by James Hilton
“I caught sight of old Longwell this morning, but he didn’t know me —I never took drawing. Some of the servants’ faces I seem to remember. But apart from that, everyone’s a stranger.” He added: “I gather there was something like a clean sweep when the new Head came?”
Daggat nodded. “I came in ‘twenty-three—a year after the Head. I heard stories, of course, of what things had been like before…”
They chatted on, coming at length to reminiscences of particular boys whom Revell had known in his time, and whose younger relatives were still at Oakington. It was easy, in such a connexion, to mention Marshall, and Daggat was only too eager to discuss the tragedy. “I suppose you read about it at the time?” he queried, and Revell allowed him to presume so. “Ah, a terrible business. Queer thing, when you come to think about it, that a gas-thingumbob should come crashing down just when a boy’s head is underneath it. Providence, of course—that’s all one can say. As I’ve told the School in my sermons time and time again—WE NEVER KNOW. With all our modern science and invention—with all our much-vaunted—”
A sharp tap on the door-panel interrupted a peroration whose conclusion seemed reasonably predictable. “Come in!” yelled Daggat, in a high-pitched, sing-song tenor. The door opened a few inches, and a man’s voice, deep-toned and rather cultivated, murmured: “Sorry, Daggat—didn’t know you were busy. Any other time’ll do.”
Daggat jumped up hastily. “No, don’t go, Lambourne—we’re only chatting. Come in and meet Mr. Revell—he’s an Old Boy.”
The new-comer made his way into the centre of the room with a sort of nonchalant indifference. He was a youngish man, rather tall, perhaps in his early thirties, with dark eyes and hair and a curious half-melancholy carelessness in the way he nodded and smiled. He was dressed, if not perhaps definitely unconventionally, at least in a way that was not quite expected of an Oakington master on a Sunday morning; in fact, Revell decided, liking him a little on sight, there was nothing about him that was either schoolmasterly or sabbatical.
“We were talking,” said Daggat, puffing away at a huge briar pipe, “about poor Marshall. Revell knew his brother—the one who was killed in the War.”
Lambourne inclined his head, but made no comment.
“I must say I feel dashed sorry for the present Marshall,” Daggat continued. “He’s here now, you know, Revell—our head prefect. The only one left out of three brothers, and both the others killed. Frightful bad luck, you know, and his parents both dead, too. The poor fellow was pretty badly cut up, I can tell you. The Head wanted to give him leave of absence for the rest of Term, but of course there was nowhere for him to go. His guardian’s in India.”
“How about his holidays, then?”
“I think he spends most of them with other fellows’ people. He’s very popular.”
“Once he had a fortnight with Cousin Thomas,” put in Lambourne. “Did you know, by the way, that Ellington was his cousin? They toured the Lake District, anyhow, caught terrible colds, and finished up with a very bourgeois week-end at a seaside hydro near Blackpool.”
“Yes, he’s very popular,” Daggat reiterated. “Jolly good at all games, but swimming especially. Quite the best swimmer Oakington ever had, I believe. Different in almost every way from his brother, poor chap.”
Revell gathered somehow that Daggat had not greatly cared for the younger Marshall. “You knew HIM quite well too, I suppose?” he queried.
“Oh, fairly well. He was in my junior form for English. Quiet sort of fellow—imaginative, I daresay—read queer kinds of books. Not bad at his work. I expect he’d have taken his School Certificate.”
Revell felt that the epitaph on the deceased had, from the schoolmasterly point of view, been fitly and finally pronounced. As if to clinch the matter, Daggat added: “Ah well, the only way to look at these things is to believe that somehow or other they’re providential.”
Lambourne smiled. “I’m afraid you view Providence a shade too indulgently, Daggat. Even an insurance company would hardly dare to call a falling gas-fitting an act of God.”
Just then the chapel bell began to ring for morning service. “Must dash away,” cried Daggat, picking up his gown. “You two chaps stay here and chin-wag as long as you like.”
