“The truth is the truth,” Boy said.
Wearily Swift rose, grabbed Boy by the hair, bent his head down, and thrust him along the gangway at the foot of the beds. “Do as you’re told, sir. Go and get ready for your drumming-in. Piss your bladder dry and shit yourself empty—we don’t want any accidents. Your drumming-in is in ten minutes. And you,” he turned to Caspar, “will follow.”
Boy had no choice but to obey. And after the dread of what he had done to Lorrimer, the ordeal that lay ahead could, he imagined, hold few extra terrors. That conviction fell apart when he returned to the upper gallery ten minutes later. It was now thronged with excited boys who looked at him with a mirth that was part-truculent, part-shamefaced. He knew two things now about drumming-in: It involved the whole house and it happened on the upper gallery.
Back in the dorm he found that Lorrimer, whether dead or alive, was no longer there. Nor were Caspar, Causton, and de Lacy. Only Carnforth, his other dorm neighbour, remained.
“You didn’t kill Lorrimer,” Carnforth said after introducing himself.
Until that moment Boy had shared the same belief; but Carnforth spoke so shiftily he began to doubt again that Lorrimer was alive. One twitching foot seemed little enough proof. And it was true about chickens.
“Your bro will be back soon,” Carnforth said. “Come on, get your clothes off. Quick as you can now.”
“Do what?” The bottom fell out of his stomach.
“You have to do it naked. Everyone has to.”
“I will not!” But even as he heard himself say the words he knew the determination was empty.
“If you don’t, they’ll come in here and tear your clothes off. It’s what they’re hoping for. Blenkinsop will really tear them. I mean shred them. Even after he’s got them off. I’ve seen him.”
Suddenly Boy stepped out of his clothes, down to the underpants. He had no idea the night was so cold.
“Everything,” Carnforth said.
Boy felt gooseflesh grate against gooseflesh as he pulled off his underpants. The cold shrivelled his penis to a little acorn. He wished he could stop shivering; everyone would think—would know—how terrified he was. He grinned weakly at Carnforth. “We should do this in the summer,” he said.
“It wouldn’t work,” Carnforth said stolidly. “We’d know each other too well by then. What they’re getting ready for out there you could only do to someone you didn’t know.” Then, realizing perhaps how unfeeling his answer had been, he added as he half-pushed, half-steered Boy toward the door, “You’re lucky really. You’ll have a rope. Until two years ago they used to do it without ropes and a boy was killed.”
Just before they reached the door it was pushed open and Caspar and Causton came in. Caspar’s eyes went wide with shock as he took in Boy’s nakedness. Boy saw the terror follow, “Bear up, young ’un,” he said and walked swiftly out to the gallery.
Thus Christians to the lions—the sense that every eye in the universe was upon you, and every defect of your body and character made plain. A great hoot of derision greeted his appearance. A boy in a tail coat, not Swift but obviously a pharaoh, strode toward him holding a length of rope. With a practised flick of the wrist he threw a loop in the rope and tossed it over Boy’s neck; for an instant Boy thought of a hanging. “And your arms,” the pharaoh said crossly, annoyed at Boy’s lack of response. “Shove your arms through.”
Boy obeyed. Suddenly he had an inkling of all that was to follow, for when the pharaoh stood aside it became clear that the rope snaked out over the iron rail of the gallery, over one of the beams—a stiffened collarbeam, as Caspar had told Lorrimer—over the next beam, and back to the gallery, where it was made fast to the railing. He was not left guessing for long.
“All you do,” the pharaoh said, “is jump up there”—he pointed to the first of the two beams over which the rope trailed—“and fetch that book back here. If you fall, the rope’ll save you.”
Boy could barely make out the words over the excited barracking of the rest of the house. The book lay dusty at the exact midpoint of the beam.
