Fathers of Men

“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 it 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.