them?"
"I can think of one thing," said Jan—"and I got it from Mr. Haigh, too! Possunt quia posse videntur—you can because you think you can. I've often said that to myself when there was a good man in—and sometimes I've got him!"
"That's good!" exclaimed Heriot. "That's fine, Jan; you must let me tell Haigh that. Can you think of anything else?"
"I don't know, sir. I never was much good at work. But sometimes I've thought it teaches you your place, a school like this."
"It does—if you want teaching. But you"
"I'd learnt it somewhere else, but I had it to learn all over again here."
"You always have—each time you get your step—that's one of the chief points about promotion! You may have been schoolmastering for fifteen years, but you've got to learn your place even in your own house when you get one."
That touch put Jan more at his ease.
"And you may have been in the Eleven two or three years," said he, "but you've got a new job to tackle when you're captain. They say there's room at the top, but there isn't room to sit down!"
"That was worth learning!" cried Heriot, eagerly. "I'm not sure it wasn't worth coming here to pick up that alone. And you'll manage your men all right, though I daresay they're not any easier out there than here. That's all to the good, Rutter."
"But suppose I hadn't been a left-hand bowler?"
Jan grinned; it had struck him as a poser.
"Well, you'd have come to the front in something else. You did, you know, in other things besides cricket. It's a case of character, and that was never wanting."
But if he had not been an athlete at all! That was the real poser. Heriot was glad it was not put to him. It would have been unanswerable in the case of perhaps half the athletes in the school. What would Goose have been?
"Then there's manners," said Jan, who could warm up to a discussion if he was given time. "But I doubt I'm no judge of them."
"They're the very worst criterion in the world, Jan. The only way to use your judgment, there, is not to judge anybody on earth by his manners."
That was not quite what Jan meant, but he felt vaguely comforted and Heriot breathed again. He was not a man who could say what he did not mean to people whom he did care about. He knew that Jan could still be uncouth, that it might tell against him here and there in life, and yet that what he meant was no more than flotsam on the surface of a noble stream—strong, transparent, deep—and in its depths still undefiled. Indeed, there were no lees in Jan. And Heriot loved him; and they fell to talking for the last time (and almost the first) of old Thrale's sermon on the Sunday after the Old Boys' Match, and the curious fact that he meant Jan to be there, that Heriot himself had come to fetch him; that was when Jan hid behind the door, little dreaming that Evan had owned up everything on learning what had happened.
"I might have known he would!" said Jan fondly. "It was only a question of time; but you say he didn't hesitate an instant? He wouldn't! But thank goodness he didn't go and make bad worse like I did for him. It would have killed him to get expelled; he says it was the bare thought that very nearly did, as it was."
Jan did not see that was a confession he could not have made, or have had to make, about himself; and Heriot did not point it out to him. Presently Chips came in from the Sanatorium. He reported Evan as convalescent in body and mind, and so appreciative of the verses on the Old Boys' Match in the July Mag. that he was getting them framed with the score.
"We've been talking about what you fellows get out of a school like this," said Heriot. "If you ever take to your pen, I think you may owe us more than most, Carpenter; but there was one man once who said what we're all three probably thinking to-night. Here's his little book of verses. I've had a copy bound for each of you. Here they are."
The little books were bound in the almost royal blue of the Eleven sash and cap-trimming. Carpenter had scarcely opened his when he exclaimed, "Here's an old friend!" and read out:
"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky."
"Rather an old enemy, that," said Jan, grinning.
"Then, my good fellow, you're incapable of appreciating four of the most classically perfect lines in a modern language!"
Heriot had quite turned on Jan. It took Chips to explain their former acquaintance with the lines, which he did with much gusto. And then they all three laughed heartily over his misconstruction of "Still are thy quiet voices, thy nightingales, awake," in the second stanza, and roared at Jan's nostro loquendo in the first.
"But that's not the poem I mean," said Heriot, borrowing Jan's copy. "It's this 'Retrospect of School Life.' Can you stand it?"
"Rather, sir!"
And Heriot read a verse that made them hold their breath; then this one, with his head turned towards Jan, and a rich tremor in his virile voice:
"There courteous strivings with my peers,
And duties not bound up in books,
And courage fanned by stormy cheers,
And wisdom writ in pleasant looks,
And hardship buoyed with hope, and pain
Encountered for the common weal,
And glories void of vulgar gain,
Were mine to take, were mine to feel."
"Isn't that rather what we were driving at?" he asked of Jan.
Jan nodded. Chips begged for more, with a break in his voice. Heriot wagged his spectacles and went on. . .
"Much lost I; something stayed behind,
A snatch, maybe, of ancient song;
Some breathings of a deathless mind.
Some love of truth, some hate of wrong. …
"And to myself in games I said,
"'What mean the books? Can I win fame?
I would be like the faithful dead
A fearless man, and pure of blame.
I may have failed, my School may fail;
I tremble, but thus much I dare;
I love her. Let the critics rail,
My brethren and my home are there.'"
Chips had laid an emotional hand on Jan's arm after the last line but four; and Heriot went almost as far after the last one of all; but Jan had himself well in hand.
"That's what you and I were forgetting, and we mustn't," Heriot said to him. "Your name isn't only up in the pavilion. It's in some of our hearts as well. Your brethren and your home are here!"
Still Jan looked rather stolid.
"There's just one line I should like to alter," said he with hardihood. "Do you mind reading the first verse over again, sir?"
And Heriot read:
"I go, and men who know me not,
When I am reckoned man, will ask,
"'What is it then that thou hast got
By drudging through that five-year task?
What knowledge or what art is thine?
Set out thy stock, thy craft declare.
Then this child-answer shall be mine,
'I only know they loved me there.'"
"It's just that last line," said Jan. "It should be the other way about."
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