Fathers of Men

“Come! I don’t suppose it’s anything so very bad,” said he, encouragingly.

“Bad enough to prevent me from playing to-day, I’m afraid.”

“You surely don’t mean – that anybody’s dead?”

“I know I wish I was!”

“It isn’t that, then?”

“No; but I’ve got to meet somebody at two o’clock. I simply must,” declared Evan, with an air of dull determination.

“Some of your people?” asked Jan, and supplied the negative himself before Evan could shake his head. “I thought not. Then do you mind telling me who it is?”

No answer from Evan but averted looks.

“Well, where is it that you’ve got to meet them?”

“Yardley Wood.”

Jan was there in a flash; he was looking over the posts and rails at the besotted figure waving and beckoning in the lower meadow; he was meeting Sandham and Evan, hurrying up the lane, not five minutes afterwards.

“Is it old Mulberry?” asked Jan, with absolute certainty that it was.

“What do you know about him?” cried Evan suspiciously.

Jan forced a conciliatory grin. “I thought everybody knew something about Mulberry,” he said.

“But what makes you think of him the moment I mention Yardley Wood?”

“I saw him come out the other Sunday.”

“I daresay. He hides there half the summer. But what’s that got to do with me?”

“He waved to us by mistake, and the next thing was that we met you and Sandham coming up as we went down.”

“So you put two and two together on the spot?”

“Well, more or less between us.”

“Oh, Carpenter, of course! He was with you, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. But Chips wouldn’t let out a word, any more than I would, Evan. Not,” added Jan, “that there’s anything to let out in what you’ve told me as yet… Is there, Evan?” The opportunity afforded by a pointed pause had not been taken. “You may as well tell me now you’ve got so far – but don’t you if you’ve thought better of it.” There again was the studious delicacy that was growing on Jan, that had always been in his blood.

Evan flung up his head once more.

“I’ll tell you, of course. I came to tell you. It’s nothing awful after all. There’s no harm in it, really; only you can do things at home, quite openly, with your people, that become a crime if you do them here.”

“That’s true enough,” said Jan who still smoked his pipe in Norfolk. He felt relieved. Evidently it was some such trifle that law-abiding Evan was magnifying in his constitutional horror of a row.

Jan asked outright if it was smoking, if Mulberry had been getting them cigars, and was at once informed eagerly that he had. But that was not all; the old tell-tale face was scarlet with the rest. And out it all came at last.

“The fact is, Sandham and I have had a bit of a spree now and again in Yardley Wood. Champagne. Not a drop too much, of course, or you’d have heard of it, and so should we. No more harm in it than if you had it in the holidays. I know at one time we used to have champagne every night at home. Heaps of people do; they certainly did at Lord Allenborough’s. And yet it’s such a frightful crime to touch it here!”

“I suppose Mulberry found out?”

“No – he got it for us.”

“I see. And I suppose you paid him through the nose?” continued Jan at length. He would have been the first to take Evan’s lenient view of such a peccadillo, if Evan himself had said less in extenuation. But just as Chips Carpenter would dry Jan’s genial currents by the overflow of his own, so even Evan had taken the excuses out of his mouth, and left it shut awhile.

“That’s just it,” replied Evan. “We have paid a wicked price, but we haven’t quite squared up, and now it’s all falling on me.”

“How much do you still owe him?”

“Between four and five pounds.”

Jan looked grave; any such sum seemed a great deal to him.

“Can’t you raise it from your people?” he suggested.

“No, I can’t. They’re all abroad, for one thing.”

“What about Sandham and his lot?”

“I can’t write to him, you see. Anybody might get hold of it; besides, there’s no time.”

“He’s pressing you, is he?”

“I’ve got to pay up this afternoon.”

“The moment Sandham’s out of the way!”

Jan’s eyes had brightened; but Evan was too miserable to meet them any more; he could speak more freely without facing his confessor. His tone was frankly injured, ingenuously superior, as though the worst of all was having to come with his troubles to the likes of Jan, if he would kindly bear that in mind.

Details came out piecemeal, each with its covering excuse. As some debaters fight every inch in controversy, so Evan went over the humiliating ground planting flags of defiant self-justification. The business had begun last term; and still Sandham had been easy Champion; that showed how harmless the whole thing had been. But when Jan asked how much Mulberry had been paid already, the amount amazed him. Evan had given it without thinking; but when asked whether he and Sandham had got through all that alone, he refused to answer, saying that was their business, and turning again very red. At any rate he was not going to drag in anybody else, he declared as though he were standing up to old Thrale himself, and by way of suffering the extreme penalty for his silence.

Jan saw exactly what had happened. It was Sandham who had led Evan into mischief; but that was the last thing of all that Evan could be expected to admit. Between them these two might have led others; but all that mattered to Jan was the old story of the strong villain and the weak-kneed accomplice. Of course it was the villain who escaped the consequences; and very hard it seemed even to Jan. Sandham was reported to have his own banking account; he could have written a cheque for four or five pounds without feeling it; probably he had refused to do so, probably the whole thing was a dexterous attempt to blackmail Evan while his masterful friend was out of reach.

Jan asked a few questions, and extracted answers which left him nodding to himself with rare self-satisfaction. On Evan they had an opposite effect. Unless he went with the money to the wood, before three o’clock, the villainous Mulberry was “coming in to blab the whole thing out to Jerry.” And he would do it, too, a low wretch like that, with nothing to lose by it! And what would that mean but being bunked in one’s last term – but breaking one’s people’s hearts – Jan knew them – as well as one’s own?

Evan’s voice broke as it was. He laid his forehead on his hand, thus hiding and yet trying to save his face; and Jan could not help a thrill of joy at the sight of Evan, of all people, come to him, of all others, for aid in such a pass. He was ashamed of feeling as he did; and yet it was no ignoble sense of power, much less of poetic justice or revenge, that touched and fired this still very simple heart. It was only the final conviction that here at last was his chance of doing something for Evan, something to win a new place in his regard, and to efface for ever the subtly tenacious memory of the old ignominous footing between them. That was all Jan felt, as he sat and looked, with renewed compassion, yet with just that thrilling human perception of his own great ultimate gain, at the bowed head and abject figure of him whom he had loved and envied all his days.

“He doesn’t happen to have put his threat into black and white, I suppose?”

Jan felt that he was asking a stupid question. Of course he would have heard of anything of the kind before this. He did not realise the break that Evan’s vanity was still putting on Evan’s tongue. But when a dirty little document was produced, even now reluctantly, and found to contain that very word “blab,” with the time, place, and exact amount stipulated, Jan soon saw why it had not been put in before. It referred to a broken appointment on the day of writing. That was another thing Evan had not mentioned. It accounted for his strange unreadiness to play in the match, as well as for the threats accompanying the impudently definite demand.

“This is what he asks, eh? So this would settle him?”

“There’s no saying,” replied Evan, doubtfully. “I thought we had settled, more or less.”