by Hugh Walpole
And suddenly he awoke in the middle of the night and found himself there — and it was all very dark. He rose to his feet and was terribly frightened, because there, a gray figure against the fireplace, was the other Mr. Perrin — and he knew that God had not answered his prayer, and he cursed God and stumbled to his bed.
III.
And after that, things, for him, developed in an amazing way. He was quite sure now that God hated him.
Now that he was sure of that, he need not care so much about keeping that box closed — he was damned anyhow.
Traill now took complete possession of his mind. He never thought of anyone else, and it was exactly as though an iron weight was pressing on his head, shutting him down. He must get rid of that iron weight, because it was so disagreeable and prevented him thinking; but he was sure that it would not go until he had got rid of Traill: therefore Traill must go.
He did not know how Traill would be likely to go, but he began to consider it....
These days before the examinations began were very difficult for everybody, and Perrin began that hideous “getting behind-hand” that made things accumulate so that there seemed no chance of ever catching up. There were all the term’s marks to be added up before the examinations began, there were trial papers and test questions to be set, and therefore a great many papers to be corrected. He found that he was not able to keep at it for very long at a time, but would sit in his chair with his hands folded in front of him and think of — Traill — and then he would find that the papers were not corrected and that there were others to be done, and they would be in dingy piles about his room — sometimes a pile would slip from the table on to the floor and would lie there scattered, and he would feel his rage rising so that if he had not, with all his force, kept it down he would have rushed screaming about his room.
But with the whole staff this irritation was at work, and Perrin welcomed it because it amused him, and because it seemed to him in tune with his own moods. Always this week before the examinations was a very difficult one, but now, this term, it was worse than it had ever been before.
The place was badly understaffed, and always at this time the work was multiplied so that any spare hours that there had been before were now filled to overflowing. Also the examination scheme had now appeared and, whether by design or not, Moy-Thompson always arranged it so that one or two men seemed to have scarcely any work at all, and the others naturally had a great deal more than they could do. The quarrels that had broken out over the umbrella incident had developed until there was very little to prevent physical struggle. It happened that on this occasion, West was the person who was let off easily by the examination list, and he was not the kind of man to allow his advantage to pass without comment.
Perrin passed a considerable amount of time now in the Senior common room. He never talked to anyone, but would sit in a dark corner by the window and watch them all. The funniest thoughts came to him as he sat there: for instance, he fancied that it would be pleasant, when they were not watching, to crawl under the table and bite White’s legs — it would be amusing to spring suddenly from behind on to Comber’s back, and to strip all the clothes from him until he was stark naked, and must run, screaming, from the room — or to twist Birkland’s ears round and round until they were tom and hung.... All these things would be pleasant to do, but he sat in his corner and said nothing.
At last the day before the examinations arrived, and they were nearly all gathered in the Senior common room in the half-hour before Chapel.
Perrin, with his white face and untidy hair, watched them from his corner.
“It will be very pleasant,” West said, smiling a little, “to have that third hour off all through this week. I can’t think, Comber, why Moy-Thompson’s given you all that extra Latin to do — I—”
“For God’s sake,” Comber broke out furiously, “stop it! Aren’t we all sick to death with hearing of your beastly good luck? Don’t we all know that the whole thing’s about as unfair as it is possible for anything to be? Just keep quiet about it if you can.”
“Oh, of course, Comber,” said West. “You grudge a man any bit of luck that he may have. It’s just like you. I never knew anything more selfish. If you’d had an hour off yourself, you ‘d have let us know about it all right.”
“Well, stop talking about it anyhow, West,” said Dormer. “Leave it alone. Can’t you see that we’re all as tired out as we can be? We’ve had enough fighting this term to last us a century.”
With common consent they seemed to sink their private differences in a common thought of that strange, silent man sitting behind them.
They all drew closer together. The pale gas-light fell on their faces, and they were all white and tired, with heavy, dark marks under their eyes.
With their dark gowns, their long white hands, their pale faces, their heavy eyes, they moved silently about the room and gathered at last in a cluster by the fire, and stood and sat silently without a word. Only Perrin, hidden in the shadow behind them, did not move.
Then suddenly Birkland, who was standing a little away from the rest with his back against the wall, spoke.
“You’re right, Dormer. We’ve fought enough this term to fill a great many years. We’re a wretched enough crew.”
He paused; but no one spoke, and no one moved.
“I wonder sometimes,” he went on, “how long we are going to stand it. Most of us have been here a great many years — most of us have had our hopes broken a great many years ago — most of us have lost our pluck—” Perhaps he expected a vehement denial, because he paused; but no one spoke, and no one moved. “This term has been worse than any other since I have been here. We have all been very near doing things as well as thinking them. I wonder if you others have ever thought, as I have thought sometimes, that we have no right to be here?”
“How do you mean,” said Comber slowly, “no right?”
