Jack Raymond

by Этель Лилиан Войнич

  "Surely you don't want this one?" he asked in surprise. "It's the commination service."

  The Vicar looked up uneasily. "You had better read the lessons for the day," he said.

  "I read them this morning," said Jack in his indifferent voice. "This one, if you don't mind, sir; I've had to learn it by heart, and I'm not sure I've got it right."

  The contrast between his face and his speech had roused the doctor's curiosity. "Master Jack has a will of his own," he thought; "I'm glad it's not I that have to manage him." However, he began to read without further protest; he was puzzled, and also a little bit amused at being domi­neered over in this fashion by a disgraced schoolboy.

  Jack's lips moved silently as he lay watch­ing his uncle; evidently he was following the text from memory. The doctor read on, passing the nineteenth verse, where the brown stain marked the page, and skipping the improper passages, though his hearers knew them by heart. He felt embarrassed and uncomfortable, almost annoyed.

  "I think we can find something more suitable than this," he said, when the chapter was finished. "Suppose I read the story of..."

  "The next chapter, please." Jack spoke softly, without turning or removing his eyes from the figure in the arm-chair.

  "Don't be troublesome, Jack," said the Vicar sharply. "Let Dr. Jenkins choose."

  Jack's fingers closed round the doctor's wrist. "Go on, please," he whispered, with­out moving. "The next chapter..."

  His face was still quite colourless and set. "I wonder what the boy is up to?" Dr. Jenkins thought. "Some devilry, certainly."

  He was not so familiar with the Bible as the Raymonds were. Glancing over the opening verses of the twenty-eighth chapter, he began to read, well content to have got through the maledictions and come to the blessings. After the first column he realised what the chapter is about.

  "Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be, when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out..."

  He laid the Bible down on his knee; really he could not plough through any more of this.

  Mrs. Raymond was quite white, and her lips had begun to tremble. The little girl on her knee was pale too, scared without know­ing why. Jack's great eyes had never stirred from his uncle's face.

  A kind of breathless hush had fallen in the room. The doctor picked up the book again, and went on reading, with a horrible sense that he was taking part in an execution. He floundered helplessly on and on, through the curses piled one upon another, to the tremendous peroration:

  "In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see..."

  The Vicar rose from his chair with a smothered cry.

  The Bible fell open on the floor. Jack was kneeling upright on the couch, with one hand clenched upon the foot-board, and looking straight into his uncle's eyes. Molly began to cry suddenly.

  "Thank you," said Jack, lying down again. "Uncle will let me go to school."

  CHAPTER VII

  Accordingly, at the opening of the term, Jack went to school. His point once gained, he had been quite docile about all minor questions. Mr. Raymond's choice had fallen upon a good middle-class school near Lon­don; and Jack, when told of the decision, had acquiesced with the passivity of utter indifference. On the last morning, when it was time to start for the train, the Vicar called him into the study.

  "I think it right to tell you," he said, "that in giving Dr. Cross the necessary par­ticulars, I made no mention of what I have found out about you. If I had done so, he would certainly have refused to accept you; and I have some doubt whether I am not doing him wrong by letting him take you in ignorance. But my chief reason for choosing his school is that I have heard he exercises a close supervision over the conduct of his boys; you will, I hope, have no opportunity to injure your schoolfellows. You start, therefore, with a clean record, and it rests with yourself to live down the past. But you must understand clearly that this is the last chance I can give you. If Dr. Cross sends you back to me, you will go to a reformatory."

  Jack stood still and listened, his eyes on the floor. As he did not speak, the Vicar added in a lower voice:

  "I suppose it is useless to appeal to any natural feeling of affection in you, or I would ask you not to break your aunt's heart, and not to bring shame on your sister. But for your own sake I beg you to think before it is too late. From the reformatory to the con­vict prison is only one step."

  There was still no answer He rose, sigh­ing.

