The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (2 page)

3.19 p.m. Bateman Minor slumped forward on his elbows and turned another page. Vincent nudged Cooper impatiently, indicating that he also should turn over and penetrate deeper into the now world-famous gamekeeper's hut. Lane-Perkins sneezed into his handkerchief in order to cover the soft explosion of a safety match held between his knees. Mr. Sermon did not notice any of these trivial incidents, he was inhaling the lilac perfume in long, deep breaths and letting it carry him back to the year 1929 when he was seventeen and walking out of Selhurst Grammar School Boys' entrance for the last time, holding his three summer-term prizes under his arm and swinging his gym shoes with a carelessness that betokened freedom, youth and a confident advance into the adult world that lay waiting.

Where had it led, that sunlit, lilac-scented path? To a provincial University, a Degree and more prizes, to hours and hours of

15

concentrated study in his bedroom in Yew Tree Road, Norwood. To eyestrain and a touch of asthma that had cost him a job at a good public school in Cumberland. To a series of frustrating, disagreeable jobs in Preparatory Schools up and down the country. To a wretchedly disappointing year as a Civil Servant and then, inexplicably, to another school in Sybil's suburb of Beckenham, eighteen minutes by electric from Charing Cross Station. Then the war and further penalties for Grade Two Vision and the youthful tussle with asthma. Rejected by the R.A.F., he had at last wriggled into the Ordnance Corps as a clerk and spent two frustrating years in the orderly-room of a depot, dividing his time between routine chores and attending to the commercial correspondence of the junior officers. On several occasions he had made strenuous efforts to get a commission and once had passed the Selection Board and entered upon the preliminary Course but the bogey ran him down in the end, laying him by the heels at the scramble net of the Commando course and hauling him, bleating out breathless excuses, before the examiners to receive the degrading Returned-to-Unit chit.

Sybil had been wonderful about that. Most wives, he imagined, would have concealed their contempt under feigned indifference but Sybil was indignant at the blindness of the military machine.

"They don't deserve you, Sebastian, dear," she had said, when he returned on leave, with his pride in ribbons; "I shall get Daddy to reclaim you to industry and we'll find you another school, a nice, better-class type of school, further out of London."

And she had done just that. She had got him out of the Services and found him the post at Napier Hall, only a threepenny bus ride from their new home and here he had remained, year after year, with the full confidence of the Headmaster (to whom staff vacancies were a permanent nightmare) and the tolerant acceptance of the boys who, on the whole, considered him a moderately sporting old buffer, a bit of a weed on the sports field but less of a bore than most of the men paid to prepare them for Common Entrance.

Ten seconds to go. Mr. Sermon took off his spectacles and wiped them carefully and as he half turned to replace his handkerchief in his jacket pocket his narrow nostrils quivered as an alien scent

16

stole up on the lilac and drove it back through the open window. The lilac, however, made a final rally and in the last few seconds of Mr. Sermon's old life it almost drugged him with memories, the memory of quiet, inner satisfaction on gaining his Degree, of Sybil's lips and white body in the bedroom of the hotel during their Bournemouth honeymoon, of the ache and tug of remembered vistas seen during his solitary walking tours in North Wales, of the dazzling splendour of the rainbow of life always just out of reach but always there, glistening with the promise of Spring sunshine like the shaft now deifying Lane-Perkins' bullet-head. Then the alien scent triumphed and the lilac shambled away and the pungent smell of French incense filled the whole room, vanquishing not only Spring but the more lowly odours of ink and chalk and apple-cores and stale dust. Half the boys began coughing and all but Bateman Minor began to snigger behind spread palms.

"Stand up the boy who is making that disgusting smell!"

Mr. Sermon's voice had an edge to it that Lane-Perkins and his cronies failed to recognise, such a sharp edge indeed that nobody moved and the more discerning among them were startled by the grim expression on Preacher's face. All the easy tolerance and professionally cultivated irony were gone. It was a flushed, pitiless face, with suffering behind eyes that blinked and blinked with a kind of senseless fury. The mouth, usually relaxed, was now a savage line, and the taut cheeks twitched. The head was out-thrust, like the head of a bull on the point of charging a phalanx of tormentors.