“Well, we were not always like this. We were not always fighting and cursing like beasts. We were not always without any decency or friendliness or kindliness. We did not always have a man over us who used us like slaves, because he knew that we were afraid to give him notice and go. I was a man myself once. I thought that I was going to do things — we all thought that we were going to do things. Look at the lot of us, now—” He paused again, but there was still silence. “They say to us — the people outside — that it is our own fault, that other men have made a fine thing of teaching, that there are fine schools where life is splendid, that we have the interests of the boys under us in our hands. I know that — we all know that there are splendid schools and splendid lives; but what is that to do with us?... Do you know the kind of man that we have got over us? Do they know that every time that we have tried to do decently, it has been crushed out of us by that devil? Not a minute is our own; even in the holidays we are pursued. Let others come and try and see what they will make of it.”
A little stir like a wind passed through the listeners, but no one spoke. Birkland was leaning forward; his eyes were on fire, his hands waving in the air.
“But it is not too late — it is not too late, I tell you. Let us break from it, let us go for the governors in a body and tell them that unless they improve our conditions, unless they remove Moy-Thompson, unless they give us more freedom, we will leave — in a body. There is a chance if we can act together, and better, far better, that we break stones in the road, that we die free men than this... that this should go on.”
His voice was almost a shout. “My God!” he cried, “think of it! Think of our chance! We are not dead yet. There is time. Let us act together and break free! — free!”
He had caught them, he had held them. They saw with his eyes. They moved together. Cries broke from them.
“You’re right, Birkland; you’re right. We won’t stand it. It’s our last chance.”
“Now! Let us go now!”
“Let us go and face him!”
Birkland held t
hem all with his uplifted hand. “Now or never!” he cried.
Suddenly the door opened. Into the midst of their noise there came the voice of the school-sergeant, cold, unmoved — the voice of a thousand years of authority: “The headmaster would like to see Mr. White as soon as possible.”
It was the test. They all realized it as they turned to White to see what he would do.
For a moment he stood there, tall, gaunt, haggard, his eyes held by Birkland’s, the fire dying from them. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, his lips moved as though he would speak — then, with a helpless gesture of his hand, he moved slowly, with hanging head, down the room, and passed out through the door.
There was silence, and then from his chair in the dark corner Perrin laughed.
CHAPTER XII — MR. PERRIN WALKS IN SLEEP
I.
WITH examinations there comes a new element into the life of the term — it is an element of triumph in so far as it marks the approaching end of an impossible situation; it is, an element of despair in so far as it provides an overpowering number of answers, differing in the minutest particulars, to the same questions; and is even an element of romance, because it heralds the appearance of a final order in which boys will beat other boys, generally in a surprising and unforeseen manner. But whatever it means it also tightens to a higher pitch any situation that there may have been before, so that anything that seemed impossible now appears incredible; the days are like years, and the hours, filled with the empty scratching of pens and the rubbing of blotting-paper, stretch infinitely into the distance and hide release.
Their effect on everyone on the present occasion was to force extravagantly the longing that everything might soon be over, that the situation couldn’t stand the kind of strain that was being put upon it unless the curtain were rung down as soon as possible. Everyone was hideously busy with long periods of doing nothing except the aforesaid attention to pens and blotting-paper. Mr. Moy-Thompson had, moreover, invented a little scheme which always provided, as far as he was concerned, the pleasantest and most happy results. This was a plan whereby every master set and corrected the papers of some other master’s form and then wrote a report on them. Here obviously was a most admirable opportunity for the paying off of old scores, as a bad report always led, next term, to a miserable period of bullying and baiting, with the hapless master who had incurred it in the rôle of victim. Therefore, if, as was usually the case, your especial enemy was correcting the papers of your form and would write a report on them, unless something were done to appease him, you were, during the whole of the next term, delivered over mercilessly to the Rev. Moy-Thompson. You might perchance appease your enemy, or you might yourself be examining his form, in which case you had every opportunity of a pleasant retort. At any rate, this plan invariably inflamed any hostilities that might already be in existence and resulted in the provision of at least half a dozen victims for Mr. Moy-Thompson’s games on a later occasion.
For once, however, these examinations came to Perrin as very vague and misty affairs. This was not usual with him. As a rule they pleased him, because he could hold over boys who had been rude to him during the term the terror of being detained all the first day of the holidays — also he considered that he was ingenious in the invention of pleasant Algebraic conundrums and fascinating, derisive questions in Trigonometry that prevented any possible solution. The devising of these gave him, as a rule, pleasure and amusement, but this term he could not face them.
He set his papers, in an odd, abstracted way, with questions from earlier papers, and then he sat with his hands folded in front of him and waited. There was only one subject now in the whole world, and all these curious boys, these strange, visionary class-rooms, these appalling noises, and then these equally appalling silences, only diverted his attention and prevented his thinking.
There were always three of them now — himself, the other Mr. Perrin, and Traill — they always went about together. When he was taking an examination and was sitting at his desk, isolated, by the wall, the other Mr. Perrin, a gray, thin figure, was behind him, looking into the room, and Traill stood, as he always did now, just inside the door, but away from Mr. Perrin’s eye, because when he turned round and looked at him he always slipped, in the cleverest way, out of the door.