Blenkinsop joined them. He had a head like a caricature of a phrenology cast—every normal bump, lump, and protrusion, including the Adam’s apple, was too prominent to seem real. Boy found himself imagining phrases such as Love of Family, Criminal tendencies, Baser Appetites written one upon each bump, as in all the books on phrenology. All he saw were the shaven hairs of the beard, tightly extruded and bristle-blue on the sallow skin. Blenkinsop’s eyes were supernaturally shiny as he scanned Boy’s naked body.
“Is this what you call drumming-in?” Boy asked.
“Ho ho ho ho, no no no no!” Blenkinsop said. “But if you do that”—he pointed at the beam—“fast enough, you can spare yourself the drumming-in.” He laid a mock-kindly hand on Boy’s arm. “No need to tremble,” he said. “Yet!”
“Come on,” the pharaoh said crossly, as if Boy had been doing all the talking.
Boy looked at the beam again. He could not stop trembling as he walked toward the rail. When he touched it he almost knew he was not going to be able to climb up and over onto the beam. He looked around in his terror. A hundred—it looked like a thousand—gloating faces. He tried to imagine little Caspar standing there ten minutes from now. He could not bear the thought, and he needed the pity of it to save him from his own terror.
“Listen,” he called. There was a momentary hush. “My brother cannot stand heights. He will certainly fall. Let me do it twice—once for him.”
There was an uncertain murmur until Blenkinsop, who now held the other end of the rope, gave it a tweak. “Come on!” he shouted. “Your heroics don’t impress us a bit.”
The rope tweaked Boy forward, almost toppling him. Gusts of laughter resolved themselves into a chant: “Come on! Come on!”
Caspar and Causton, still in the dorm, heard all of this through the open door, though Caspar still had little idea of the ordeal awaiting him.
“Is that true?” Causton asked. “Can’t you take heights?”
“He’s the one with no head for heights. They terrify him.”
“And you?”
“I don’t mind.”
“What a sterling brother!” Causton said.
“I can look after myself,” Caspar told him. “I wish he wouldn’t interfere.”
Outside Boy was beginning the sickening climb over the railing and onto the lower of the two curved stiffeners. What Caspar had said was quite true: Even the view from the lower branches of a tree would give him vertigo. But the words of his father, words he had heard a hundred times, rang in his memory: Never flinch. Never show fear, and you’ll master any group of men. Show no fear and there’s naught you may not lead them to—no dangers you may not brave together. Show no fear.
So this was not the first time in his life he had put an ice-cool face upon the world while he seethed with terrors inside. It was not as bad (he told himself) as, for instance, dropping down into the blackness of a tunnel ventilation shaft with one foot in a noose at the end of a rope. If he could ignore the scorn of the others, it was not as bad as that.
He slipped his arm through the decorative rose cut between the stiffener and the collarbeam and then inched his way up the centre of the strut, testing each toehold, each new hand grip, up, up, until he could swing a leg over the beam. The mob watched in what—so soon after their catcalling—seemed like silence.
He straddled the beam, not daring to glance down. Here a second stiffener, above the beam this time, ran up to form, with its partner on the other side, a semicircular arch of wood beneath the apex of the roof. It effectively prevented him from standing.
How should he go now? He was sitting the wrong way, facing the crowded gallery, his back to the book he had to collect. Could he turn around without looking down? He decided he could not. He would have to inch himself along back
wards.
“Boo!” someone shouted when he began. “Do it twice? You won’t even do it once!”
Laughter turned to derision. Still struggling to keep his outward calm, he looked from one pitiless, gloating face to another. Some eyes could not meet his, but most stared back with savage glee as they shouted fake encouragement at him.
The beam was filthy. His hands were at once black with soot and dust—the black, oily dust of gas jets. So, too, he imagined were his buttocks and scrotum. Steadily he worked his way back until he felt the book touch the base of his spine. He breathed out his relief and sat upright, reaching a hand around for the book. The movement unbalanced him.
For a moment his legs flailed wildly and he knew he was going to fall. The gallery shouted whoo-oo-op! and parodied imbalance to one another. God, let me fall where the rope will be shortest, he begged. His ears were filled with a great wind. He saw the apex of the roof turn and tilt at a crazy angle. He saw faces, laughing—hooting with laughter. He prepared himself for the tug and burn of the rope about his chest.