  "I had hoped you would repent and con­fess at last. Jack, this is the turning point of your life; have you nothing to tell me before you go?"

  Jack slowly raised his eyes from the floor.

  "Yes, one thing."

  He was grave, but quiet and gentle. "Whether you send me to a reformatory or not, I suppose I shall live, somehow, and grow up. You've got Molly here, and I can't take her away from you, because you're stronger than I am. When I'm a man I shall be stronger than you; and if you've been unkind to her I shall come back, and kill you. As for Spotty, she's safe enough; I drowned her this morning. That's all; good-bye."

  He soon settled down into the routine of school life, and plodded through the first half term, making neither friends nor enemies. No one was unkind to him; nothing ever happened; he was not even acutely miserable. "I'm getting accustomed," he thought, with dull self-contempt; a creature that could placidly go on living after such violation of body and soul seemed to him not worth hating. Probably his nerves were blunted.

  Of the old wilfulness not a trace remained. From the naughtiest boy within twenty miles round, he had changed into a model of docility; yet he was as little liked by the masters as by the boys. His schoolfellows, on the whole a very fair average set of lads, had at first made friendly advances to him, and had been repulsed, not angrily, but with sullen indifference. He no longer cared at all for any sports or games; yet there was noth­ing studious about him; he performed the tasks set him, but made no pretence of taking any interest in them. The one thing for which he seemed to crave was sleep. He would have slept, if it had been allowed, for fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. Masters and boys alike gradually came to regard him as a dull, apathetic boor, with neither intellect enough for scholarship nor energy enough for mischief. They thought him a coward, too. Before Christmas all the boys were called up to have their teeth examined; and Jack, who had been so brave, trembled and turned white when the dentist told him that a tooth wanted filling.

  His uncle had asked that arrangements should be made for him to spend the Christ­mas and Easter holidays at the school, and go home only for the summer vacation.

  The journey, he had said in his letter, was too long to be worth taking for short holidays. Dr. Cross, though somewhat surprised at this request, in an age of cheap and easy railway travelling, had raised no objections; and so, at Christmas-time, while his schoolfellows were merry-making at their homes, Jack wandered about the deserted play-grounds, and slept alone in the big, empty dormitory. It was at this time that he began to think.

  The process of thinking was to him a labor­ious and difficult one. His mind had never been trained to such exercise; nor had he the external familiarity with it which comes of living among thoughtful persons. Probably no member of the Vicarage household had ever thought, individually, at all; family opinions and beliefs, none the less sincere for that, were inherited, like the family plate, and profiles, and virtues. The Raymonds lived, as other Raymonds had lived before them, and never asked of Providence: "Why?" But Jack, left alone, sat down among the ruins of his shattered childhood and contemp­lated a tremendous question-stop.

  He began to see the world as it had been a huge fish pond,
where the big fish eat the little ones, only to be dragged up with a hook through their gills and eaten in their turn by a fearsome two-legged monster whose name is Death. Seeing that from this final dread there is no escape, he judged it a point of wisdom to keep the eyes turned away from that direction, and to fix them upon dangers which can be avoided.

  His uncle had been bigger and stronger than he, just as Tarquin had been bigger and stronger than Lucrece; that, in itself, was sufficient explanation of all that had befallen him last summer. There was no ground for reproach, or bitterness, or anger; it was all quite natural. Like Caliban's god Setebos, the stronger creature had done as pleased him. For the weaker, one course remained: to harden his muscles and expand his chest, that when next a predatory entity should cross his path the balance of strength might not be as it had been. Thus, when his schoolfellows came back after the holidays, they found a change in Jack; he was as surly, as reserved, as passively obedient to authority as ever, but he seemed to be waking out of his sleepy apathy, and now took an interest in at least one subject: physical training.

  "Boys," said Dr. Cross on the first even­ing, "I want you older ones to keep an eye on a new boy that's coming to-morrow, and see he doesn't get bullied. He's a little foreigner, a widow's only son, and supposed to be a bit of a musical genius. He's only eleven, and I daresay has been rather coddled up at home, especially as he's not very strong. Of course he must learn to rough it now; but let him down gently, like good fellows."

