Fathers of Men

Bingley might have been an infant Mephistopheles; but he was really only an incredulous, irritated, and rather excited schoolboy.

“You’ll see directly,” muttered Jan, slipping his braces over his night-shirt.

“You’ll be caught to a certainty, and bunked if you’re caught!”

That was Chips, in desperation now.

“And a good job too! I’ve had about enough of this place.”

That was the Jan of their first term together.

“And it’s raining like the very dickens!”

This was the child in Crabtree’s corner, an insensible little sinner, who seemed to take the imminent enormity as an absolute matter of course.

“So much the better,” said Jan. “I’ll take a brolly and run all the less risk of being seen, and you see if I don’t bring you all something from the fair.”

“It’s something he’s gone and got to-day,” whispered Bingley for Chips’s consolation. “It’s all a swizzle, you’ll see.”

“You look out of the window in about five minutes,” retorted Jan from the door, “and p’r’aps you’ll see!”

And out he actually stole, carrying the clean boots that he had brought up to dormitory in readiness for first school, and leaving Chips in muzzled consternation on the threshold.

The rain pelted on the skylight over the stairs. It had been a showery day, but it was a very wet night, and Jan was almost as glad of it as he had just professed himself. He saw a distant complication of wet clothes, but as a mere umbrella among umbrellas he stood a really fair chance of not being seen. It was still only a chance; but that was half the fun. And fun it was, though a terrifying form of fun, and though Jan was already feeling a bit unsound about the knees, he had to go on with it; there was as yet no question in his mind about that, and hardly any looking back at the ridiculous combination of taunt and impulse which had committed him to this mad adventure.

Conversation had ceased in the top long dormitory; in the one below a dropping fire was still maintained; and the intervening flight of lead-lined stairs, taken one at a time, with terrible deliberation, and in his socks, struck a chill to the adventurer’s marrow. He began to think he really was a fool; but he would look a bigger one if he went back now. So he gained the foot of the second flight in safety, and paused to consider his next move. The flags were colder than the leaden stairs; so he sat on the slate table while he put on his boots; and the slate table was colder than the flags.

His first idea had been to get out into the quad, as he had got out into it his very first morning in the place, through the hall windows. But the rain rather spoilt that plan; the rain was not an unmixed blessing after all. The umbrellas, now he came to think of it, were kept in the lower study passage; and how was he to break in there? Of course the outer doors would be locked; and he might get wet through in the quad, before effecting an entry into the lower studies, and even then leaving a dripping trail behind him.

No; if he wanted an umbrella he must borrow old Bob Heriot’s. That was a paralysing alternative, but it was the only one to returning humiliated to dormitory. After all, the hat-stand was only just on the other side of the green baize door under which Jan could see the thinnest thread of light from Heriot’s outer hall. And dear old Bob sat up till all hours; that was notorious; and his study was beyond the dining-room, leading out of it, so that in all probability there would be two shut doors between the intruder and the unsuspecting master of the house.

But the long lean figure of Robert Heriot, smoking his pipe in the inner sanctuary, cocking a quick ear at the furtive footstep on his side of the house, and finally confronting the audacious offender, with bristling beard and flashing spectacles, made all at once the most portentous picture in Jan’s mind. Heriot of all men! The one master with whom the boldest boy never dared to take a liberty; the one whose good opinion was best worth having, and perhaps hardest to win; why had he not thought of Heriot before? To think of him now so vividly was to abandon the whole adventure in a panic. Better the scorn of fifty Bingleys, for the rest of the term, than the wrath of one Heriot for a single minute such as he had just gone through in a paroxysm of the imagination.

