Sons of Fortune (9 page)

Boy’s heart fell to his boots. The Lorrimer inquisition was about to begin. Barn beatings and tongue lashings from Malaby would soon seem very small beer.

Mr. Whymper did a lot of breathing and staring before he spoke. “Last night!” was all he said.

Last night? Did he mean Lorrimer? Or the drumming-in? Or even Blenkinsop? So much had happened last night. Boy was determined not to resolve Whymper’s ambiguity for him.

“Yes, master?”

“Well?”

Boy shrugged, nonplussed.

“Answer the question, dammit, sir!”

“I’m sorry, master. What is the question?”

“You know full well ‘what is the question’!”

“About the drumming-in, master?”

Whymper’s nostrils flared until Boy thought they would disgorge the two black caterpillars. “Drumming-in! Drumming-in? There is no such thing, d’ye hear! This school tolerates no such rituals. If you hear of it, if you hear so much as a whisper, you are to come at once to me and we shall extirpate it, eradicate it, root it out.”

The word “root” must have tripped the schoolmaster’s equivalent of a hair trigger in his mind, for he at once added: “What is the derivation of the words extirpate and eradicate?” Then, no doubt remembering that their business was much too serious for pedagogical games, he said gruffly, “No matter. No matter. You understand what I was saying before?” He glared at Boy, challenging him to so much as mention the drumming-in again.

“Do you mean Lorrimer, master?” Boy longed to ask if he were alive or dead but did not dare.

“Yes, I mean Lorrimer, sir. I understand that three people who were there say he tripped and fell. But you, for reasons best known to yourself, persist in blackening his name with some wild talk or other, incidentally casting yourself in an heroic mould.”

“That is true, master.”

Whymper’s attitude certainly didn’t suggest that Lorrimer had died, but how could you tell with someone who obviously knew that the drumming-in ceremony went on and who yet denied it so blatantly? And to one of the victims within hours of his experience of it? There was such a puzzling gap in this place between what people said and what they did.

Without looking, Whymper reached behind him, into a nook between the chimney breast and a bookcase, and fished out a stout malacca cane. In crude assertion of his power he laid it on the faded leather of his desk; the fine wire binding around the end of it gleamed fiercely in the multicoloured sunlight that fell between them from the stained-glass window. “What is true, Stevenson? That is what I wish to know. That is what I intend to know.”

“It is true that three people say he slipped.”

“Including your own brother.”

“Including him. And I say he was bullying de Lacy and I merely…”

“Bullying?” It was obviously not the word Whymper had expected. “But you said ‘doing unspeakable things’—that is very different from mere bullying.”

Boy took a deep breath. “He was making de Lacy lick his toes. Lorrimer was making de Lacy lick Lorrimer’s toes. Then Lorrimer stood on de Lacy’s head. And there was worse than that. I call it unspeakable, master.”

“And
I
call it unspeakable to blacken a boy’s name—an honourable name, from a family far more ancient than the Stevensons, I may say—when there is a perfectly reasonable alternative explanation.”

Boy was silent.

“What do you say to that?”

“I say that they will have to swear it before God and I know that at least one of them, being a Stevenson, will not then be able to maintain the lie, master. And I trust the same is true of the others.”

Whymper looked puzzled at this.

“Surely there must be some kind of inquiry…” Boy began.

Before he could say more the door opened and a tall, powerful man walked in. His fair, curly hair, released as he lifted his mortarboard, gave his rugged face an almost boyish look. Only then did Boy recognize him as the chief.

“Good morning to you, Whymper,” he said; then he looked at Boy with a stern, guarded sympathy—a conditional promise of sympathy, Boy thought. But Boy was on the lookout for sympathy that morning.

Whymper had risen at once. “Good morning, chief. This is Stevenson major. Stevenson, here is your headmaster, Dr. Brockman.”

Brockman held out a muscular hand—a big bunch of squabby fingers, which closed right over Boy’s paw. “I sent for you a good thirty minutes ago. I trust you weren’t skulking somewhere?” Something in his tone let Boy understand that a partial rebuke was aimed at Whymper, for not sending Boy at once.

