Fathers of Men

“Plenty.”

“Name something – anything – he’s ever done except when you were in a position to do more for him!”

And then Jan did tell him where to go. But Chips only laughed in his face, with the spendthrift courage of a fellow who did not as a rule show enough, though he had it all the same when his blood was up. And now he was in as great a passion as Jan, and just for a moment it was as fine a passion too.

“You start cursing me because you haven’t any answer. Curse away, and come to blows if you like; you shan’t shift me out of this until I’ve said what I’ve got to say, not if I have to hang on to this bedstead and bring the place about our ears!”

“Don’t be a fool, Chips,” said Jan, perceiving that he required self-control for two. “You know you’ve always had a down on Evan.”

“Well, perhaps I have. Doesn’t he deserve it? What did he ever do for you your first term – though he’d known you at home?”

“That was no reason why he should do anything. What could he do? We were in different houses and different forms; besides, I was higher up in the school, as it happened, as well as a bit older.”

“That’s nothing; still I rather agree with you, though he was here first, remember. But what about your second term or my third? He overtook us each in turn, but did he ever go out of his way to say a civil word to either of us, though he’d known us both before?”

“Yes; he did.”

“Yes, he did! When you’d made a little bit of a name for yourself over the Mile he was out for a walk with you in a minute. That’s the fellow all over, and has been all the time. I remember how it was when you got in the Eleven, if you don’t!”

But Jan did remember, and it made him think. Like most boys who are good at games, he had acquired in their practice great fairness of mind. He thought Chips was unfair to Evan, and yet he wanted to be fair to Chips, whom he recognised in his heart as by far the sounder fellow of the two. Chips was the loyal, unswerving, faithful friend who not only bore a friend’s infirmities but blew his trumpet as few would blow their own. But he had without doubt some of the usual defects of such qualities; he was touchy, he could be jealous, though Jan was not the one to tell him that; but on the touchiness he dwelt with a tact made tender by his own trouble.

“The fact is, Chips, you’re such a good old chap yourself that you want everybody else to be the same as you. You wouldn’t hurt a fellow’s feelings, so you can’t forgive the chaps who do it without thinking. Not one in a hundred makes as much of things as you do, or takes things so to heart. But that’s because you’re what you are, Chips; you oughtn’t to be down on everybody who doesn’t happen to be built as straight and true.”

“Don’t be too sure that I’m either!” exclaimed Carpenter, flinching unaccountably.

“You’re only about the straightest chap in the whole school, Chips. Everybody knows that, I should think.”

“I’ve a good mind to set everybody right!” cried Carpenter, worked up to more than he had dreamed of saying, a wild impulse burning in his eyes. “I can’t see you bunked for nothing, when others including me have done all sorts of things to deserve it. Yes, Jan, including me! You think I’ve been so straight! So I was in the beginning; so I am now, if you like, but I’ve not been all the time. Don’t stop me. I won’t be stopped; but that’s about all I’ve got to say. I’ve always wanted you to know. You’re the only fellow in the place I care much for, who cares much for me, though not so much – ”

“Yes I do, Chips, yes I do! I never thought so much of you as I do this minute… I don’t say it never crossed my mind… But don’t you make yourself out worse than you ever were, even to me!”

“I don’t want to… It didn’t go on so long, and it’s all over now… But I shall get the præpostor’s medal when I leave – unless I’m man enough to refuse it – and you’ve been bunked for standing by a fellow who never would have stood by you!”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Chips,” said Jan, gently.

“No, I’m not. It’s the other way about.”

“You don’t know how Evan’s stood by me all these years.”

Carpenter maintained a strange silence – very strange in him, just then especially – a silence that made him ashamed and yet exultant.

“Do you know, Chips?”

“It depends what you think he’s done.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Jan with sudden yet quiet resolution, and a lift of his head as though the peak of a cap had been pulled down too far. “I had a secret when I came here, and Evan knew it but nobody else. It was a big secret – about my people and me too – and if it had come out then I’d have bolted like a rabbit. I know now that it wouldn’t have mattered as much as I thought it would; things about your people, or anything that ever happened anywhere else, don’t hurt or help much in a place like this. It’s what you can do and how you take things that matters here. But I didn’t know that then and I don’t suppose Evan did either. Yet he kept a quiet tongue in his head about everything he did know. And that’s what I owe him – all it meant to me then, and does still in a way – his holding his tongue like that!”

Still Chips held his; and now Jan was the prey of doubts which his own voice had silenced. All that the familiar debt had gained by clear statement was counteracted by the stony demeanour of its first auditor.

“Did he ever tell you, Chips?”

“The very first time I saw him, our very first term!”

“Not – not about my father and – the stables – and all that?”

“Everything!”

Jan threw himself back four years.

“Yet when I sounded you at the time – ”

“I told you the lie of my life!” said Chips. “I couldn’t help myself. But this is the truth!”

And Jan took it with the enviable composure which had only deserted him when Evan was being traduced; it was several seconds before he made a sound, still standing there with his back to the bedroom window; and then the sound was very like a chuckle.

“Well, at any rate he can’t have told many!”

“I don’t suppose he did.”

“Then he picked the right one, Chipsey, and I still owe him almost as much as I do you.”

“You owe old Heriot more than either of us.”

“Heriot! Why? Does he know?”

“He knew all along, but he never meant you to know that he knew. He guessed how you’d feel it if you did; he guesses everything! Why, that very first Saturday, if you remember, when Devereux turned up for call-over and began telling me the minute afterwards, it was as though Bob Heriot simply saw what he was saying! He pounced upon us both that instant, dropped a pretty plain hint on the spot, but asked us to breakfast next morning and then absolutely bound us over never to let out a single word about you in all our days here!”

“So Evan’d been talking before he told me he never would,” mused Jan. “Well, I can’t blame him so much for that. I’m not sure, Chips, that I should have done so differently now even if I’d known. I liked him even in the old days when we were kids. Must you go?”

The question was asked in a very wistful tone. Chips felt, rather uneasily, that in these few minutes he had ousted Evan and taken his old place. He could not help it if he had. It had not been his intention on coming into the room. It was no use regretting it now.

“I told Heriot I wouldn’t stay very long,” he answered. “I’ll get him to let me come up again.”

“And you won’t tell him anything about Evan?”

“How do you mean?”

“You won’t tell him a single word about our having seen him and Sandham that day?”

Chips was silent.

“Surely you wouldn’t go getting them bunked as well as me?”

“Well – no – not exactly.”

“I should think not! It wouldn’t do any good, you see, even if you did,” said Jan, suddenly discovering why he had looked so mysterious some minutes back. “You forget that Evan and I used to go about together quite as much as he and Sandham have been doing all this year. What if it was me that first started playing the fool in Yardley Wood? What if old Mulberry knows more against me than anybody else? It wouldn’t do me much good to put them in the same boat, would it?”

“But does he, Jan, honestly?”