When he had gone, Lambourne poked up the fire and dragged his chair nearer to it. “I wish Daggat, as a believer in hell-fire, would use a little more coal,” he remarked. “It would prevent his visitors from envying the warmth of the lower regions.” He dug into the coal-scuttle with the shovel. “Empty, of course. We call him ‘the Cherub’, by the way. Decent fellow, except when he’s preaching. Then he makes you feel you want to wring his neck. I warn you, you’ll have him to-night, if you go.”
“I know. He told me.”
“You’re staying at the Head’s, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Just for the week-end?”
“That’s all.”
“Pity. You might have come along to dine with me one night at the local pub. I like a change from school dinners now and again.” He went on, after a pause, and with disconcerting abruptness: “Like the Head?”
“Pretty well, I think.”
“I suppose you mean that you can’t quite make him out?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that I meant that.” Revell was a little resentful of the other’s interpretative air.
“You must remember he’s been other things besides a schoolmaster. Lived abroad a good deal—America and the Colonies. His degree’s a medical one, by the way. Bit of a bon viveur, too, and the very devil for being discreet. All things to all men and to nearly all women, you know.”
“He makes a good Head, though, I should think.”
“Oh, first rate. Organising ability and all that. Quite a war-time discovery, in fact.”
“He was in the War, then?”
“Of it more than in it, though I’m not suggesting he didn’t risk his life once or twice. Ran so many hospitals and things that when he took it into his head to want to run Oakington, the governors snapped him up with joy.”
Something in his tone provoked Revell to a question which, in normal circumstances, he would have been least likely to ask. “Were you in the War at all?”
“Oh yes. Decidedly. But I didn’t organise anything. I just got gassed and shell-shocked—that was all.” He added, with a faint smile: “I don’t quite know why I’m telling you all this—I don’t gossip about my own affairs as a rule. Really, I suppose it’s because Daggat put me in the mood —it always gets on my nerves to hear him explaining how Providence does this, and that, and the other in this best of all possible worlds… By the way, to change the subject, are you the author of a novel?”
Revell, for whom this was rare and priceless flattery, admitted that that was so.
“I thought it must be you,” Lambourne rejoined. “I think I read it when it came out. The usual sort of thing that people do write just after they leave Oxford. Still, rather better than most, I remember. Done anything since?”
Damned patronising, Revell thought, yet more in disappointment than anger. And there was undoubtedly something in Lambourne that appealed to him. “Odd journalism,” he replied, briefly. But he would not confide in him—not yet, at any rate—about the Don Juan epic.
They talked on for a few more minutes, but the slowly dying fire made Lambourne less and less happy. “Really,” he said at length, rising from his chair, “I MUST go and do some work. I think I shall take a hot-water bottle to bed with me and mark exercise-books until dinner-time. Midday dinner, you know, on Sundays—cold meat and beetroot… Come along and have tea with me one afternoon, if you can spare the time. So long.” It was the pleasantest, politest, and most effective way of saying: “Don’t bother me any more just now”; and Revell, who himself specialised in just such pleasant, polite, and effective methods, appreciated the other’s technique.
Revell found Oakington a rather depressing place, as he wandered about the fam
iliar corridors amidst silences unbroken save by the echo of his own footfalls. It was raining heavily outside; otherwise he would have more gladly strolled about the grounds. He even half-wished that he had gone into chapel, except that to attend the evening service and two chapels in one day seemed more than could be expected of anyone who was not still a public schoolboy.
Things were still pretty much the same, he reflected, despite Roseveare’s uplifting influence. There were the same spluttering hot-water pipes in the corridors; there was the same curious smell of dust and ink in the deserted classrooms. From the ground floor he descended to the basement bathrooms; these, however, had been considerably modernised since his time. Everywhere, too, there were new and rather ugly electric-light fittings.
He next visited the two dormitories, in each of which he had slept as a schoolboy. School House had five floors, including basement and attic; the first and second floors contained the senior and junior dormitories respectively. Each dormitory was approached by a corridor leading from the staircase landing, and on both sides of these corridors were the private rooms of the masters. Ellington had a room on the second floor, immediately above Daggat’s.