Jan found himself creeping upstairs more gingerly than ever in his boots, climbing nearer and nearer to the dropping voices in the lower dormitory. That was Shockley’s guttural monologue. It was Shockley who had said the hardest thing to Jan about his running, in just that hateful voice. It was Shockley who would have the most and the worst to say if it came to his ears, as no doubt it would, that one of his special butts had made such a feeble fool of himself as Jan knew that he was making now. And then life would be duller even than it had been before, and school a rottener place, and himself a greater nonentity than ever. Nay, all these changes for the worse had already taken place in the last minute of ignominious retreat. But a minute ago, yes, a minute ago there had been some excitement in life, and a fellow had felt somebody for once!

“I’m blowed if I do,” said Jan deliberately to himself; and down he went with equal deliberation to the green baize door. It opened with scarcely a sound. A light was burning in the little entrance hall beyond. And the dining-room door was providentially shut.

Here was Heriot’s umbrella; and it was wet. Hanging over it was an Irish tweed cape, a characteristic garment, also a bit wet about the hem. Old Bob Heriot had been out, but he had come in again, and it could not be quite eleven. Unless tradition lied he was safe in his den for another hour.

From his fit of cowardice Jan had flown to the opposite extreme of foolhardy audacity. What better disguise than Heriot’s coat and even Heriot’s hat, the soft felt one that was also rather wet already? Jan had them on in a twinkling, drunk as he was already with the magnitude of his impudence. It would give them something to talk about, whether he was caught or not. That was Jan’s way of expressing to himself his intention of contributing to the annals of the school, whatever happened.

The front door had not been locked up for the night, and it never was by day. Heriot had his happy-go-lucky ways, but the town as a rule was as quiet as the sleepiest hollow. Jan managed to shut the door almost noiselessly behind him, never thinking now of his return. Out in the rain the umbrella went up at once; like an extinguisher, he jammed it down about his ears; and the instinct of further concealment drove his left hand deep into a capacious pocket. It came upon one of old Heriot’s many pipes. Next instant the pipe was between the madman’s teeth, and Jan, on the opposite pavement of a dripping and deserted street, was flourishing the umbrella and pointing out the pipe to three white faces at a window in the shiny roof.

He would not have cared, at that moment, if he had known that he was going to be caught the next. But nobody was abroad just then in that rain to catch him. And not further down the street than Jan could have jerked a fives-ball, the glare of the market-place lit up the stone front and archway of the Mitre. And the blare of the steam merry-go-round waxed fast and furious as he marched under Heriot’s umbrella into the zone of light.

“He wears a penny flower in his coat —
Lardy-dah —
And a penny paper collar round his throat —
Lardy-dah —
In his hand a penny stick,
In his tooth a penny pick,
And a penny in his pocket —
Lardy-dah – lardy-dah —
And a penny in his pocket —
Lardy-dah!”

Jan had picked up the words from some fellow who used to render such rubbish to a worse accompaniment on the hall piano; and they ran in his head with the outrageous tune. They reminded him that he had scarcely a penny in his own pocket, thanks to his munificent people in Norfolk, and for once it was just as well. Otherwise he would certainly have had a ride, in Heriot’s well-known foul-weather garb, on one of “Collinson’s Royal Racing Thoroughbreds, the Greatest and Most Elaborate Machine now Travelling.”

Last nights are popular nights, and the fair was crowded in spite of the rain. Round and round went the wooden horses, carrying half the young bloods of the little place, with here and there an apple-cheeked son or daughter of the surrounding soil. Jan tilted his umbrella to have a look at them; their shouts were drowned by the shattering crash of the steam organ, but their flushed faces caught fresh fire from a great naked light as they whirled nearest to where Jan stood. One purple countenance he recognised as the pace slackened; it was Mulberry, the local reprobate of evil memory, swaying in his stirrups and whacking his wooden mount as though they were in the straight.

The deafening blare sank to a dying whine; the flare-light sputtered audibly in the rain, and Jan jerked his umbrella forward as the dizzy riders dismounted within a few yards of him. Jan turned his back on them, and contemplated the cobbles under his nose, and the lighted puddles that ringed them round, like meshes of liquid gold. He watched for the unsteady corduroys of Mulberry, and withdrew at their approach. But there was no certain escape short of immediate departure from the fair, which occupied little more than the area of a full-sized lawn tennis court, and covered half of that with the merry-go-round, and another quarter with stalls and vans.

