Two Worlds and Their Ways

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Arithmetic was the subject of the first hour, and the master of the art was Mr. Spode, who suffered from resentful surprise that new boys could not proceed from the point where the last ones left off.

  “Have you been taught?” he said.

  “Yes; yes, sir.”

  “And have you learnt?” said Mr. Spode, as if it were not worth while to finish his sentences.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then work that sum. And if it is wrong, do not mind about it. Others will not.”

  Sefton found the problem within his powers, looked up the answer and found it correct, and awaited and obtained approval.

  “Try the next kind, and I shall begin to see what you are. I did not know what you might be. Do not look at the answers. They are to help me, not you. We both need them, and I am to have them. In future you will use a book without them.”

  Sefton followed directions and again attained success, was put on to a further chapter and pursued his way. In the fourth he was less sure of himself, consulted the answer and worked at the question until the result tallied with it. Mr. Spode saw the erasures.

  “You were less sure of your ground?”

  “Yes, sir. I saw the mistake myself. I thought the sum was wrong, and looked for it.”

  “Well, who else was there to see it? Now I am here to teach you, and I do not ask that the cup shall pass from me. Do another of the same kind, and take your time.”

  Sefton did so, protected by glances at Mr. Spode, and by means of his last method again achieved success. Then he went further, and finding a problem beyond his powers, appended the answer at a distance from it, filled in the intervening space with attempts at working, and achieved a plausible effect and another triumph. One more problem dealt with in this way, and the lesson ended, and he put his work into his desk in relief and exultation. He was too young to see his danger and joined his companions without misgiving.

  “Who taught you arithmetic at home?” said Holland.

  “Miss Petticott, my governess, my sister’s governess.”

  “She must have kept your nose to the grindstone,” said Bacon.

  “Women do that,” said Holland. “They are known to be harder than men.”

  “I don’t think they are,” said Sturgeon.

  “Oh, your sickness is not the whole of life,” said Bacon.

  “No, but it is a part of it,” said Sturgeon, betraying some feeling.

  “There is not so much in early success,” said Bacon. “It may be a bad sign. But you need not look disturbed, Shelley. I daresay you will not have much of it.”

  Sefton was silent, knowing he must have it, if he could.

  “We have Latin after the break. We have it with Mr. Bigwell,” said Holland. “Bigwell wastes his time and ours with it.”

  “He takes Greek too, for the boys who learn it,” said Bacon. “I shall have enough of Bigwell, and he of me.”

  “I am not to learn Greek,” said Holland. “I am not supposed to be clever. Are you, Sturgeon?”

  “Yes. So I am to learn Greek, to let people know about it.”

  “Now what is this, boys?” said Miss James, appearing from no particular direction. “You do not want so much to eat in the middle of the morning. You have fetched enough from your boxes to last you all day. Anyone would think you had never had a meal before.”

  The boys, who had seen their appetites as casting an aspersion on the school fare, were silent as the slur was transferred to their home provision.

  “No wonder you do not enjoy your meals, if you overeat between them.”

  The boys grinned at each other, Sefton feeling shame for the first time that day, and repaired before they needed, to Mr. Bigwell’s class.

  “Well, I hope you are ready to face the term,” said the latter, hitching his gown on to his shoulders as a hardly natural appendage. “I confess I am still inclined to indulge in the backward glance.”

  “It is easier for you. You have not anything to learn,” said Holland.

  “Have I not? Make no mistake,” said Mr. Bigwell, who made none himself, and attended to his needs.

  “I mean, you know all you have to teach. You don’t have to keep on learning, as we do.”

  “Well, once I was in your pristine state,” said Mr. Bigwell, giving further adjustment to the outward sign of his present one.

  He set the boys to construe from a book of selections, to gauge their knowledge. The book was in common use, and Sefton had read it with his tutor, and obtained easy credit.

  “Have you read that passage before, Shelley? Do you know this book?”

  “No, sir. But I have read Latin something like it.”

  “Try this passage on the opposite page.”

  Sefton did so, with similar result.

  “And now this harder one some pages further.”

  Sefton just managed it, or gave the impression that he did, making one or two false moves, and rectifying them in a manner of sudden perception.

  “That is above the average. You may have a gift for languages. If so, you must see it as a responsibility. It is not a matter of credit for yourself.”

  “No, sir,” said Sefton, who had no personal concern with it.

  “We shall have our textbooks next week, and shall see how you manage then. That will be more of a test, but I do not think you will fail.”

  “I think you know more Latin than Bigwell,” said Holland, when the latter had withdrawn. “He is supposed to buy cribs for every book, and keep them in his desk. The boys have seen them when he opens it. But he did not give himself away when I set a trap for him.”

  “It would hardly do to borrow them,” said Bacon. “It would leave him without the means of taking his classes. He would have to take to his bed.”