Then there was a searing pain at his ankle. It had caught a notch checked into the beam by a carpenter, perhaps to house the calipers when the beam had been lifted up here. If it would hold! If flesh would not protest too much! If it would only hold! His fingers spidered over the top of the beam. Then over the edge. Now he had two holds—two bits of flesh to divide the agony. Arm and leg muscles took the strain. He was going up. He was not going to fall. More strain. Surely a bone must snap or a tendon wrench free from its attachment? The pain was intense. How could he stand such pain? But slowly he was recovering his position on the top of the beam. The hooting and the barracking did not for one moment let up.
Inch by torturing inch he regained his balance. When finally he sat upright he was bathed in sweat. Ironical cheers greeted the achievement. He looked around that cruel sea of faces and could not help smiling his relief. More carefully this time he felt behind him. No book. The book was not there!
“Fly, man!” a boy cried, giggling and flapping his hands. He jumped up and down on the spot. Others joined in, jumping and flapping their arms, laughing. “Fly!” they chorused. “Fly!” He could feel the tremor of their jumping, shaking in the beam, as he frantically groped behind him for the book.
“Fly down!” one boy cried and pointed over the gallery rail.
Unthinkingly Boy glanced down. There was the book, battered and open, on one of the oak tables. It was all he saw, and he saw it for only a flash; but that was enough. The entire hall spun in a shower of flying black darts, swirling in a maelstrom about his head. Mindless now of the scorn of others, he hurled himself forward and clutched at the beam, eyes tight shut against the black whirlpool that sought to suck him down.
Again the chorus of boos—and this time, something more: missiles. Books, rocks of stale bread, rolled-up clothing, a kale stalk, bits of kindling, whizzed past him or struck him hard where he clung for dear life to the beam. Someone out there was a wizard with a peashooter, too.
It will not do, he told himself. You must face them. You must see it through.
Caspar, sick himself with pity for his mad, brave brother, followed his progress by changes in the tone of the shouting and derision.
“It’s to do with going out on one of the beams, isn’t it?” he told Causton.
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“You have no idea what torture that would be to my brother.”
Out on the beam Boy was slowly but resolutely raising himself upright again. A book caught him across the nose with a flash of searing light and a salty, hollow sharpness in which his head rang. Two images of the hall spiralled over one another. But still he went on raising himself upright.
When he made his first move back he discovered what all new boys who tried to go along the beam at the straddle discovered—he was going against the grain of the wood. A long splinter of pitch pine pierced the heel of his right hand, another his left thigh. He had no choice but to kneel or get turned into a pincushion of splinters. He began another painful move to the new position. The sweat now made him feel deathly chill.
Everyone had been waiting for the discovery: they howled with laughter and pricked one another’s bodies with imaginary splinters. Boy searched for one kindlier face in all that unrelenting mob and found none. What he did find made him freeze halfway up into the crouch: Blenkinsop was unfastening the tethered end of the rope!
Moments later the free end swung loose, a whippy pendulum, from the neighbouring beam. Boy was paralysed, one foot in the crouch, one still hanging down. He could not move; he could hardly breathe. His eyes bulged.
Now the silence was complete. Blenkinsop looked around, grinning, ready to ward off a shower of laughing congratulation. He faced nothing but blank, horror-stricken silence. Boy realized that he had not been alone in depending on that rope; it had been every fellow’s licence to mock and jeer. But now, to a man, they sat-crouched-hung there with him, appalled at his danger, willing his muscles to move until their own ached.
“You blithering fool, Blenkinsop!” Swift hissed in that straining silence. But there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do to retrieve the loose end now. Boy had to make it back to the gallery alone.
No one looked at either of the senior men; no one could take his eyes off Boy, still rigid in the middle of the beam.
“Come on, Stevenson. You can do it!” someone said.
“Yes, come on, man!” Several took up the shout.