One of the stalls displayed a legend which seemed to Jan to deserve more custom than it attracted.

Rings Must Lie to Win

Watch-la!

2 Rings 1d

ALL YOU RING YOU HAVE

The watches lay in open cardboard boxes on a sloping board. There was a supply of wooden rings that just fitted round the boxes. Jan watched one oaf run through several coppers, his rings always lying between the boxes or on top of one. Jan felt it was a case for a spin, and he longed to have a try with that cunning left hand of his. But he had actually only twopence on him, and the first necessity was two-pennyworth of evidence that he had really been to the fair. Yet what trophy could compare with one of those cheap watches in its cardboard box?

It so happened that Jan had a watch of his own worth everything on sale at this trumpery fair; but he could almost have bartered it for one of these that would show the top dormitory, at any rate, the kind of chap he was. And yet he was not the kind who often saw himself in heroic proportions; but an abnormal mood was at the back and front of this whole adventure; and perhaps no more fitting climax could have inflamed a reeling mind. He produced his pennies with sudden determination, yet with a hand as cool as his brain was hot, and as cool a preliminary survey to make sure that Mulberry was not already dogging him.

“Two rings a penny,” said the fur-capped custodian of the watches, handing the rings to Jan. “An’ wot you rings you 'aves.”

Jan stood alone before the sloping board, kept a few feet off by an intervening table, and he poised his first ring as the steam fiend broke out again with “Over the Garden Wall.” A back-handed spin sent it well among the watches, and it went on spinning until it settled at an angle over one of the boxes, as though loth to abandon the attempt to ring it properly.

“Rings must lie flat to win,” said the fellow in the fur cap, with a quick squint at Jan. “Try again, mister; you’ll do better with less spin.”

Jan grinned dryly as he resolved to put on a bit more. He had heard his father drive hard bargains in the Saturday night’s marketing aforetime. Old Rutter had known how to take care of himself across any stall or barrow, even when his gait was like Mulberry’s on the way home; and Jan had a sense of similar capacity as he poised his second ring against the voluminous folds of Mr. Heriot’s cape. Thence it skimmed with graceful trajectory, in palpable gyrations; had circled one of the square boxes before he knew it, and was spinning down it like a nut on a bolt, when the man in the fur cap whipped a finger between the ring and the table.

“That’s a near one, mister!” cried he. “But it don’t lie flat.”

Nor did it. The ring had jammed obliquely on the cardboard box, a finger’s breadth from the board.

“It would’ve done if you’d left it alone!” shouted Jan above the steam fiend’s roar.

“That it wouldn’t! It’s a bit o’ bad luck, that’s wot it is; never knew it to 'appen afore, I didn’t; but it don’t lie straight, now do it?”

“It would’ve done,” replied Jan through his teeth. “And the watch is mine, so let’s have it.”

Whether he said that more than once, or what the fur-capped foe replied, Jan never knew. The merry-go-round robbed him of half that passed between them, and all that was to follow blurred the rest as soon as it had taken place. One or two salient moments were to stand out in his mind like rocks. He was sprawling across the intervening table, he had seized the watch that he had fairly won, and the ruffian in the cap had seized his wrist. That horny grip remained like the memory of a handcuff. The thing developed into a semi-recumbent tug-of-war, in which Jan more than held his own. The watches in their boxes came sliding down the sloping board, the fur-cap followed them, and a head like a fluffy melon hung a-ripening as the blood rushed into it. Jan beheld swelling veins in a stupor of angry satisfaction, and without a thought of his own position until a rap on the back went through him like a stab.

It was only a country policeman in streaming leggings; but he had not arrived alone upon the scene; and Jan felt the flooded cobble-stones heaving under him, as he relinquished his prize at once, and recoiled from the gaze of countless eyes.