Haviland's Chum

“No, sir,” answered Haviland in genuine surprise, for he had made his reports, all in order, his own roll, and the general report as prefect of the week. Yet he didn’t like the tone. It sounded ominous.

“Ah! Let Finch and Harris step forward.”

Two quaking juniors slunk from their places, and stood in the awful presence. The crime charged against the luckless pair was that of trespass. The system of “bounds” did not exist at Saint Kirwin’s, though there were limits of time, such being constituted by frequent callings-over. Otherwise the school could wander as it listed, the longest stretch obtainable being about an hour and three-quarters. There had, however, been a good many complaints of late with regard to boys overrunning the neighbouring pheasant coverts in search of birds’ nests, for egg-collecting had many enthusiastic votaries in the school, and now these two luckless ones, Finch and Harris, had been collared red-handed that very afternoon by a stalwart keeper, and hauled straight away to the Doctor.

But where did Haviland come in? Just this way. In the course of a severe cross-examination in private, the headmaster had elicited from the two frightened juniors that when emerging from some forbidden ground they had seen Haviland under circumstances which rendered it impossible that he should not have seen them. It is only fair to the two that they hardly knew themselves how the information had been surprised out of them – certain it was that no other master could have done it – only the terrible Doctor. It had been ruled of late, by reason of the frequency of such complaints, that all cases of trespass on preserved land should be reported, instead of being dealt with as ordinary misdemeanours by the prefects; and here was a most flagrant instance of breach of trust on the part of one of the latter. As for Haviland, the game was all up, he decided. He would be deprived of his official position, and its great and material privileges, and be reduced to the ranks. He expected nothing less.

“Now, Haviland,” said the Doctor, “how is it you did not report these boys?”

“I ought to have, sir,” was the answer.

“You ought to have,” echoed the Doctor, his voice assuming its most awe-inspiring tones. “And, did you intend to report them?”

Here was a loophole. Here was a chance held out to him. Why not grasp it? At best he would get off with a severe wigging, at worst with an imposition. It would only be a white lie after all, and surely under the circumstances justifiable. The stern eyes of the headmaster seemed to penetrate his brain, and every head was craned forward open-mouthed for his answer. It came.

“I’m afraid I did not, sir.”

“You are afraid you did not! Very well. Then there is no more to be said.” And the Doctor, bending down, was seen to be writing something on a slip of paper – the while the whole school was on tenterhooks, but the excitement was of a more thrilling nature than ever now. What would be the upshot? was in every mind. A swishing of course. Not for Haviland though; he was too old, and a prefect. He would be reduced.

Then the headmaster looked up and proceeded to pass sentence.

“These continual complaints on the part of the neighbours,” he said, “are becoming very serious indeed, and are getting the school a very bad name. I am determined to put a stop to them, and indeed it is becoming a grave question with me whether I shall not gate the whole school during the remainder of the term. These two boys, who have been brought up to me, represent a number of cases, I am afraid, wherein the offenders escape undetected and unpunished: therefore I shall make a severe example of them, and of any others in like case. And now a word to the prefects.”

A long, acrid, and bitter homily for the benefit of those officials followed – the juniors listening with intense delight, not that the order was especially unpopular, but simply the outcome of the glee of juvenile human nature over those set in authority over it being rated and brought to book in their turn. Then, having descanted on authority and trust, and so forth, until every one of those officially endowed with such responsibility began almost to wish they were not – with the exception perhaps of the one who stood certain to be deprived of it – the headmaster proceeded:

“Harris and Finch, I shall flog you both to-morrow morning after divinity lesson, and I may add that any boy reported to me for the same offence will certainly receive the same treatment. As for you, Haviland,” handing him the slip of paper on which he had been writing, “you will post this upon the board. And I warn you that any further dereliction of duty on your part brought to my notice will entail very much more severe consequences.”

Mechanically Haviland took the paper, containing of course the notice of his suspension, and could hardly believe his eyes. This is what he read:

“Haviland. Prefect.

“Fifteen hundred lines (of Virgil). For gross neglect of duty. Gated till done.

“Nicholas Bowen, D.D., Headmaster.”

The great bound of relief evolved by the respite of the heavier penalty was succeeded in his mind by resentment and disgust as he realised the magnitude of this really formidable imposition. The Doctor had left the desk and the room, and now the whole gathering was pouring forth to the outer air again. Not a few curious glances were turned on Haviland to see how he took it: the two condemned juniors, however, being surrounded by a far more boisterously sympathetic crowd – those who had been swished before undertaking, with a hundredfold wealth of exaggeration, to explain to these two, who had not, what it felt like, by way of consolation.

