by Hugh Walpole
“Ah! that is splendid.” There was a pause; then the beard was suddenly lifted, and a glance was flashed across the table. “I hope that you take your work seriously, Mr. Traill.” Traill flushed a little. “I think that I do,” he said.
“That is well.... Because we are — ah! um — a great institution, a very great institution. We owe our traditions — um, eh — a very serious and determined attention to detail. To work together, as one man, for the good of our race, that must be our object. Yes. No divisions, all in friendly brotherhood — um, yes.” Traill said nothing.
“I hope that you realize this. We want every energy, every nerve, at work. We must not waste a moment, nor grudge every instant to the cause we have at heart. Um, yes, I hope that you agree, Mr. Traill.”
“I hope,” Traill said, “that you have not found me wanting, that you have nothing to complain of. I think that I have worked—”
“Worked? Ah, yes.” Moy-Thompson caught him up, cracking his fingers together. “But what about play, eh? What about play?” Traill flushed. “As to football—”
“No, it is not football. It is merely a detail — quite a detail. But Mr. Perrin informs me that you came in at one o’clock this morning through the window. I confess that I was surprised.”
“That is quite true,” said Traill, in a low voice. “I went—”
“Ah! no! please!” Mr. Thompson lifted a large white hand. “No details are necessary. The facts are sufficient. I need not, I think, say any more. You must see for yourself.... Only, I think you will agree with me that it should not occur again.”
“I am sorry—” Traill said.
“Ah, please! No more; it shall not be mentioned again. Only work and play together are impossible. We have long vacations that give us all we ask. To pass for a moment to another matter.” Moy-Thompson put his hand on some papers. “Here are the scholarship questions that you have set — geography and history. I think they are scarcely what we require. If you would not mind resetting them and bringing them to me to-morrow. Yes. Thank you.... Good morning.” Traill rose, took the papers in his hand, and left the room. He knew, surely, certainly, as though Birkland himself had told him, that this was to be the beginning of persecution. The Reverend Moy-Thompson had got his knife into him, and he had Perrin to thank for it.
IV.
The interview that had lasted barely five minutes hung heavily over him throughout the midday dinner. He always hated the meal: the great joints of mutton, waiting to be carved, in shapeless, thick hunks, the incessant noise throughout the meal, the clatter of plates and noise and voices, the dreary monotony and repetition of it — Perrin’s face seen at the end of a long white table with the two rows of boys in between.
But to-day as he sat there he felt that he could kill Perrin if he had the opportunity. What business was it of his? He had at any rate lost no time in running to tell Moy-Thompson about it. The thought of the savage joy that must have filled Perrin’s breast whilst he told his news, made Traill grind his teeth. Well! he would be even with him!
The moment the meal was over, and grace had been chanted in a loud, discordant yell, Traill left the table and, without a word to anyone, rushed down to the sea.
A tremendous wind was blowing. There was a certain part of the cliff that jutted out into the water, and this was surrounded now, on three sides, by a furious, heaving flood.
Wet mist hung over the sea, so that the enormous breakers leapt out of the sea, came whistling with a thousand arms into the sky, and them fell with a deafening roar upon the rocks. One after another, in swift succession, first suspended in mid-air, hanging there like serpents about to strike, then falling with a curve and glistering, shining backs, then sweeping, tearing, at last lashing the iron rock. About him the wind screamed and tugged at his clothes; behind him the trees bent and creaked along the road; the rain lashed his face.
He was seized with a kind of fury; he stood, facing the sea, with his hands clenched, his head up, his cap in his hand, and Isabel Desart, as she came battling down the road and saw him there, knew, in that moment, that she loved him and had loved him from the first moment that she saw him. He saw her, but they could not speak to one another: the noise was too great — the waves, the wind, the bending trees caught them into their clamor; they stood, side by side, in silence. Suddenly he put out his hand and caught hers. He held it; still, without a word, with the wind almost flinging them to the ground, they drew together. The mist swept about their heads, the spray beat in their faces. He drew her closer to him, and she yielded. For a moment he held her with his face pressed close against hers, and then their lips met. At last, and still without a word, they moved slowly down the road....