  Jack shrugged his shoulders as the head­master went out So the school was to be turned into a nursery for cry-babies and pet lap-dogs now.

  The first sight of the new boy aroused in him a certain cold and secret animosity. The broken English and the violin were bad enough; but he would have managed to put up with them somehow. What he could not stand was the child's personal appearance. The seraphic little face with its yellow aureole of curls, its great, startled, solemn blue eyes, set all his teeth on edge. This child, appar­ently, had always had "mothers and things" to stand between him and Setebos.

  Dr. Cross was popular with the boys, and his wishes were usually respected, so on the whole the "kid," as the new boy was nick­named, suffered less persecution than might have been expected. Nevertheless, when the monitors were out of sight, a certain amount of rather ferocious teasing went on; and the child's first weeks at school were scarcely happy ones. He was evidently afraid of all the big, boisterous creatures who alternately snubbed and patronised him, and bewildered at these strange, new surroundings, so different from the esoteric world where he had grown from babyhood among shadows of his mother's endless grief and dim echoes of far-off trage­dies. For a month he drifted between quick­sands of practical jokes and whirlpools of ridicule, a solitary little figure, uncomplaining and very desolate, clinging tightly to his violin, and waiting for the glorious day when his mother should come to see him.

  She had arranged to come once every month, this being the most she could afford. She was too poor to travel oftener, and too feeble in health to live near the school. She had a tiny cottage in Shanklin, and an income just big enough to live upon and give her child a good education. Everything that she could save out of her personal expendi­ture, or earn by painting fans and fire-screens, was laid aside for his future.

  Qn the occasion of her first visit Jack hap­pened to pass through the hall as she entered, and glanced round carelessly at the slim black figure. "Theo!"he heard her call; then the child rushed past him in a whirlwind of tempestuous joy, and he turned and went out, that he might not see them kiss. His heart was bitter in him against this darling of the unfair gods, dowered so richly with beauty, and talent, and a mother. "Molly's two years younger than that wax doll," he thought; "and she's got to grow up in uncle's house, with no one to take her part but Aunt Sarah."

  Two days afterwards he was sitting alone in one of the playing fields, reading. Several of his schoolfellows were at play on the other side of the hedge, and their shouts and laughter sounded in his ears without arousing him. The game they had chosen was not one which develops the muscles, so for him it had no interest; he took part in games for training, not for amusement.

  "I don't know what you mean!" a piteous voice cried out suddenly. "And I — I want to go and practise."

  Jack looked up. At a little distance from him, by the gateway leading from one field into the other, stood a big boy named Stubbs, holding Theo by the arm. The scared face of the child roused Jack from his preoccupa­tion. He laid down his book and sat watch­ing. Neither of the boys had noticed his presence.

  "Don't be such a little fool," he heard Stubbs say. "I don't want to hurt you..."

  The remaining words were too low to hear; but Jack had understood by the expression of the big boy's face. He thought of Greaves, and Thompson, and Robert Polwheal; and looked on with cold malevolence. So much for a mother's protection! Surely the gods are just indeed, and mete out ruin with equal hands to loved and unloved alike; to this end comes innocence too weak for self-defence. "You don't know what it all means," he thought. "You're clean, and your mother comes and kisses you. Next time she comes you won't be so clean."

  "I don't know what you mean," Theo cried out again; and, wrenching his arm free, he dashed towards the gate.

  "You're wonderfully innocent," Stubbs called after him, "for a jail-bird."

  Theo stopped short, stared at him silently for a moment, and burst into despairing sobs.

  Jack had risen and was standing by the hedge. Something leaped out of darkness before his eyes: Trevanna glen, and the sunset, and the mavis... Then every­thing was blurred and dim, with a roaring noise that filled his ears and quick lights flash­ing in a mist; and he was kneeling on the chest of something that gasped and writhed, and strangling it with both hands.