“I was with Mr. Whymper, sir,” he said.

Brockman smiled thinly at the master.

“We were discussing Lorrimer,” Boy added, thinking it no harm to get at once to the matter.

“Yes, how is young Lorrimer?” Brockman asked.

Boy looked in relief from chief to master. How
is
Lorrimer? The question answered his own unspoken one. The whole day grew lighter. And Whymper’s answer put the seal on it: “He has taken nourishment and is sleeping.”

“Good, good,” Brockman said with conventional cheer. “A nasty shock. Now, m’boy, I wish you to come with me.”

Boy followed, walking on air. Lorrimer was alive!
Alive!
The most beautiful pair of syllables in any language. He found he could even picture Lorrimer’s face again now—something his mind had shrunk from in dread of the pallor, the white eyeballs, he had feared to discover. Now he could imagine Lorrimer talking, laughing, sneering. He could even rehearse again that dreadful fall without cringing in his flesh and cursing his own impulsive nature.

“Stevenson ma.” He caught the undertones all around as he trotted beside the chief, who, striding in flowing gown and crimson hood, swept a miraculous swath through knots of boys on their way to tutorials. He was surprised to find that he and the chief were hand-in-hand. He had heard little of what the man was saying but understood, vaguely, that it was to do with the age of the foundation and the many changes it had seen since the days of the monks. In the end, just as they reached the gate of the chief’s garden, he became aware that Brockman had halted and was looking at him, as if waiting for an answer to some question.

“What is it, m’boy?” Brockman asked at length.

“I wasn’t sure whether Lorrimer was alive or dead, sir.”

Brockman continued to look at him long and hard. “I see,” he said. “Then you have heard very little of what I have been saying.”

“I’m afraid not, sir.” Boy smiled ruefully.

They went through the little garden, directly into the chief’s study. Caspar, who was already there, stood up as they entered. A large elk-hound lay sprawled before the fire. It looked up but did not otherwise stir. Boy was motioned to a leather chair next to Caspar, on the side of the fire away from the window. Brockman took the matching chair and became a silhouette whose features were barely lit by the small flames that flared now and then from the glowing coals.

“I was talking to you about change, m’boy. Change and permanence. Change in order to achieve permanence, if you will, in an old foundation such as this is. Do you know how old it is?”

“Pre-Reformation, sir?” Boy suggested.

“That stained glass in Mr. Whymper’s pupil room is among the oldest in Yorkshire. To bring change to such a place, m’boy, is no easy matter!”

“No, sir,” Boy said, since some comment seemed to be called for. He saw the chief smile, a shade dejectedly, and realized he would have to do better. He looked at Caspar and shrugged.

“Your father, now—he is, of course, the Stevenson who is building this siege railway in the Crimea?”

“Yes, sir.” Both of them answered at once. “It will be over forty miles before he has finished,” Caspar added.

“A great achievement. You will both be very proud, to be sure. It is a great thing to do for one’s country.”

“My father says he is pleased enough to repay his country, which has done so much for him,” Boy said.

“Of course. It applies to us all, I hope. Your father is fortunate in one respect: The great opportunity presented itself. And all honour to him for grasping it so firmly, I say. But those of us not so fortunate should not grow discouraged when no great opportunity presents itself. We must make all the more sure to seize the smaller ones that come our way.”

Boy nodded, thinking this was a very simple homily to digest. Caspar, taking the cue, nodded as well.

“In my work here, for instance. How do you, Stevenson major, think I might best serve our country?” His eyes rested on Boy, who looked up in fright. It was surely not his place to offer suggestions.

“What small opportunities may come my way?”

Boy took his courage in both hands. “I suppose, sir, that each one of
us
is—er—a ‘small opportunity’…in a way.”

Brockman leaned suddenly forward, his voice full of enthusiasm: “Jove, I’m sure you are right, m’boy!” He looked at both as if he suddenly had great hope of unsuspected wisdom in them. “But in what way? An opportunity for what?”

Boy merely breathed a couple of times.

“Come, m’boy. You’re no fool. I’ve met your father, remember. I know your stock. You can answer me well enough, I feel sure. Only diffidence prevents you.” His glance took in Caspar.