“What’s he given you, Hav?” said Medlicott, a fellow prefect, and rather a chum of the principal victim’s, looking over the notice. “That all! You’ve got off cheap, I can tell you. We reckoned it meant suspension – especially as Nick has a down on you.”

“Nick,” be it observed, was the inevitable name by which the redoubtable headmaster was known among the boys. It had started as “Old Nick,” but the suggestion diabolical had been sacrificed to brevity.

“That all!” echoed Haviland wrathfully. “Fifteen hundred’s a howling stiff impos, Medlicott. And it really means two thou, for the old brute always swears about a third of your stuff is so badly written you’ve got to do it over again. It’s a regulation time-honoured swindle of his. And – just as the egg-season is getting at its best! It’s too beastly altogether.”

Haviland was an enthusiastic egg-hunter, and had a really fine collection. In the season he lived for nothing else, every moment of his spare time being given up to adding to it. Of course he himself frequently transgressed the laws of trespass, but he was never known to bring a junior to book for doing so – on the contrary, he was always careful to look the other way if he suspected the presence of any such.

Now, having fixed the hateful notice to the board nailed to the wall for such purposes, he got out a Virgil and sat down to begin his odious task. The big schoolroom was empty save for a few who were under like penalty with himself. What a lovely afternoon it was, and he would have had nearly an hour and a half, just time to go over and secure the two remaining eggs in that sparrow-hawk’s nest in the copse at the foot of the down – a programme he had mapped out for himself before this grievous misfortune had overtaken him. Now some other fellow would find them, or they would be “set” and useless before he could get out again. “Gated till done.” Half the sting of the penalty lay in those abominable words – for it meant that no foot could be set outside the school gates until the whole of it was completed.

“I say, Haviland. We’re no end sorry.”

The interruption proceeded from the two smaller culprits, predestined to the rod on the morrow. Haviland looked up wrathfully.

“Sorry, are you, you young sweeps? So am I – sorry I didn’t ‘sock’ your heads off.”

“Please, Haviland, can’t we do your impos for you – or at any rate some of it?”

“D’you think Old Nick’s such an ass as all that? Why, he’d spot the fraud a mile off! Besides, remember what he said about breach of trust and all that. He’d better keep that for chapel next Sunday,” he added sneeringly. “Look here, you youngsters, you’ll be well swished to-morrow, a round dozen at least, and you’d better toss for second innings, because then Nick’ll be getting tired – but anyway you’re not gated and I am. Will you go and take a nest for me?”

“Rather. Where is it?” chorussed both boys eagerly.

“Smallest of the two tree patches, foot of Sidebury Down. Sparrow-hawk’s – in an ivy-hung ash. It’s quite an easy climb. You can’t miss it, and there should be two eggs left in it. I collared two a couple of days back, and put in stones. You won’t get pickled for it any more either, because it isn’t on preserved ground. You’ll have to run all the way though.”

They promised, and were off like a shot, and it is only fair to say that they brought back the spoil, and duly and loyally handed it over to its legitimate claimant.

Left to himself, Haviland set to work with an effort. After a hundred of the lines he flung his pen down angrily.

“Hang it, I hate this beastly place,” he muttered to himself. “I don’t care how soon I leave.”

This was not strictly true. He liked the school and its life, in reality more than he was aware of himself. He was always glad to get back to it, for his home life was unattractive. He was the son of an extremely conscientious but very overworked and very underpaid parson, the vicar of a large and shabby-genteel suburban parish, and the fresh, healthy, beautiful surroundings of Saint Kirwin’s all unconsciously had their effect upon his impressionable young mind, after the glaring dustiness, or rain-sodden mud according to the season of the year – of the said suburb. He was a good-looking lad of seventeen, well-grown for his age, and seeming older, yet thus early somewhat soured, by reason of the already felt narrowing effects of poverty, and an utter lack of anything definite in the way of prospects; for he had no more idea of what his future walk in life was to be than the man in the moon.

And so he sat, that lovely cloudless half-holiday afternoon, grinding out his treadmill-like imposition, angrily, rebelliously, his one and only thought to get that over as soon as possible.

Chapter Three.

The Bully

Haviland’s gloomy prediction proved in so far correct, in that when, after nearly a weary week of toil during his spare moments, he handed in his imposition, his insatiable taskmaster insisted on his re-writing two hundred of the lines. Then with lightened heart he found himself free to resume his all-engrossing and gloriously healthy pursuit.