  His fit of mad fury was over in a moment He found himself in the middle of a crowd, evidently called in from the other field by the cries of Stubbs. Three boys were on the ground, and a fourth, one of the monitors, was saying in a breathless, injured voice: "Well, Raymond, you do know how to use your fists, anyway!"

  Jack looked round him helplessly; at Stubbs, spluttering and choking in a corner; at another boy whose nose was bleeding; at Theo, white-faced and scared. He put both hands up to his head; he was still dizzy, and felt, somehow, as if he were back in Porthcarrick.

  "I'm... sorry," he said at last. "I lost my temper..."

  He went slowly away, his head bent, his feet dragging in the grass. The puzzled boys looked at each other.

  "There, stop sniffling!" said the monitor sharply to Stubbs. "And you, young shaver," he added, turning to Theo, "run after Raymond and give him his book; he's forgotten it."

  As Theo ran off with the book, the moni­tor turned back to Stubbs.

  "Look here! Raymond didn't start throt­tling you for nothing. The next time I catch you hanging about and bullying any of the little chaps, I'll punch your head myself. Now be off; we don't want cads here."

  Stubbs slipped away, meekly enough. "Dirty little beast!" muttered the monitor.

  After this incident Jack waked up to find that his position in the school was changed. He had been so indifferent to his surround­ings that he only now saw how universally Stubbs had for long been disliked and mis­trusted by the boys. If the masters heard anything of what had occurred, they kept silence; but Jack began slowly to realise that his unexpected championship of Theo had won for him both the goodwill of his school­fellows and the impassioned adoration of the small creature's self.

  Theo trotted after him, indeed, like a "pet lap-dog," often grievously embarrassing his idol by the ways in which his affection expressed itself. Jack would find his night­shirt carefully smoothed and folded, new laces threaded into his boots, the right page turned down in his lesson books, and early primroses laid on his plate at breakfast. This last attention, however, was too much for his patience; and he snubbed the child so unmercifully that the monitors, disinclined as they were to tolerate friendships between li
ttle boys and big ones in the school, shrugged their shoulders and refrained from interfering. "The kid" was nothing worse than a blithering idiot, they decided, and Raymond was quite capable of putting him down.

  But Theo's devotion was proof against a good deal of snubbing. "Little duffer!" Jack would mutter angrily when the child's name was mentioned; yet he submitted in time, though with a very bad grace, and grad­ ually came to be regarded as Theo's official protector and champion. "You'd better not bully the kid," one boy would say to another; "or Raymond'll cut your head open." As for Theo, once freed from persecution and satisfied as to the two prime necessities of his nature, a god for his worship and peace for violin practice, he flourished and expanded beyond all expectations, and even blossomed out into the use of English slang and the possession of a huge clasp-knife, fortunately too stiff for his small fingers to open.

  His letters to his mother were filled with the praises of Jack. She could gain no definite idea as to the cause of the fight with Stubbs, for Theo, happily, had understood too little himself to be able to explain. On her next visit, however, she obtained from him an account, given in all innocence without any comprehension of its meaning, of what Stubbs had said to him. That afternoon Dr. Cross came into the classroom and said to Jack: "Raymond, I want you to go downstairs; Mirski's mother would like to speak to you before she goes."

  Jack obeyed, with a scowling face. As if things were not bad enough already, he had got to go and be jawed at by the other fel­low's mother now.

  He found her sitting alone, her thin hands folded on her lap. As he came in she looked up; and he stopped short and dropped his eyes, with a sudden rush of jealous hatred against her child. What right had Theo to have a mother like that, when other peo­ple had nothing? "Nothing, nothing," he repeated to himself with dolorous insistence, He had never realised how lonely he was till he saw the face of the "other fellow's mother," Her eyes were like the deep, still water in the shadowy pools of Trevanna glen.