Torture
"I really do not know what to do with him," said the father. "He seems absolutely stupid."
"Poor boy!" said his mother, "I am afraid he is not well. He doesn't look in good health."
"But what's the matter with him? He eats well enough; he had two helpings of meat, and two of pudding to-day at dinner, and a quarter of an hour afterwards he was munching some sweet stuff. His appetite's all right, you see, anyhow."
"But he's very pale. He makes me feel anxious."
"And he makes me feel anxious. Look at this letter from Wells, the head master. Here you see he says: 'It seems almost impossible to get him to play games; he has had two or three thrashings, as I hear, for shirking cricket. And his form master gives me a very bad account of his work during the term, so that I fear the school is doing him little if any good.' And you see, Mary, it isn't as if he were a little boy; he was fifteen last April. It's getting serious, you know."
"What d'you think we had better do?"
"I wish I knew. Look at him here. He's only been home for a week, and you'd think he'd be in the best of spirits, enjoying himself with the squire's boys, and singing and racketing about all over the place. And you know the way he has been going on, almost from the day he came back; lounging and crawling from the house to the garden and back again, staying in bed half the day, and coming down with his eyes half open. I must insist on that being put a stop to, at all events. I shall trust to you to get him up at a proper time."
"Very well, dear. I thought he looked so tired."
"But he does nothing to make him tired! I wouldn't mind so much if the fellow were bookish, but you see what Wells says on that score. Why, I can't even get him to read a story-book. I declare his face is enough to make one angry. One can see he's totally devoid of any interest in anything."
"I am afraid he's unhappy, Robert."
"Unhappy! A schoolboy unhappy! Well, I wish you'd see what you can do. I find it perfectly useless to talk to him myself."
It was curious, but the father was quite right in laughing at the notion of his son's unhappiness. Harry was, in his quiet way, in the best of spirits. It was perfectly true that he hated cricket, and, the head master might have added, he hated other boys. He cared nothing for printed matter of any kind, whether fact or fiction, and he found Treasure Island as dull as Cicero. But all through the past term he had been pondering an idea; it had been with him in the early mornings in the dormitory, in schooltime and in playtime, and he watched with it at night, long after the other boys had gone to sleep. Before the coming of the idea he had found his existence unhappy enough. He had a puffy, unwholesome face and sandy hair, and his great wide mouth was made the subject of many jests. He was unpopular because he did not like games, and because he would not bathe unless he were flung into the water, and he was always in trouble over his lessons, which he could not understand. He burst out crying one night in the middle of preparation, and of course he would not say what was the matter. The fact was that he had been trying to extract the meaning from some weary nonsense about triangles, known by the absurd name of Euclid, and he had found it utterly impossible to learn the rabid stuff by heart. The impossibility of it, and the hopeless cloud in his mind, and the terror of the thrashing he would get in the morning, broke him down; the "blubbering idiot," as they said.
Those were unhappy times, but that very night his idea came to him, and the holidays became indeed desirable, and ten times desirable. Every day and all the day he elaborated and re-elaborated his great thought, and though he was as stupid, unpopular, and unprofitable as ever, he was no longer wretched.
When he got home at the end of term he lost no time in setting about his task. It was true that he was sleepy and heavy in the mornings, but that was because he worked till late at night. He found it impossible to do much in the day-time; his parents spied out his ways, and he knew that he was much too dull to invent lies and explanations. The day after his return his father had come across him as he slunk into a dark corner of the shrubbery with something hidden under his coat. He could only stand and look hopeless, idiotic, when an empty beer bottle was drawn forth; he could not say what he was doing or what he wanted with a green glass bottle. His father had left him, telling him not to play the fool, and he felt that he was always watched. When he took the cord from the back-kitchen one of the maids was peering after him down the passage, and his mother found him trying to bind a large log of wood to the trunk of one of the trees. She wanted to know what he was doing, and whether he could not find some more sensible amusement, and he stared at her with his heavy white face. He knew that he was under observation, and so he worked at night. The two servant girls who slept in the next room often awoke, fancying they heard a queer sort of noise, a "chink-chink," as one of them described the sensation, but they could not make out what it was.
And at last he was ready. He was "loafing about" one afternoon, and he happened to meet Charlotte Emery, a little girl of twelve, the daughter of a neighbour. Harry flushed to a dull burning red.
"Come for a walk with me to the Beeches?" he said. "I wish you would."
"Oh, I mustn't, Harry. Mother wouldn't like it."
"Do come. I've got a new game; grand fun."
"Is it really? What sort of game is it?"
"I can't show you here. Just walk on towards the Beeches, and I'll follow you directly. I knew you would."
Harry ran full tilt to the hiding-place where he had bestowed his apparatus. He soon overtook Charlotte, and the two went off together towards the Beeches, a lonely wooded hill, a mile away. The boy's father would have been astonished if he could have seen him; Harry was glowing and burning with that dull red colour, but he laughed as he walked beside Charlotte.
When they were alone together in the wood, Charlotte said:
"Now you must show me the game. You promised."
"I know. But you must do just as I tell you."
"Yes, I will."
"Even if it hurts?"
"Yes. But you wouldn't hurt me, Harry. I like you."
The boy stared at her, gazed with his dull, fishy, light blue eyes; his white, unwholesome face glared at her almost in terror. She was a dark girl, olive-skinned, with black eyes and black hair, and the scent of her hair had already half-intoxicated him, as they walked close together.
"You like me," he said at last, stuttering.
"Yes, I like you very much. I love you, Harry dear. Won't you give me a kiss?" And she put her arm round his neck, round the neck of the ugly, pasty schoolboy. The leaden marks under his eyes seemed to grow darker.
He dropped the parcel that he held under one arm. It broke open and the contents fell to the ground. There were three or four fantastic instruments, ugly little knives made of green bottle-glass, clumsily set into wooden handles. He had stolen a broom for this purpose. And there were some lengths of rope, fitted with running nooses. It was the idea that he had so long cherished.
But he threw himself full length upon the grass, and burst into tears—the "blubbering idiot."