  “And then we could not show off before him. So it would be no good,” said Sturgeon. “And it would be beyond human courage.”

  “Yes,” said Sefton, feeling that this might be the case, but that the matter could remain in the balance.

  The rest of the morning was given to Mr. Dalziel, who taught Scripture, history and English, regarded as kindred subjects and appropriate to his gentler nature. Sefton did well without great effort, and saw these things would present no problem, a matter for relief, as problems gathered.

  The dinner bell rang, and the four took their seats about Miss James in an uncertain spirit, feeling that a poor appetite would recall their gluttony, and a good one establish it. Miss James had forgotten the incident, or rather had got out of the way of remembering incidents, to avoid the strain on her memory.

  Sefton’s life thickened about him. Success was his, but success with a crumbling basis. He followed it along a way that wound hard and steep. Strategy and courage were demanded of him; danger claimed him for its own. Envy of his comrades, with their open and ordinary lives, filled his heart and looked from his eyes. By night he crept down to Mr. Bigwell’s desk, to read translations, with his ear alert for sound; broached the desk of Mr. Spode for the answers to the problems to be faced by day. A visit from Maria, urgent and exultant, confirmed him in this course. More than once catastrophe dogged him, barely passed him by. He was heard, followed, all but seen. A reputation for sleep-walking arose and saved him for the time. He was discussed, questioned, physicked by Miss James. His lapses from his standard, when his strategy failed, were ascribed to improper sleep, and he bore the symptoms of it.

  He settled down to the routine, almost coming to find it such, received his mother’s letters with their pride and praise, wept over his father’s simple words, and pressed forward on his path, resolved to sustain its rigours for his parents’ sake. He longed for the end of the term; never forgot, as others did, to mark off the days; felt he could hold out so far and no further, shrank from imagining an extra day. He fancied the masters grew guarded in their praise, that their eyes rested on him in doubt and question, but was too young to know how far he was self-betrayed. If he could reach the end of the term, his troubles would
end. The next term lay beyond his sight. Here his childhood protected him; it was part of the formless future.

  The end of the term approached, and with it the examinations. He heard them discussed without any real conception of them, hardly knew the threat they carried. When they came, it emerged that his house was founded upon the sand. Elemental forces beat upon that house, and it fell. He was confronted by problems without an answer, by passages he had not seen. His place in the subjects passed without question, either from masters or boys. This was ill-omened, but the threat was not defined. The end was at hand; the hard road lay behind; enough success was assured to him to carry him home. He no longer envied boys who slept in their beds, slept himself in a delusive peace.

  When the summons to Lucius came, he went with a sinking heart that he did not explain. The glances of the boys gave him a feeling he would not recognise. He could hardly believe it when he found his shadowy suspicions fulfilled. What was known as simple truth was simple indeed.

  Lucius sat at his desk, with Mr. Spode and Mr. Bigwell at his hand. Their faces defined Sefton’s foreboding. As Lucius spoke, his heart was still.

  “Sefton, I ask you to speak the truth, to show me you are a person who can speak it. You have had answers to the questions set by Mr. Spode?”

  “Yes—yes, sir,” said Sefton realising that honesty was the best policy, at the usual moment of finding that other policies had failed.

  “You have had books with the answers appended to them?”

  “Yes; yes, sir,” said Sefton, preferring this picture to that of himself creeping forth by night to pursue the books to their place.

  “Did you bring them from home?”

  “They were with the books that were packed for me. I did not know what they were.”

  “Did you think that copying the answers and faking the work above them was the proper use of them?”

  “I did not know how to use them, sir. I think Miss Petticott looked first at the answers.”

  Lucius looked him in the eyes, uncertain how far to accept this innocence. Mr. Spode and Mr. Bigwell kept their eyes averted, not being subject to the uncertainty.

  “And had you translations of the books you read with Mr. Bigwell?”

  “Well, I had read the book of extracts at home.”

  “You did not say you had read it?”

  “No, sir,” said Sefton, seeing that Mr. Bigwell recalled his saying he had not.

  “And the other books you used? Had you translations of those?”

  “I found some old ones in the classroom. I did not know at first we were not supposed to use them.”

  “But you did not show them to the other boys?”

  “No, sir,” said Sefton, weeping. “I wanted to do better than they did.”

  “Even when you realised you were gaining credit that was not yours, you did not show them?” said Lucius, his tone suggesting that honour among wrong-doers rendered the latter more acceptable to him.

  “No, sir. I thought that would make it more likely that it would be found out,” said Sefton, on an honest note.

  “Well, go and fetch those books and bring them to me.”

  “I can’t, sir. I have destroyed them. I put them on the fire. I wanted to stop using them before the examinations. I thought if I did not use them for those, it would not much matter my doing it before. And I did not use them for those. I did not open a single book all through them. I had not got the books any longer.” Sefton raised his eyes with a childish openness that was echoed in his tone.