V.
It was about half-past nine when Perrin, looking up at the sound of the opening door, saw Traill standing there. Traill filled the doorway, and Perrin knew at once that there was going to be a disturbance. He had had disturbances before, a good many of them, and always it had brought to him a sense of pathos that he, with an old mother (he always saw her as a crumpled but vehement background), should have always to be fighting people — he, so unoffending if they would let him alone. However, if anyone (especially Traill) wished to fight him, he would do his best.
Traill was frowning. Traill was very angry.
Perrin said, “Ah, Traill! Come in for a chat? That’s good of you. Splendid! Sit down, won’t you? Anything I can do for you?” But he wasn’t smiling.
“No,” said Traill, slowly. “There’s nothing you can do for me. But I want to speak to you.”
“Ah, well, sit down; won’t you?”
“No, thanks. I’ll stand.” Traill cleared his throat. “Did you by any chance say anything to the Head about my coming in last night?”
Perrin smiled. “My dear Traill, I really can’t remember; and is it really, after all, any business of yours?”
“Only this much, that he has been speaking to me about it. He says that you told him — I want to know why you told him.”
“It is my business,” Perrin said, “as housemaster here to find out anything that may be harming my house. I consider your late hours, your disregard of your work, prejudicial to the school’s progress, — um, yes.”
The impulse that had brought Traill to Perrin’s room had not altogether been one of anger. He was much too excited by the other event of the afternoon to have any very angry feelings against anyone, and indeed it had been rather a desire for peace, for clearing things up and being well with the world, that had brought him there. He was a little ashamed of the way that he had allowed, during these last weeks, his anger against Perrin to grow, and he seemed to be losing some of his good-humor and equability.
So now he put all the self-command that he possessed into play, and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Perrin, if you feel that I have been neglecting my duty. I don’t think that, after all, one night’s outing during the term can do anyone very great harm. But I only spoke to you about it because I have been feeling during these last weeks that we have not been very good friends. It seems a pity when we are cooped up together here so closely that we should not get on as well as possible; it makes everything uncomfortable. And, in so far as I am to blame at all, I am very sorry.”
The little red and yellow china man on the mantelpiece, Perrin said, had been watching the conversation with great curiosity, and Perrin felt that he was a little disappointed now when matters promised to finish comfortably. Perrin himself was only too ready for peace. These quarrels always brought on headaches, and, in his heart, he longed eagerly, hungrily, for a friend. He already was beginning to feel again that he liked young Traill very much.
He sat back in his chair and meant to be pleasant once more; but it was his eternal misfortune, his curse from the deriding gods, that he had ever at his back the memory of all these jesting years that had already passed him by: the memory of the men, the boys, the women, who had laughed at him: the memory of the ways that he had suffered, of the taunting jeers
that had been flung at him, of the jests that so many of his fellow-beings had, in his time, played upon him.
And so now he felt that at all costs he must regain his dignity, he must show this young fellow his place and then be nice to him afterwards; and really, somewhere in the back of his mind, he saw his old mother with her white lace cap sitting stiffly in her chair, and Traill on his knees, kissing her hand.
“Well, Traill, I’m sure I’m glad you feel like that — um, yes. One must, you know, maintain discipline. You are young; when you are older you will see that there is something in what I say — um. We know, you see; schoolmastering is a thing that takes some learning; yes, well, I’m sure I’m very glad.”
But Traill was white again; his good determinations, his pleasant tempers were flung, suddenly screaming, helter-skelter to the winds. The patronage of it, the stupid, blundering fool with his “When you are older,” and the rest.
“All right,” he said hotly; “keep that advice for others. I don’t know that I was so wrong, after all. What business of yours was it to go sneaking to the Head like that? There are certain things that a gentleman doesn’t do.”