Perrin wondered that other people didn’t notice that he was accompanied by these persons, but probably they were all too occupied with their own affairs. Of course Traill must be got rid of — one couldn’t possibly have anyone whom one hated as much as that always with one. Sometimes it was curiously confused, because there were two Traills — a Traill who moved about and spoke to people (although never to Perrin), and the Traill who stood always by the door and never moved at all except to slip away.
Perrin was quite clear in his own mind now that he hated Traill very much indeed, but he could not be very definitely sure of any reasons. There had been something once about an umbrella, and there was something else about Miss Desart, and there was even something about Garden Minimus; but none of these things were fixed very resolutely in his mind, and his thoughts slipped about like goldfish in a pond.
It was quite certain, however, that Traill must not be allowed to go on like this, because he was a nuisance, and Perrin would sit for long hours whilst he was superintending examinations thinking about this and what he could do.
There were moments, even hours, when the consciousness of the two figures at his side and the weighty burden of his decision left him. He saw suddenly as clearly as he had ever seen, and he was frightened; it was like waking from an evil dream, and just when he was gazing back at it, frightened, even terrified, it would come slipping about him again, and the world would once more grow dark.
At last he was frightened at these intervals, because he seemed to realize then how dismal and unhappy it all was, and also how dangerous it was.
Once, during one of these clear moments, he was standing, a melancholy figure, by the iron gate, looking down the Brown Hill road, and Garden Minimus passed him. Perrin stopped him, and then when he saw the boy’s round face and shining eyes, a little frightened now, and the mouth quivering a little, he had nothing to say.
At last he said, “Oh! — Ah! — Garden — I haven’t seen much of you lately. How do the exams go?”
Perrin had an absurd impulse to take the boy by the arm and ask him to be kind to him. He was so dreadfully unhappy.
But Garden was very frightened; he choked a little in his throat, and his eyes moved frantically down the white road as though appealing for help.
“Oh! very well, sir, thank you, sir — I — I couldn’t do the geography this morning, sir.”
There was a long pause. Garden gave frightened glances up and down the road.
“When do you go for — um, ah, — your holidays, Garden?”
Garden looked up in Mr. Perrin’s face, and suddenly, young though he was, felt that Mr. Perrin was, as he put it afterwards, “awfully sick about something — not ratty, you know, but jolly near blubbing.”
He had, with his friends, noticed that Perrin was “jolly odd” during these days, but now this thought struck him to the extinction of every other feeling. He had a sudden desire to help — after all, Old Pompous had been beastly decent to him — and then there came an overwhelming sensation of shyness, as though his feminine relations had suddenly appeared and claimed him in the company of his contemporaries. He looked down, rubbed one boot against the other, and then suddenly, with a murmured word about “having to meet some fellows — beastly late,” was off.
Perrin watched him go and then turned slowly back towards the school buildings. The shadows were creeping about him again. He felt that the other Mr. Perrin was behind him. He walked stealthily, a little as a cat prowls....
About this time he took great curiosity in Traill’s bedroom. He had never been inside it — he knew only that plain brown door with marks near the bottom of it where the paint had been scratched.
But he sat now in his room and thought about it. He sat in a chair by the windows and looked across the room at his own door, at the square black lock and the shining brass handle. It was of course very easy to turn, and then he would be inside. It would be interesting to be inside — he would know then where the bed was, and the washing-stand, and the chairs... it might be useful to know.
He went to his own door and opened it, and looked very cautiously down the passage; there was no one there — it was all very silent. The sun of the December afternoon flooded the cold passage, and from downstairs the shouts of some boys floated up.... There were no other sounds.
He walked very softly down the passage, his head lowered, his hands behind his back. He stopped outside Traill’s bedroom door and listened again — he was surprised to hear that his heart was beating very loudly indeed. He pushed the door open and looked inside. The bed was near the window — the sun flooded the room and shone on the silver hair-brushes and the china basin and jug.
It was a very simple room, and the bed took up most of it; there was one photograph.
He went very softly up to it and saw that it was a photograph of Miss Desart — Miss Desart, smiling, out of doors with the sun on her dress.
He bent towards the photograph, over the china basin, and kissed it. Then he went out, closing the door softly behind him.
III.
And the week wore away, and Monday came round. Thursday was Speech-Day, and on Friday everybody went home; all marks and form lists had to be in the headmaster’s room on Wednesday night before nine.
Perrin, on Monday evening, was vaguely conscious that he had corrected no papers at all. They lay about his room now in stacks — none of them were corrected. Some masters posted results as they corrected the papers; other masters left all the results until the end. It was not considered strange that Perrin had posted no results.
But he knew as he looked at these white sheets that he ought to have done something with them. He stood in the middle of the room with his hands to his head and wondered what he ought to have done. Why, of course, he ought to correct them — he ought to say what was good and what was bad.