There is, or used to be, a superstition that a boy who didn’t care for cricket or football must necessarily be an ass, a loafer, and to be regarded with some suspicion. Yet in point of fact such by no means follows, and our friend Haviland was a case in point. He could cover as many miles of ground in the limited time allowed as any one in the school, and more than most. He could climb anything, could pick his way delicately through the most forbidden ground, quartering it exhaustively every yard, what time his natural enemy the keeper, his suspicions roused, was on the watch in the very same covert, and return safe and sound with his pearly treasures – to excite the envy and admiration of the egg-collecting fraternity; yet though this represented his pet hobby, he was something of an all-round naturalist, and his wanderings in field and wood were by no means confined to the nesting season.

He might have liked cricket could he have been always in, but fielding out he pronounced beastly slow. As for football he declared he couldn’t see any fun in having his nose jammed an inch and a half deep into liquid mud, with ten or a dozen fellows on top of him trying to jam it in still deeper: and in the result he always wanted to hit some one when he got up again. Besides, a game you were obliged to play whether you wanted to or not, ceased to be a game at all – and during its season football was compulsory on half-holidays, at any rate for the juniors. Now, as a prefect, he was exempt, and he appreciated his exemption. But, his distaste for the two great games notwithstanding, there was nothing of the loafer or the muff about Haviland. He was always in the pink of hard training, clear-eyed, clean-skinned, thoroughly sound in wind and limb.

In the matter of his school work we regret to say that our friend cut a less creditable figure; for in it indeed he shone in no particular branch. His sole object was to get through his work as quickly and as easily as possible, thereby to have more time for his favourite pursuit, wherefore his ambition soared no higher than a respectable middle of the fifth form. The ethics of Saint Kirwin’s held “cribs” to be perfectly justifiable – needless to say not from the masters’ point of view – and a large proportion generously availed themselves of such dubious aid, being of course careful to avoid all the stock catches. Even a certain amount of cribbing in form was held not to be unlawful, although perilous; and when the Reverend Joseph Wilmot – an absent and star-gazing type of master – gravely and impressively warned his Greek Testament form one Sunday, à propos of some suspiciously technical construing, that he should, detect in a moment if any one used the English version, the form was simply dying to roar; the point of the joke being that every fellow composing it had got his English version concealed beneath his locker, and was surreptitiously reading up the part where he would be put on, this having been the practice of the form from time immemorial, and, we grieve to say, destined to continue so indefinitely.

“Serve ’em right,” pronounced Haviland, who was one of the offenders. “They’ve no business to make us work on Sundays. It’s smashing up the fourth commandment. So if we take the English in to form with us it saves us from working, and we get out of smashing the fourth commandment. See?”

They did see, for a shout of acclamation hailed this young casuist’s special pleading. “Besides,” he added, “Old Joe is such an ass. Detect in a moment if any one used the English! Faugh! As if any one in this form had ever done anything else?”

It may be thought that by reason of his own delinquencies Haviland’s authority as a prefect would have been partially if not entirely undermined, yet such was not the case, for under the school code they were justified, whereas the terrible crime of “sneaking” was as much the one unpardonable sin at Saint Kirwin’s as elsewhere. And in the enforcement of that authority he was pitiless, hence his unpopularity – but it answered – and whether he presided over preparation, or in the dormitory, or elsewhere, order reigned. The spirits of misrule were laid.

Once indeed an offender thought to round on him. He had unearthed a smoking case, and the use of tobacco was of course a capital offence. One of the offenders – three biggish fellows by the way – had said meaningly:

“If you do anything in this, Haviland, we can hand you up. We saw you in Needham’s Copse only last week, and other places besides.”

“All right, Starford. You must go before the next prefects’ council, all three of you. This’ll mean a licking I’m afraid, but you’ll have an appeal to the Doctor. You can give me away then if you think it’ll do yourselves any good, but I believe you know Nick better than that.”

He was right, except that the headmaster took the matter out of the prefectorial hands and soundly flogged the culprits himself. But no word did these utter with regard to any delinquency on the part of him who was instrumental in bringing them to justice.

Meanwhile the Zulu boy, Anthony, otherwise Mpukuza, was not finding life at Saint Kirwin’s exactly a bed of roses, the more so that Jarnley and a few other choice spirits were making it their especial business that he should not. Deprived of the protection of his first and accidental defender, he was very much at their mercy. Haviland was gated, and would so remain for some days to come, and so long as they could catch their victim outside, this rough element promised itself plenty of fun. There was no fear of the victim himself giving it away, for although complaining to a prefect was immeasurably less heinous than complaining to a master, still it was not held justifiable except in very extreme cases.