“Oh, really!” — the little man on the mantelpiece was smiling again. Perrin was snarling, and his hands gripped the sides of his chair. “Your apologies seem a little premature. One can forgive something to your age, but that sort of impertinence — I don’t think you remember to whom you are speaking. You are the junior master here, you must be taught that, and when those who are wiser than yourself choose to give you some advice, you should take it gratefully.”
Traill took a step down the room, his hands clenched.
“My God! you conceited, insufferable—”
“Get out of my room!”
“All right, when I’ve told you what I’ve thought of you.”
“Get out of my room!” Perrin’s eyes were starting out of his head.
Traill swung on his heel. “I won’t forget this in a hurry,” he said.
“Take care you don’t come in here again,” Perrin shouted after him. The door was banged.
Perrin sat back in his chair; the room was going round and round, and he had a confused idea that people were running races. He pressed his hands to his head; the little china man leapt, screaming, off the mantelpiece and ran at him, kicking up his fat little legs; and with the breeze from under the door, a pile of French exercises fluttered, blew like sails in the wind, and then slid, scattering, to the floor.
CHAPTER VII — THE BATTLE OF THE UMBRELLA; THEY OPEN FIRE
I.
BUT, during the week that followed, Traill’s good-temper slowly reasserted itself once more. After all, it was really impossible to be angry with anyone when the world was alight and trembling with so wonderful an adventure. They had each of them written to those in authority. Isabel had a complacent father who knew something of young Traill’s family and, answering at once, said that he would come down to see them and made it his only stipulation that the engagement should last for at least a year, until they were both a little older. Traill’s mother was delighted with anything that could give her son such happiness. It had all been very sudden of course; but then, was not true love always like that? Had not she, a great many years ago, fallen in love with Archie’s father “all in a minute,” and was not that the beautiful incautious way that the new practical generation seemed so often to forget? So, she sent him her blessing and also wrote a little note to Isabel.
But they still kept their secret from the others. They meant every day to reveal it, but they shrank, as each morning came, from all the talk and chatter that would at once follow. It would mean an end, Isabel knew, to any easy and pleasant relations that she might have with anyone at the school. She never understood the reason, but she knew that they would feel that she had acted in a conceited, presuming manner. It would not be pleasant.
So their meetings were, during these days, few and difficult. They met in the wood and at the sea, and their eyes crossed over the chapel floor, and they even wrote to one another and posted them elaborately in the letter-box.
But on any morning the secret might be revealed. Traill told Isabel about his quarrel with Perrin, and she urged him to make it up.
“When we ourselves are so happy,” she said, “we can’t quarrel with anyone — and, poor man, no wonder his temper is irritable. He’s a miserably disappointed man, and I don’t think he’s very well either. He looks dreadfully white and strained sometimes. We can afford to put up with some ill-temper from other people, Archie, just now. When we are so happy and he is so unhappy, it is a little unfair, isn’t it?”
And so he kissed her and went back resolved to be pleasant and agreeable. But Perrin gave him no opportunity. They spoke to each other a little at meals for appearance’ sake, but any advances that Traill made were cut short at once without hesitation.
Perrin passed about the passages and the class-rooms during this week heavily, with a white face and a lowering brow — he had headaches, bad headaches; and his form suffered.
II.
And so it was suddenly, without warning or preparation, that the storm broke — the storm that was to be remembered for years afterwards at Moffatt’s: the great Battle of the Umbrella, about which strange myths grew up, that will become, doubtless, in later centuries at Moffatt’s a strange Titanic contest, with gods for its warriors and thunderbolts for their weapons; the great battle that involved not only the central combatants, not only Traill and Perrin and their lives and fortunes, but also others — the Combers, the matrons, the masters, the whole world of that place seized by the Furies... and, in the corner, in that umbrella-stand by the hall door, underneath the stairs, that faded green umbrella — now, we suppose, passed into that limbo into which all umbrellas must eventually go, but then the gage, the glove, the sign token of all that was to come.