"Christ!" murmured Vincent to himself, hastily slipping Lady Chatterley's Lover into his desk and jerking it under his Atlas. "What's the matter with old Preacher this afternoon? He looks as if he could murder the ruddy lot of us!"

"Stand up I said! Stand up! Come out here!"

Nobody moved and five seconds ticked by in silence. Then Mr. Sermon himself stood up, grating his chair along the dais and jumped down to the level of the classroom floor, making straight for Lane-Perkins who had paled and was reaching forward to screen his inkwell-hole with both hands.

It was a foolhardy gesture and a boy of his experience should have known better but the edge of Preacher's voice had rattled his nerves.

17

Suddenly Preacher was towering above him and yanking at his hands so that they were dragged clear of the inkwell-hole and a blue spiral of incense crawled steadily upward.

Now that Mr. Sermon was safely anchored near the window all but Lane-Perkins relaxed and there was an involuntary titter. Mr. Sermon looked hard at the spiral, sniffing it and then, with a vicious sweep of his hand he knocked Lane-Perkins to one side and flung up the desk-lid so that the spiral became a bluish cloud, so thick and sour that the outburst of coughing was genuine and one or two of the bolder pretended to retch.

Then it happened. The taut elastic that had held Sebastian Sermon to sanity and tolerance for a quarter-century snapped and its flailing ends coiled round his brain like a whiplash. He could not have said what made him act in such an extravagant manner. Perhaps there is more truth in the old adages than we know and perhaps the final straw really does break the camel's back. Or perhaps there was something terrifyingly symbolic in the conquest of the lilac by Lane-Perkins" cone of incense, the inevitability of the overthrow of sweetness by barbarism, the terrible certainty that, sooner or later, heavy-footed oafs will trample the lilacs to a mush. Whatever it was, it converted Mr. Sermon in an instant into a reckless fiend, sweeping away his self-discipline and trumpeting berserk defiance at every canon of tutorial law. With a whimper of rage he seized the recoiling Lane-Perkins by the coat and began to beat him about the head and face with his open hand, smack after smack that rang out like a volley of pistol shots and ended in the boy tearing himself free and bolting madly for the door.

He did not get more than a yard or so. Mr. Sermon sprang in pursuit, grabbed him by the collar and threw him sideways on top of the blameless Bateman, whose face was rammed down against his own desk-lid with such violence that his spectacles snapped at the bridge and a lens flew in each direction. The classroom exploded with sound, Lane-Perkins' terrified squeals, Bateman's agonised squawk, the grinding crash of desks and the shocked protests of scholars, all scurrying this way and that in their efforts to dodge the struggling group near the window. Only Vincent, sharp for his age, realised that something was seriously wrong and that it

18

behooved somebody to intervene. Gallantly he laid restraining hands on Mr. Sermon's left arm and hung on gamely but he was an under-sized boy and could do little to check the rhythmic jerk of Sebastian's right arm which now had Lane-Perkins in an unbreakable grip and was exploiting it by flinging his victim against the hot-water pipes. Every time Lane-Perkins' head or shoulders struck the pipes a hollow boom echoed along the system, passing across the hall and into the adjoining classroom, where Mr. Twyning, the Geography master, was explaining the nature of isotherms.

It is profitless to guess what might have happened in the end. Lane-Perkins might have collapsed with a fractured skull or Mr. Sermon might have tired and flung the boy aside like a handful of chaff, or some of the other boys might have come to the gallant Vincent's aid before murder was committed. As it was, the uproar was heard by the Reverend Victor Hawley as he mounted the steps that led from his residential quarters to his book-lined study which lay directly across the hall from the Upper Fourth. For a moment the Headmaster stood stock still a stride beyond the glass door, wondering whether there had been a head-on collision between lorries passing down the main Crowborough Road. Then, with a gasp of dismay, he realised that the cacophony came from inside the house and at once located its source as the Upper Fourth. He dithered a second or so, unwilling to believe that this could be so, and then, gathering his trailing gown, he ran across the hall and flung open the heavy door, standing on the threshold and gazing at the astounding spectacle that met his eyes.

