Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It was noticed that he had divided his sheaf into two packets. He came to the end of it, and tore up, across and across, the larger packet of the two.

  The rest numbered perhaps half a dozen sheets. Then he spoke.

  “I have never seen a worse set of unseen translations than those which the form showed up to Maddox this morning,” he said. “Some half-dozen are passable, and one, that of Blaize, is good, or nearly so. Blaize!”

  “Yes sir,” said Blaize.

  “What is your place in the form by the half-term marks!”

  “Seventeenth, sir,” said David, from his lowly abode.

  The Head glared at him and spoke very advisedly.

  “That is a disgraceful place for a boy who can make such a decent unseen translation,” he observed.

  This had precisely the effect that that diabolical Head had intended. Rather bad luck on Blaize, reflected the form generally, to be whacked for cribbing, and then to be slated by the Head for being so low.

  The Head paused a moment.

  “You may close your books for the present,” he said, “and listen to what I have to say to you. It is an extremely serious matter. Before doing your unseen you construed a piece of prepared work, and out of the twenty-four boys in the form, sixteen got practically full marks for it. You may remember that at last lesson I took away from Maddox the crib he had brought in with him, and I also took the transcription of the shorthand notes he had made. I see, by referring to the crib, that all, or, I think, nearly all of the boys who got full marks, had used that crib. They had not even the sense to alter their translations so that their indebtedness to it should not have been so glaringly obvious. They are fools, in fact, as well as knaves, and I have no use in Remove A or in any other part of the school for either. Now I have not the slightest intention of asking any of you if you used a crib or not, because, without your telling me, I know that you did. I will just take one instance, the first that comes to hand. Gregson translated his prepared lesson perfectly, and in it used three expressions which were identical with expressions in Bohn’s translation. His unseen, on the other hand, was simply beneath contempt. I use his name only as the first that occurs to me, and I do not single him out as being a worse offender than many others. Nor do I wish him or any of you to confess, still less to deny that he used a crib. He and you alike are a very rotten set of fellows.”

  The form generally, during this quiet and biting address, was growing stiff with horror, and Gregson, who, as Plugs, had conversed so lightly in Bags’s study about the advantages of cribbing, was feeling singularly empty. It was one thing to talk airily about the merits of the system; but they were not so apparent when the Head spoke like this about its demerits.

  He let this sink in for a bit, without looking at poor Plugs any more than at anybody else. Then he continued:

  “I have looked through the marks of the half-term,” he said, “and it is quite inconceivable to me that such high marks as those earned by the boys who are at the top of the form could have been come by honestly. I am therefore going to cancel the whole of the marks which to-day determine your places, and begin fresh with the marks for the unseen which I have just looked over. You will therefore now take your places in the new order which I shall read out, and the whole of the marks of the term hitherto are cancelled. If any boy, high or low, in the newly constituted form has the slightest protest to make, he will please state it fully, and I will listen to it with respect. I am not talking sarcastically, and I only want to do justice, roughly, no doubt, but to the best of my power. I dare say you have all used cribs to a certain extent, but I do not want to go into that unless any one wishes me to. It is dishonest to use cribs at all, and there is the end of the matter. I will, however, go into any individual case, for the purpose of doing justice. You may talk it over among yourselves if you wish, and, while you do so, I will leave your class-room and come back when you have made up your minds. If any boy wishes me to go, he will please hold up his hand, and go I will. No notice will be taken by me of the owner of any hand that is held up.”

  They could appreciate that; there was a justice about it that commanded respect. But though the Head’s promise was implicitly trusted by all present, not a hand was held up. The Head gave ample time for this.

  “I take it, then, you are satisfied,” he said at length. “You will therefore take your places in the new order. And do not take any books out of your desks before you take your new places. I will read the list, and each boy will take his place according to these marks as his name is read.”

  There was the scraping of boots, the stir of changed places, and in a couple of minutes the new order was established.

  “And now,” said the Head, “every boy will look in his new desk, and give to its previous occupant all its contents with the exception of any cribs that there may be there. Now make the exchanges, and place all cribs you find in front of my desk.”

  There was an impression at this point that the Head was showing ignorance. He should have known that most cribs were not brought into school at all, and that the large majority of them were securely reposing in their owners’ studies. But here they reckoned without their host.

  Some dozen books were given up, a very meagre total, and the form generally (wrong once more) expected that the Head would make a desk-to-desk visitation himself. He did nothing of the kind.

  “You will now,” he said, “each of you, go to the house and the study of the boy whose place you now occupy, and bring me all the cribs you find there. I have told Maddox to go round after you. I sincerely hope — sincerely — that he will find nothing to do. If he does the consequences will be quite serious. I shall come back here in exactly twenty minutes, and shall expect to find the books ready, piled here. Maddox will go his rounds after you have finished and report to me. You all of you share studies with other boys and you will understand that all cribs found therein will be brought here, whether belonging to members of this form or not. Now you had the opportunity of consulting each other before, and you must not consult now. If any of you don’t know the house to which the owner of your present desk belongs, ask.”