Let, moreover, no one imagine that these things are not possible. This Battle of the Umbrella stands for more, for far more, than its immediate contest. Here is the whole protest and appeal of all those crowded, stifled souls buried of their own original free-will beneath fantastic piles of scribbled paper, cursing their fate, but unable to escape from it, seeing their old age as a broken, hurried scrambling to a no-man’s grave, with no dignity nor suavity, with no temper nor discipline, with nerves jangling like the broken wires of a shattered harp — so that there is no comfort or hope in the future, nothing but disappointment and insult in the past, and the dry, bitter knowledge of failure in the present — this is the Battle of the Umbrella.
It was Monday morning, and Monday morning is worse than any other day of the week.
There has been, in spite of many services and the reiteration of religious stories concerning which a shower of inconvenient questions are flung at the uncertain convictions of authority, a relief in the rest and repose of the preceding day.
Sunday was, at any rate, a day to look forward to in that it was different from the other six days of the week, and although it might not on its arrival show quite so pleasant a face as earlier hours had given it, nevertheless it was something — a landmark if nothing else.
And now on this dark and dreary Monday — with the first hour a tedious and bickering discussion on Divinity, and the second hour a universal and embittered Latin exercise — that early rising to the cold summoning of the hell was anything but pleasant.
Moreover, on this especial Monday the rain came thundering in furious torrents, and the row of trees opposite the Lower School wailed and cried with their dripping, naked boughs, and all the brown leaves on the paths were beaten and flattened into a miserable and hopeless pulp.
Monday was the only morning in the week on which Traill took early preparation at the Upper School, and he had noticed before that it nearly always rained on Mondays. He was in no very bright temper as he hurried down the cold stone passages, pulling on his gown and avoiding the bodies of numerous small boys who flung themselves against him as they rushed furiously downstairs
in order to be in time for call-over.
He heard the rain beating against the window-panes and hurriedly selected the first umbrella that he saw in the stand and rushed to the Upper School.
That preparation hour was unpleasant. M. Pons, the French master, was in the room above him, and the ceiling shook with the delighted stamp of twenty boys blessed with a sense of humor and an opportunity of power. M. Pons could be figured with shaking hands in the middle of the room, appealing for quiet. And, as was ever the case, the spirit of rebellion passed down through the ceiling to the room beneath. Traill had his boys well under control; but whereas on ordinary occasions it was all done without effort and worked of its own accord, on this morning continual persistence was necessary, and he had to make examples of various offenders.
A preparation hour always invited the Seven Devils to dance across the two hundred of open books, and the tweaking of boys’ bodies and the digging of pins into unsuspecting legs was the inevitable result. Traill rose at the end of the hour, cross, irritable, and already tired. He hurried down to the Lower School to breakfast and forgot the umbrella.
The rain was driving furiously against the window-panes of the Junior common room. The windows were tightly closed, and still the presence of yesterday’s mutton was felt heavily, gloomily, about the ceiling. The brown and black oilcloth contained numberless little winds and draughts that leapt out from under it and crept here and there about the room.
A small fire was burning in the grate — a mountain of black coal and stray spirals of gray smoke, and little white edges of unburnt paper hanging from the black bars. Beyond the side door voices quarreling in the kitchen could be heard, and beyond the other door a hum of voices and a clatter of cups.
It was all so dingy that it struck even the heavy brain of Clinton, who was down first. Perrin was taking breakfast in the big dining-room, and Traill was not yet back from the Upper School.
Clinton seized the Morning Post and, with a grunt of dissatisfaction at the general appearance of things, sat down. He never thought very intently about anything, but, in a vague way, he did dislike Monday and rain and a smoking fire. He helped himself to more than his share of the breakfast, ate it in large, noisy mouthfuls, found the Morning Post dull, and relapsed on to the Daily Mail. The rain and the quarreling in the kitchen were very disturbing.