“An opportunity to educate us, sir?” Caspar said; he had been waiting to speak.

“And what may that mean? What is ‘education,’ do you imagine?”

“To turn us into Christian gentlemen, well grounded in the classics?” Boy said. That was an easy answer. Their tutor at home, Mr. Morier-Watson, had always said that was the purpose of education.

It was the right note. He could see that in the chief’s gleaming eyes. “Yes!” He leaned back and put large, spade-tipped fingers together. “I suppose it is open to each of us to hope to leave behind some monument, a single achievement, great or small, to the glory of God and for the benefit of one’s country, or one’s fellows. Your father, if he does nothing else—though, indeed, I’m sure his life will be both long and distinguished, but if your father does nothing else, I say—he will have his Crimea railway.”

He looked sharply at Boy, almost begging him to supply the obvious extension.

“And you, sir, would have the school,” Boy said.

The chief smiled. “Will I, Stevenson? I wonder.” There was a long silence before he added: “And what
is
a school?” Now he looked at both of them equally. “Could it, for instance, exist with no boys?”

They laughed, but chief’s monitory finger halted them.

“No, no,” he said. “I do not jest. Could I and my assistant masters, could we, call in a builder and set out so much bricks and mortar—dormitories, refectories, schoolrooms, and so on, as well as playing fields and fives courts, and everything that goes to make what the vulgar might call a school, you follow? A school at holiday time, y’ou might say.”

They nodded.

“Would you call that a school, either of you?”

“No, sir.”

“It has everything except…”

“Pupils, sir.” They grinned. It was as exciting as finding a new passage in Socrates, where Plato has him making an absolute fool of someone.

“Exactly! You are
kind
enough to say that this school may be my monument. But will you be
good
enough to make it so? For, as you have just proved to me, without pupils there is no school.” He smiled. “Will you?”

“Yes, sir,” they promised, easily and eagerly.

“Will you strive at all times and in all things to be industrious, pious, chaste, sober, athletic, and God-fearing—true, muscular little Christians?”

“Yes, sir.” It was not quite so easy a promise to make. They began to feel uneasy that chief meant every word of it quite literally.

He weighed them up before he spoke again, apparently deciding they were worth the words. “Many things here are unsatisfactory. I do not conceal it from you. Three years ago I found this place a relic of Georgian barbarism; it was almost as bad as Eton in my boyhood. And Old School, where you now find yourselves, is, I fear, as close to the infamous Long Chamber at Eton as you might find in all the world. It will be a remarkable boy—remarkable for purity and strength of character—who will pass unscathed through Old School. I hope that you, and others like you, but especially you, are such boys. Because I mean to change it—and without such boys I cannot do that.” He leaned back and put his fingertips together again. “Are you of the company?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“Or will the old barbarism claim you in its turn?”

“No, sir,” Caspar promised brightly.

Boy thought well before he answered: “I cannot truthfully say, sir. Not yet.”

“Hmm. An honest answer, m’boy. Well, you may both go now. Major to private study until my divinity class at noon. Minor to Mr. Cusack’s geometry class.”

As they reached the door to the garden, Brockman spoke again: “Remember, m’boys—
patientes vincunt
, the patient conquer, as Piers Ploughman says. And we have a very long furrow to plough!”

“What did old chiefy say to you?” de Lacy asked when Boy returned to Old School.

“I couldn’t understand it,” Boy half-lied.

“The usual rot? ‘Help me change the school, m’boy’?”

“That sort of thing, yes.”

“Ignore it. Rubbish! This is a damn fine place as it is.”

Boy secretly marvelled that the demotion of one bully could turn a school that de Lacy claimed to “hate hate
hate
”
into a “damn fine place.”

“Let’s go out and start a snowman before it all melts,” de Lacy said.

Cossack—as Mr. Cusack was inevitably called—was a young man, bordering on not-so-young, with an earnest, sober face that nevertheless hinted at a sort of red-cheeked, watery-eyed dissipation. He had not a hair on his scalp. It shone like wax beneath a dome of glass. Yet he was not a hairless man. He had muttonchop whiskers that ran around to a shelf of beard beneath his chin. As soon as he saw Caspar he beamed with delight and cried out: “It’s new!”