It was rather melancholy, pacing along the felt matting in between the tiers of beds in the dormitories. In neither of them could Revell feel quite sure which bed he had once occupied—so lightly did sentimental recollections weigh on him. He found, indeed, that his thoughts were far more on the boy Marshall than on his own schooldays. The bright new electric lamps suspended from the ceiling over the central gangway drew his attention to the double row of scars on either side, where formerly had been the gas- fittings. Certainly, as Daggat had said, it was a curious thing that one of them should have fallen directly on to a sleeping boy. And yet such curious things DID happen. Perhaps the boys HAD been swinging on it previously, despite Roseveare’s denial at the inquest. Heads could not know everything that happened.
During lunch, however, he did not mention the matter, nor did Roseveare. After a pleasant meal, punctuated with equally pleasant conversation, the weather improved, and Revell, leaving the other in his study, strolled out into the world of leafless trees and sodden turf. There was really not much that he could do. In his own mind he was quite certain that young Marshall had met his death by an unusual sort of accident, and that the note left in his algebra-book a few hours previously was nothing more significant than a rather remarkable coincidence. What did puzzle him was not so much the Marshall affair itself, as Roseveare’s extraordinary fit of nerves over it.
Still, he might as well fill in the time with some sort of inquiry. A chat with Jones Tertius, for instance, was an obvious step, though he did not expect it to yield very much. The junior boys, he knew, usually spent winter Sunday afternoons in the Common Room; so he re-entered School House, put his head in at the familiar door, and asked the nearest occupant if he could tell him Jones’s whereabouts. The cry went round, and in a moment or two he found facing him a small, spectacled, rather shy youngster dressed in Oakington’s compulsory Sunday blacks.
Revell, when he chose to exert himself, had a distinct way with people. He was young enough, too, to be able to approach a thirteen-year-old without any sign of adult condescension. “Hullo, Jones,” he began, with a pleasant smile. “Sorry to drag you away from your friends”—not “pals” or “chums”, as Daggat would have said—“but I thought you might have a minute or two to spare. Perhaps we could take a turn round the pitch—it’s stopped raining.”
The boy accompanied him willingly enough but with very natural surprise. “I’m an O.O. up for the week-end, you see,” went on Revell, “and when I saw your name on the School list, I thought I’d look you up in case you were the brother of a fellow I knew very well when I was here. Of course, I know the name isn’t exactly a rare one, but—”
And so on. It turned out that the boy had no brothers, either past or present, but by the time the matter had been fully elucidated, the pair had reached the sports pavilion and were faced with the return walk. And what more natural, therefore, than that Revell should say, as if making conversation: “Awfully bad business about that boy who was killed here at the beginning of Term, wasn’t it? Did you know him?”
But beyond the fact that Jones had known him, and had been his particular friend, Revell learned practically nothing. Jones was one of those boys who do not respond to pumping, even by the most expert pumper. It was evident, though, that he shared none of the Head’s curiosity, misgiving, or whatever exactly it was. And as Revell had fully expected this, he bade farewell to the boy at the door of School House with a satisfied smile.
Like some rather preposterous slow-motion film the pageant of an Oakington Sunday tortuously unwound itself. Revell took tea with the Head and dazzlingly propounded his pet theory that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were allotropic personalities of the same human or perhaps inhuman being. The Head listened attentively and appeared impressed. In such wise the time passed pleasantly enough until the ringing of the chapel bell for evening service. The Head, it seemed, was not going to attend. “I have some letters to write,” he explained. “But you go, most certainly. Supper will be immediately afterwards. We do not dress on Sundays.”
In one of the rear pews of the rather ornate chapel, as the School began to stream in, Revell sought to capture the real, genuine, hundred-per-cent thrill of the Old Boy dreaming of past days. He was far more conscious of a thrill, however, when Mrs. Ellington came to sit in the pew beside him. She smiled cordially, and her husband, next to her on the other side, leaned forward with a nod of reluctant recognition. “I wondered if you would be here,” she whispered, “and to tell the truth, I rather hoped you wouldn’t.”