  The Head got up, rustled down the room, and went out looking neither to right nor left. A perfectly silent form dispersed.

  They were back again in their places before he reappeared. In front of his desk was a solid pile of books. He did not even glance at them.

  “We will now do our Thucydides,” he said. “Who is the top boy of the form? You, Blaize. What chapter of what book are you at?”

  “Book three, sir, “ said David. “Chapter fourteen.”

  “Read the Greek then, aloud, till I stop you, and then construe.”

  A rather trying half-hour followed. The form generally was addled with emotion, and it was almost a relief when Maddox appeared from his search. He had no fresh and incriminating volumes with him, but he might have left them outside.

  “Well?” said the Head.

  “No, sir,” said he, “I couldn’t find any more.”

  And his eye fell almost respectfully on the appalling pile already found.

  “Thanks,” said the Head. “I am glad. Please take the lesson to-morrow morning.”

  He instantly resumed Thucydides.

  “Gregson, read and translate,” he said.

  Poor Plugs!...

  At the end the Head got up.

  “There is no need to speak to you further, “ he said, “because I think you all understand. I may say, however, that any boy found using a crib in the future will be flogged and degraded into the fourth form. You will find it unwise to try. At least I think so.”

  He gathered up his gown, and for the first time, apparently, saw the heap of books piled in front of his desk.

  “The lowest six boys of the form will bring those silly volumes across to my house,” he said. “The head boy will count them here, and then come across when they are all removed and count them again to see that the numbers tally. You understand, B
laize?”

  “Yes, sir,” said David.

  “And I am ashamed of you all,” said the Head.

  CHAPTER X

  DAVID’S soft grey hat with house-colours on it was tilted over his eyes to screen them from the sun, and he lay full length on the hot dry sand above high-water mark on the beach at Naseby, stupefied and simmering with content. His arms, bare to the elbow in rolled-up shirt sleeves, were extended, and he kept filling his hands with sand and letting it ooze out again through the interstices of his fingers in a pleasant, tickling manner, hourglass fashion, though the action evoked in him neither edifying nor melancholy reflection on the subject of the passing of time. Beside him lay two coats and two bags of golf-clubs, for he and Maddox, with whom he was staying, had just come back from a morning round of golf, and had gone down to the shore to bathe before lunch. They had tossed up as to which of them should go to fetch towels, and, Maddox having lost, had just disappeared up the steep, crumbling path that led to the top of the sand-cliffs, where was perched the house his mother usually took for the summer holidays. A few hundred yards farther north these cliffs broke into tumbled sand-dunes and stretches of short, velvety turf, where greens nestled in Elysian valleys surrounded by saharas.

  Maddox would be absent some ten minutes, and David let his lazy thoughts float down the stream of the very pleasant thinkings which made up his extreme contentment. He did not direct them, but let them drift, going swiftly here, eddying round there, while the memory-shores of the last few months glided by. In the first place, and perhaps most important of all, he was staying here with his friend — this was an eddy; he went round and round in it. Though he had been here three days already, passing them entirely with Maddox, playing golf with him, playing tennis with him, bathing with him, and quite continuously talking to him, David could not get used to this amazing situation. He called him “Frank” too, just as if he was nobody in particular, and at the thought of it David rolled over on to his side, wriggling, and said “Lord!”

  It was but a little more than a year ago that he had been, in his own phrase, “a scruggy little devil with stag-beetles,” capable, it is true, of hero-worship, and able to recognise a hero when he saw him, for had not his heart burned within him when, going up for his scholarship examination, the demigod had thrown a careless word to him? It was quite sufficient then that Maddox, the handsomest fellow in the world, the best bat probably that Marchester had ever produced, and altogether the most glorious of created beings, should have noticed him at all: indeed, that was more than sufficient; it was sufficient that Maddox should exist. And since then only a year had passed, and here he was calling him Frank, and leaning on his arm when so disposed, and tossing him who should get towels, and staying with his mother. Often she would say something to him in French, unconscious which language she talked, and Frank would answer in French, which seemed wonderfully romantic. Though their ages were so diverse (for Frank was eighteen and David fifteen, and three years, when the combined total is so small, make a vast difference) here, staying with him, David hardly felt the gap. At school it was otherwise, a hundred seasons sundered them, but here they were equal. All difference was swallowed up in friendship, friendship even swallowed up hero-worship sometimes.

  David dwelled gluttonously on the steps that had led up to this. There was that meeting at Baxminster, with the splendid adventure of the second edition of Keats, and here he made an agitated excursion into the fate of that. He and Margery had decided to sell it, and had got the enormous sum of twelve (not ten) pounds for it. But the glory of that had been abruptly extinguished, for their father had insisted that their equal shares should be invested in the savings bank, to roll up at some beggarly rate of interest, and do no good to anybody. Really, grown-up people were beyond words....