A raucous laugh, full of anticipation, went up from the rest of the class—a hundred and twenty-eight boys, for this was public school, not a tutorial.

“A new specimen of pond life! Let it come to me!” He beckoned Caspar into his open arms. The laughter redoubled. Caspar walked up to the podium.

“Does it have a name?”

“Stevenson mi, sir.”

“Is that what its mother calls it, I wonder?”

Caspar drew close and said, in an undertone, “Caspar Stevenson, sir.” Already he felt that a Christian name was somehow girlish and shameful.

Cossack lifted him bodily onto his lap. “Casparius,
filius Steveni.
Or are you a big family, hmm? Are you a legion? Is it
filius Stevenorum
?”

Caspar smiled weakly. Cossack had peppermint breath, with a hint of whisky behind it. He knew the smell of whisky from the way Mr. Morier-Watson sometimes smelt.

“Slow,” Cossack judged. “It’s a slow specimen. Cold-blooded, I shouldn’t wonder. Perhaps it goes faster in the fine weather.” He turned to the class. “They do, you know, these cold-blooded things in the pond.” The class grinned and giggled, glad it wasn’t them.

“But where does it swim in the pond? In the scum at the top, hmmm?” He glared at Caspar; his hands round Caspar’s waist were growing hot. “Or in the dregs and sludge at the bottom?” He glowered at the class, who roared back their delight. “Pockets, sir!” someone shouted.

“Yes, look in his pockets,” others took up the cry.

Cossack looked sternly at Caspar. “What does it keep in its pockets?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Nothing! Nothing? I expected at least a million pounds. But let us see…ahah!” And his hand pulled forth from Caspar’s jacket pocket a greasy string of bacon rind. It surprised Caspar far more than it did the beak, who grinned knowingly. “Nothing, eh? Except its lunch—which it has brought to school with it!” The class roared again.

The next thing to appear was a broken top, then a large humbug, covered in fluff. “And its pudding!” Cossack said. “So this is how our new rich eat!” Then there was what looked like a marble but was, in fact, a glass eye. It rolled lugubriously on Cossack’s desk, staring at the whole world impartially. Each item was held up for inspection by the class—“Nothing!…More nothing!” and so on, easy sarcasm. The class howled back their simple delight.

At first Caspar thought that Cossack was producing these things the way a conjuror pulls ribbons and pennies from people’s ears and lapels; but soon it was clear that everything was, indeed, being turned out from his pockets. He looked around the class and realized: They had put these things there. In that confused mêlée in the Barn, just before chief had sent for him, hand after hand had dipped into his pockets, each depositing its pretext for Cossack’s ridicule. He remembered thinking that the horseplay had been rather too exuberant. Of course—it had been a cover for their planting.

Cossack knew it, too. Caspar could tell that from the way the beak held up each item and accepted their laughter. Thank God, he thought, there was nothing but a handkerchief in his trouser pockets. He’d surely have felt it if they’d put anything in there.

The last item in his jacket was a folded page cut from a magazine. Cossack carefully unfolded it. His hands were covered in down, like the hairs between a pullet’s feather stubs. The page was from a fashion journal; it showed a lady in a new patent hoop—with some crudely added modifications. Caspar saw, and also sensed in Cossack’s sudden rigidity, that this was a new feature of the pocket-picking ritual. It bordered on the impermissible. For a long moment the beak hovered between the game and an outburst of rage. The game won, but only just. However, having decided to go on with the game, Cossack threw himself into it with all his former relish.

“And what has it in its trouser pockets?” he asked, plunging both hands firmly in.

To Caspar’s relief there was only the handkerchief. He watched it emerge with reptilian slowness, tugged inch by inch in Cossack’s fastidious thumb-and-finger grip. It was almost free when another folded sheet of paper fell out. He knew he had not put it there. For a moment both ignored it. Cossack’s other hand was warm and heavy on Caspar’s thigh. The fastidious hand plunged back into the other pocket. Both hands lumbered heavily around in those narrow confines, seeking further booty. Cossack’s breath howled in and out through the labyrinth of his nostrils and sinuses, very pepperminty. Close up, Caspar could see each scarlet vessel on the man’s cheeks and nose. The colour was intense.