Mr. Sermon had his back to the door and seemed to be performing some kind of Haitian ritual dance, for he was throwing his weight from side to side and putting every ounce of strength into each lunge, a movement made difficult by the dead weight of Vincent hanging on his left arm. He was holding some kind of bundle under his right armpit and the bundle seemed to be alive for it yelped and writhed in Mr. Sermon's grasp.

It was not until he was quite certain that this bundle was indeed a screaming boy that the Reverend Hawley regained the power of motion. With a cry of alarm he jumped through the cloud of bluish smoke (why blue smoke?) and grabbed Mr. Sermon by the

19

shoulders, shouting in his ear and half enfolding master and boys in his billowing gown.

"Stop it! Stop it this instant! Are you mad? Are you insane? Stop it I say!"

His voice and his not inconsiderable weight had their effect almost at once. Vincent, weeping with fright, fell to the floor and Mr. Sermon braced himself, looking over his shoulder in a dazed fashion and then recoiling from the beam of the Headmaster's eye, so that he stepped away from the window and released Lane-Perkins automatically.

The uproar subsided very suddenly and after the outcry the ensuing silence was unreal, as though what had taken place the moment before was an excerpt from a recorded jazz session on a radiogram and somebody had switched it off. The only sounds in the room were Vincent's winded gasps and the steady, gulping sobs of Lane-Perkins, now rocking himself to and fro like a boy with chronic toothache, holding his head with both hands and attempting, but with poor success, to space his gulps with protests. The pause was very welcome to the Reverend Hawley who was the first of the group to recover. He glanced briefly round the room, subduing the already subdued, gathered his gown around him and said, very crisply indeed:

"Lane-Perkins, go up to Matron and await me there! Mr. Sermon, I think perhaps you had better tell me what happened. Vincent, stop snivelling, get up off the floor and pull yourself together! You others, open all the windows and get rid of this disgusting smell. From what does it originate?"

An eager chorus answered this question-"Incense, sir!" "French incense, sir!" "In the desk, sir!" and so on, until the Headmaster bellowed for silence. Slowly, with limbs that seemed weighted by fetters, Mr. Sermon dragged himself across to Lane-Perkins' desk and threw up the lid that had fallen during the struggle. A cloud of incense puffed out and Bateman, always anxious to please, ran forward, picked up the glowing cone and threw it out of the window.

"Thank you, Bateman!" said the Reverend Hawley and himself lowered the desk-lid; then, to Mr. Sermon: "Come along now, Mr.

20

Sermon, please," but at the door the Headmaster turned back, facing the class.

"If there is any more noise there will be serious trouble, you understand? Trouble for everyone! Bateman, you're in charge," and he shut the door and followed Mr. Sermon into the tiled hall. Outside the study, Mr. Sermon stood aside to allow his employer to enter first and the Reverend Hawley swept in, as though his senior master was a boy on his way to be caned. Indeed, Mr. Sermon had this impression and would not have been much surprised if the Headmaster had opened the cupboard door and foraged for his ashplant. The enormity of what he had done was beginning to steal up on him, probing the raw edges of his rage and seeking a way into his consciousness. It would be hours, however, before it found a way in, for buttressed by rage and squatting in the very centre of his brain was a malignant imp that almost rejoiced in the catastrophe, that grinned and grimaced and whispered: "There now, it's done! You've been aching to do that to Lane-Perkins for years! He won't sit there leering at you again, you can depend on that! His father will take him away tomorrow of course and probably take out a summons against you the day after, but that won't hurt you as much as it will hurt this pompous slave-driver of a Headmaster. You may get a month or so in gaol but he'll go bankrupt and serve him bloody well right!"

Mr. Sermon listened carefully to what the imp had to say, so carefully in fact that he barely heard the Headmaster's opening remark and was not really conscious of him until that exasperated man took him by the arm and shook it, repeating over and over again: "What is it, Sermon? Are you ill? Did he do something outrageous? Are you yourself, Sermon? What happened? Don't you see, I must know? Sit down Mr. Sermon, for pity's sake sit down, and try and pull yourself together, man!"