Boy opened his eyes then and saw smiling, fearful encouragement on every side. He saw, too, that someone in the hall below had dowsed the gaslights in the lower gallery and the main body of the hall. Only the upper gallery was lit. The height, the sickening, headwhirling height, had gone.
This beam rests two feet above the floor, Boy told himself. Stand up!
He stood. He could smile. He smiled at the silhouettes that thronged the rails, knowing they were smiling, too. One, two, three, four easy steps brought him to the safety of the upper stiffener, but now he did not pause. He swung himself around it and, thrusting an arm through the rose-shaped hole, made the easy leap for the railing, catching hold of it without difficulty. If the move had been made upon the ground, no one would have turned to watch; yet now a great roar of relief rang from every throat there. Boys clustered around to haul him in over the railing and slap him on the back. “Well done, man!” they cried.
Over, Boy thought, close to tears. It’s over!
“You’ll only get a light drumming-in after that,” Swift promised.
“What?” Boy was incredulous. More? After that?
Swift laughed, not quite wholeheartedly. “Oh yes. That”—he pointed airily at the beam—“was a fraud. No one escapes a drumming-in, however well they do the beam.”
Several lads around giggled at the trick, but the mood was friendly.
Only Blenkinsop looked peevish as he came forward to Boy.
“Come on,” he said roughly. “Get that rope off. It’s time for your little bro.”
“Let me do it again,” Boy said. “In place of him.”
Swift shook his head. “Can’t be done, young sport.”
Blenkinsop was very rough in getting the rope off. They swung the loose end over the beam, fished it in with one of the poles for opening the upper windows, swung it over the next beam, fished it in again, and tied it to the railing. Swift checked the knot and then looked at Blenkinsop as if he had needed all this time to reach a decision. “You’d better come and see me in my study when this is over,” he said.
From the change in the hubbub outside, Caspar guessed that his turn had come. He stood, with pounding heart and lost stomach, and dropped his blanket. Causton stared at his tiny erection.
“Why that?” he asked, his eyes wide in disbelief and delight.
Caspar looked down and blushed. “That always ha
ppens when I have to think about cruelty. Like whipping slaves and things. Doesn’t it with you?”
“I should say not! Not thinking about that, anyway!”
With only the upper gallery lights on there was too much shadow for many to notice Caspar’s strange condition. But Blenkinsop saw it. He brushed his hands down there many times as he tied the rope. In the end he was quite excited. Caspar was more bemused than embarrassed. He kept looking at the beam, working on how best to clamber up the stiffeners and walk along it.
Someone thrust a book into his hands. Eating Exercises it said on the cover; the spine, more truthfully, said Latin Exercises. “Take it to the middle of that beam and put it down. Then come back,” Swift said.
“Leave it there?”
“Yes. If you do it fast enough, you’ll escape your drumming-in.”
Right, Caspar thought. This isn’t so bad. His erection fell. He clamped the book between his teeth, knowing exactly the route he was going to take.
He sprang up onto the broad wooden handrail that capped the gallery railings, steadied his balance in a trice, and then made a further diagonal leap straight onto the collarbeam, crouching down at once to get under the slope of the rafters.
There was a gasp from those who saw the move from the side where he made the leap. Fractionally later, so quickly had he moved, there was an answering gasp as those on the other side saw him appear, miraculously, above their heads.
He barely paused, moving forward and rising as the slope allowed. When he reached the upper stiffener he leaped again, landing at a crouch three feet up; in the same move he dropped to his stomach and swung his legs down under the curve of the stiffener. He had judged it perfectly, for his feet came to rest on the midline of the beam. He swung the rest of himself under and once more crouched, this time beneath the curve. Again he went forward, rising as the curve rose until he was standing fully upright and sauntering out to the middle of the beam.
People were excited now, clapping and cheering and shouting encouragement. Caspar was as lithe and delightful to watch as an acrobat. Where he bent over to place the book exactly in the centre, a great sexual whoo! whoo! went up, almost unnerving him.
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