Of course he asked why.
“Because Captain Daggat is preaching. He really is AWFUL.”
Revell was thoroughly amused. “So I’ve been told already to-day.”
“Oh yes, by Mr. Lambourne, I know. He said he had met you. He also said you had written a novel. Have you really?”
“England expects,” replied Revell, lightly purloining some one else’s epigram, “that every young man some day will write a novel.”
“But you have, haven’t you? Do tell me what it’s called—Mr. Lambourne gave me the name, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”
“Ancient Lights,” answered Revell, frowning heavily. (Every time he uttered it, it always sounded sillier, but this was the first time he had ever whispered it to his neighbour in a place of worship.)
“Ancient Rights?”
“No, Lights,” he enunciated, as loudly as he dared.
“How interesting! I must get Mudie’s to send it down with their next batch.”
The announcement of the opening hymn put an end to further conversation. She was a fool, he thought, as he sang an intermittent and languishing alto. A charming and attractive little fool, no doubt; but a fool for all that. Yet with a half-sideways glance at her dark and sparkling eyes, he felt again the thrill of proximity.
Even apart from his neighbour, he found the chapel service quite interesting, especially as Daggat, within five minutes of beginning his sermon, supplied a perfect clue to the mystery of the note in Marshall’s algebra-book.
He would take as his text, began Daggat, in a mournful monotone, part of the eighteenth verse of the twenty-second chapter of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, twenty-two, eighteen. “They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah my brother! or, Ah sister! they shall not lament for him, saying, Ah Lord! or, Ah his glory!” As it was the last Sunday before the vacation, he thought it would not be unfitting to review in retrospect the manifold blessings and trials of the past Term. It was a good thing, every now and then, to stop and take a look behind us along the path of life, as it were, and so draw lessons from the past to help us in the future. There had been one happening, at least, within the memory of them all, that had brought them the deepest and most profound sorrow. Into their midst, unlooked for and without warning, there had come the Angel of Death�
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“You may remember,” went on Daggat, entering upon his second half-hour with a preliminary swig of water from the tumbler on the pulpit-ledge, “you may, I say, remember words which I addressed to you here, from this same pulpit, upon the first Sunday of this Term. How little did I, or any one of us then, imagine that, so shortly afterwards, my words would appear prophetic! And yet it should be a lesson to us—a much needed lesson in this age of boastful science and too-confident invention—a lesson to us never to forget, even for a moment, that our health, our happiness, even the very breath of our life, depend, not upon our own puny wills, but upon an all-wise and an all-knowing Providence…”
Revell almost laughed. He knew that immediately after evening service it was the custom for the whole school to adjourn to the assembly hall and spend twenty minutes, presided over by a master, in writing letters, reading books, or some other silent occupation.
“Wasn’t it awful?” whispered Mrs. Ellington, as they left the pew after the Benediction; and she added, without waiting for him to reply: “But it was positively cheerful compared with some that we HAVE had. By the way, how long are you staying?”
He said that he would most likely be returning to London the next morning.
“Don’t forget to visit us when you come again,” she said with a smile, and Revell, shaking hands, promised accordingly.
During supper with the Head he could not resist the temptation to be oracular. “I think I’ve solved your little mystery, sir,” he remarked, after preliminary conversation.
But Roseveare, rather to his surprise, showed no eagerness for him to explain. “Revell,” he answered, with slow emphasis, “I’m afraid I owe you an apology. There IS no mystery. I sent for you in a moment of nervous prostration—now, in a more normal condition, I can realise fully what you must have thought of it all. You have disguised your feelings with great politeness, my dear boy, but I can judge of them all the same. And you’re right, too. I have allowed myself to be completely foolish, and I apologise to you most sincerely for wasting your time… Do help yourself to some more wine.”