  “There was no sign that you did use them,” said Mr. Spode.

  “You could not have done so,” said Mr. Bigwell. “The invigilation would have made it impossible.”

  Sefton lifted his eyes again in innocent acceptance.

  “So this was the reason of the sleep-walking and pallid looks,” said Lucius. “It was what you had on your mind.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sefton, causing his shoulders to rise, as though he felt the burden rolling off them.

  “What made you so anxious to do better than the other boys?”

  “My mother wanted it, sir, because of my father,” said Sefton, arousing in Lucius a familiar doubt whether to encourage parents in interest in their sons.

  “We have never had to deal with such a protracted course of deceit.”

  Sefton broke into natural tears, as the long stretch of weariness and effort surged over him.

  “Your parents will feel more sorrow in your wrongdoing than they had pleasure in your success. I need hardly say that to your father’s son.”

  “No, sir,” said Sefton, his eyes dilating as he grasped the possible result of his sacrifice.

  “The masters cannot write a report of your work without mention of a thing so much involved in it,” said Lucius, in an empty tone, as though getting through what must be said. “And we could not take it upon ourselves to keep such a thing from your parents. We must not fail them because you have done so.”

  “I suppose you do have to depend on them in any real thing to do with the boys.”

  Sefton spoke under some strange urge, surprised by the directing force within himself. He saw the shaft go home, saw a gleam of hope and saw it fade, knew without seeing it the comprehension in the masters’ eyes.

  “I am glad there has been no suggestion of trouble in your work for Mr. Dalziel.”

  “No, sir. There was nothing in the books I had, to do with that,” said Sefton, as though the trouble in the other things were hardly to be referred to himself.

  “You may go now. There is no more to say on the matter. I wish that words could mend it.”

  “It is a sorry thing to see a child at bay,” said Mr. Bigwell. “We could only be ashamed of our own position.”

  “He saw us as secure and pitiless,” said Mr. Spode, “and what is greater cause for shame? And a child is not what we think. We should not know, if we did not see it, that it was a child. That is a knowledge that has come to me.”

  “The childishness of the whole affair is its saving grace,” said Lucius. “Thank you for giving me your time.”

  “So he does not want to give us his,” said Mr. Spode in the passage. “He does not like to hear us doing justice to ourselves. Most of this trouble is saving grace. It is so gentle and aspiring a crime. That may be true of many crimes. It is righteousness that tends to lack quality.”

  “Oh, it has more on the whole,” said Mr. Bigwell.

  “The boy was surprised that it had not. I observed the boy.”

  “I wonder what he is doing now. I hope not crying in the dormitory.”

  “Your hope is realised. I can hear him with the other boys. He is vaunting himself and being puffed up.”

  “I do not see he has cause for doing that.”

  “I think I see why he does. The way of transgressors may be hard in a subtle sense.”

  Sefton had intended to go upstairs and face alone the death of hope. He was not yet versed in the ways of his present world. In the passage, at a considered distance from the study, stood the three partners of his life, if not of his experience.

  “What had the Head to say?” said Holland. “You have not lost a relation, have you? I mean, nobody is dead at home? It is just that you did your papers less well than your ordinary work?”

  “Yes, of course it is that. Don’t you really know the game I have played?”

  “We knew there was something. We began to guess. Had you cribs and keys and things?”

  “Yes, of course I had. I have torn them all up now. I have watched their death in the flames. I wanted to see how far I could go without being suspected. And it was a pretty long way. What fools these masters are!”

  “It is not a sign of intelligence to be easily suspicious,” said Bacon.

  “I got rid of the keys before the examinations. I could not use them for those. It would not have been fair on the rest of you. And there is such a thing as going too far.”

  “You did not stop far short
of it. You went a pretty long way.”

  “And I expect the Head thought so,” said Holland, “and said what he thought.”

  “And you were not so fair to the rest of us as all that,” said Bacon. “We had to suffer through the term by comparison with you.”

  “With your keys and cribs, which was worse,” said Sturgeon.

  “Isn’t there going to be any trouble about it?” said Holland, in a baffled tone.

  “Allusions on report, and all that,” said Sefton, in an airy manner, feeling this would satisfy any normal desire for justice.

  “An instance of the all-in-one, indeed,” said Bacon, showing it had done so in his case.

  “Couldn’t you run away instead of going home?” said Holland, in whose case it had gone further.

  “No, thank you. I prefer the comforts of home to hanging about without a roof over my head.”

  “Comforts of home!” said Sturgeon.

  “You might stay away just long enough to make them anxious,” said Holland. “Then they might be too relieved to see you, to say much.”

  “I have not enough money. And I can’t very well ask for it for that purpose,” said Sefton, implying that for any other it would be forthcoming.

  “Ask for it for something else.”