He tickled. “No holes, hmmm?” Caspar squirmed and giggled under the fevered probing of those huge hams, closing over his thighs and slipping down into his groin. “No secret little ways, hmmm?” The class laughed; this was obviously the climax of the show.

“Bit of paper dropped, sir,” one lad called.

“Read the paper!” several others chorused.

The fastidious hand went on delving while the other dangled, ape-like, to the floor and retrieved the folded sheet between two knuckles. The single hand unfolded it and laid it flat upon the desk. The message was upside down. Caspar turned it around. It said:
Why doth the Cossack so chiefly go about to undermine our trouser pockets?

Caspar gulped and tried not to breathe. Cossack read the message several times, until the entire class had fallen into a hush. Only then did he look up. His eyes raked the ranks and files of boys; their eyes dropped as corn before the scythe. This time there could be no doubt: Someone really had gone too far.

“Swift minor,” Cossack said, his eyes resting on one boy.

The boy looked quickly up and down again, trying not to smirk.

“Yes, I thought so. A poor piece of homage to your illustrious namesake, Swift, if I may say. Let me give you something better. From
Gulliver’s Travels
, I adapt slightly: ‘You are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.’ Well, Swift, is that not more apposite!”

“Yes, sir,” Swift mi grudged.

“Or
ibidem
: ‘I am amazed’”—he transferred the paper from his ape hand to his fastidious one—“‘how so impotent and grovelling an insect as you could entertain such inhuman ideas.’ Is not that more to the point, Swift?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hail fellow, well met

All dirty and wet:

Find out, if you can,

Who’s master, who’s man.

“From
My Lady’s Lamentation.
Are you, by chance, in any doubt, Swift, who in this room is master, who is man? Because if you are, we may easily arrange for my young man’s lamentation!”

“No, sir!” Swift hastened to reassure him.

Cossack tipped Caspar unceremoniously off his lap. “Down there, sir, where I may see you.” He pointed to an empty seat in the front rank and then returned to Swift. “Since you seem so fond of that illustrious man—who had the misfortune to bear your name, but the fortune to die before you came along to besmirch it—you will come to my chambers before lockup and I shall give you his
Imitation of Horace
,
one hundred lines of which you will put into Latin iambic dimeter.”

“Yes, sir,” Swift said miserably.

Cossack began again to quote:

I’ve often wish’d that I had clear,

For life, six hundred pounds a year…

His voice petered out and his eves strayed toward, then lingered on, Caspar. His lips smiled but his eyes were cold.

“You can’t ever get the better of Cossack,” Causton later told Caspar. “He knows everything. He’s a sod, though. Literally, I mean. He’d bugger you as soon as beat you. Blenkinsop used to be a great favourite.”

Caspar had no idea what this meant, but he stored the incomprehensible facts away.

They had only two parts of public school that day. The idle boys liked public school. Since the classes varied between one and two hundred in number, any individual was unlikely to get singled out too often. And, naturally, the masters would concentrate on their more able pupils—all except chief. In thirty minutes of divinity lesson, he could fire off fifty questions to as many pupils, striding among them, cracking his fingers, pulling ears, shouting, “Mmm? Mmm? Eh?…Come on, m’boy, come on!” No one dared to feel the luxury of neglect in chief’s class.

The rest of the day was taken up with private work-study and tutorials. For study periods boys in the Houses went back (naturally) to their studies, while those in Old School went to their messes in Langstroth. So, too, did the hundred and twenty boys in Hospice, which was identical in every way to Old School except that its members were housed in a different building, the former monastic hospice.

All tutorials were private—that is, parents were billed for them as extras and boys were, theoretically, free to choose which tutors they attended. In practice the end-of-term report hung over them all, severely qualifying that freedom. Tutorials, where the classes were down to a manageable thirty or forty boys, were held in the pupil rooms; in summer they would sometimes be held out on the moor. There were two tutors who were not on the public school staff. They had come as private tutors accompanying individual boys at some time in the past, had picked up a popular following because of the high quality of their lectures, and had stayed on after their original charges had left. Mr. Cheetham was called Chiz; Mr. L. St. John Peach was called Sinner. Chiz had a small stipend as warden of the Hospice, now a mere sinecure; Sinner had no official standing. Both relied entirely on tuition fees, which, in turn, depended absolutely on the size of their classes. The fee was three and a half pence per boy per tutorial, or £2. 11
s.
6
d.
a term, of which two guineas went to the tutor, the remaining 9
s.
6
d.
being kept by the school for the hire of the pupil rooms, coals, gas, etc. The four established masters (chief, Whymper, Carter, and Cossack) also held private tutorials under the same system and charges.

Without these extracurricular lessons no serious learning could have been imparted at the school—at least, to boys of an average laziness. Yet the ten poor boys from Langstroth who attended by right (and after all, it was for their supposed benefit the school had been founded and, at the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry 
viii
, endowed) had only the fifteen half-hours of public school to rely on their instruction, though it was their presence alone that justified the name “public” school.

Caspar fell in with one of these lads, Ingilby by name and a year his senior by age, as he went back over the causeway, intending to do some private study in his mess. He had a feeling that Ingilby had been waiting for him.

“What do you think of Cossack then?” Ingilby asked.

“Hells scaring,” Caspar said.

“See who can throw a snowball farthest!”

The competition ended with their pelting one another around Langstroth market square, only becoming allies again when a miscast snowball struck a farmer in the back. They both ran, laughing and fearful, up one of the alleys. Ingilby pulled him into one of the cottage doorways.

“I live here,” he said.

They peeped out into the lane. No one was following.

“Come on in. Our dad wants to meet you. He knows your guvnor.”

“My guvnor?”

“Aye. He called here, that day he came to see chief. Our dad used to work for your guvnor before his accident.”

“Wipe feet,” Mrs. Ingilby said mechanically as they crossed the threshold. The kitchen was identical in layout to the Oldroyds’ and almost identical in its contents, except that Mrs. Ingilby was obviously a cheesemaker on more than a domestic scale, for two cheese presses, one iron and one of wood, both on wheels, stood near the back door.

At the moment, though, she was baking havercakes—large, soft pancake-like rounds of oaten bread. She was in the middle of separating one from the hot “bakstone” with a knife. Then she lifted it with the shovel-like baking spittle and turned it in swirling wraiths of aromatic steam. When Caspar opened his mouth to introduce himself, a fountain of saliva shot half across the room.

Ingilby was sidling innocently toward the cake stool before the fire, where a havercake stood drying. But his mother well knew what he was at and caught him a sharp whack with the baking spittle before he could break off a chunk. He yelped, more with indignation than pain.

“Everything comes to them as waits,” she said with a smile, not taking her eyes off Caspar while she dealt the blow.

“I’m Stevenson minor, m’m,” Caspar said, wondering if the townsfolk recognized such names.

She certainly recognized the Stevenson part, for her smile doubled.

“Oh, you’re very welcome, Master Stevenson.” She wiped her floury hands on her apron and then did not know whether to offer one to be shaken.

Caspar stepped to her, holding out his hand. She shook it uncertainly; her skin was warm and soft.

“Your master was here…” she began, and then laughed at her mistake.

“Father!” Ingilby sneered, unfortunately drawing attention to himself just as he was trying again for the cake. Still laughing, she clouted him even harder and pushed him toward the back door. The handle of the cheese press against his hipbone doubled his punishment. He ran out of the back door rather than let Caspar see the tears he could not suppress. Outside someone was hitting at wood with a mallet.

“You may ’ave some cake, Master Stevenson,” she said.

“Oh, no thank you, m’m,” he answered politely.

Her face fell. “Oh well, suit yourself,” she said, not understanding the convention. Then she saw his disappointment and, smiling again, broke him off a corner of the cake that lay drying on the stool: “Thou near lost that,” she said. “Offers aren’t doubled hereabouts!”