  He dismissed this distressing topic and hitched on to Maddox again. Public-school life began with his installation as fag, and there hero-worship had soared like a flame day by day, until that afternoon when, after playing squash with Bags in the rain, he had gone back to the house for a bath. David had always avoided the thought of that; it remained a moment quite sundered from the rest of his intercourse with Frank, embarrassing, and to be forgotten, like the momentary opening of a cupboard where nightmare dwelt. Anyhow, it had been locked again instantly, and the key thrown away. Never a sound had again issued therefrom.

  Thereafter came a flood of jolly things to swim in. After the new arrangement in Remove A, consequent on that monumental cribbing-row, he had got into the lower fifth at Easter, and would, when he went back at Michaelmas, find himself in the middle fifth. Frank had made him work with intelligence and industry as well, though the distractions of the summer-half had been frightfully alluring. For David was really coming on as a wily left-hand bowler, and it had been extremely difficult to give more than casual attention to the “Commentaries “ of Julius Cæsar, when his inmost mind was wrapped up in cricket. It was not hundreds of overs, but thousands of them that David delivered in imagination when he ought to have been crossing the Alps with Hannibal, or challenging Medea’s strange use of the pluperfect when that infuriated lady was in the act of stabbing her children. But he had got his remove, and a satisfactory report of his work, so that there was peace and joy at Baxminster, and his father sanguinely prophesied that he would go up into a fresh form every term, as he himself had done.

  Half-way through the summer-half had come the most intoxicating possibility, namely, that he had a chance of getting his house-colours for cricket, his very first year at school. This was a thing nearly unheard of (though, of course, Maddox had done it), but he had been tried in house-matches, and had done rather well. Then that hope had gone to the grave, for when Maddox put up the list of the completed house-eleven his name did not appear. But he had known that it was not going to do so already, and the manner of its exclusion was, secretly to him, almost a greater gratification than its appearance would have been. That, too, lying on the hot sand, he turned greedily over in his mind, licking the chops of memory.

  It had happened thus. He had come one afternoon into Maddox’s study, just before the final promotions were made, and Maddox opened the subject.

  “David, would you be fearfully sick if I didn’t give you your house-colours?” he asked abruptly.

  David had already allowed himself to hope for, even to expect them, and the sunshine went out of life.

  “I think I should,” he said. “Not that it matters a hang.... I say, I’m going up town. Do you want anything?”

  “No, thanks. But just wait a minute. Oh, don’t look like that!”

  David’s face had taken an expression of the most Stygian gloom.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Of course I was an ass to hope it.”

  “No, you weren’t,” said Maddox. “But I’ve been bothering about it, and I thought I’d talk to you. It’s like this: you and Ozzy have about equal claim, and, if we weren’t such pals, I think I should toss up which of you I gave colours to. But the house would think I was favouring you if I put you in. There’s another thing, too; it’s Ozzy’s last year, and your first. I don’t know that that matters so much; so, if you find yourself left out, it’ll be because we’re pals. See?”

  David moved a step nearer; the woe had gone from his face.

  “Gosh, then, leave me out,” he said. “I — I prefer being left out, if that’s it.”

  “Really?” asked Maddox.

  “Yes, rather, and — and thanks ever so much.” There had been no need for more than these jerked telegraphic sentences, but David went up town, treading on air, with a secret heavenly pride that was certainly among the “rippingest feelings” he had ever had. He congratulated Ozzy with complete sincerity.... And here was Frank himself sliding down the crumbling sand-path with towels.

  Frank threw a towel at him and knocked off his hat.

  “Mother’s lunching out,” he said, “so we can bathe just as long as we please without being late. Oh, and she said to me, ‘need
you’ — that’s you— ‘go away on Saturday?’ I said I’d ask you.” David had no hesitation over this.

  “No, of course I needn’t,” he said. “At least—”

  “At least?” said Frank, emptying the sand out of his shoes.

  “I mean, are you sure I’m not being a bore? I should love to stop, of course. But won’t you and your mother get blasted sick of me?”

  “Don’t think she will,” said Maddox gravely. “I shall rather, but it doesn’t matter. In fact, I was wondering whether perhaps you’d mind going on Friday instead of Saturday.”

  David laughed.

  “That’s a poor shot at getting a rise out of me,” he said. “Absolute failure. I shan’t go away on Friday or Saturday.”

  Frank just shrugged his shoulders, and stifled a yawn with dreadful verisimilitude. David gave him one short, anxious glance.

  “And that wasn’t such a poor shot after all,” said Frank. “Just for a second you wondered if I was in earnest.”

  “No, I didn’t,” said David promptly.

  “And that’s a lie,” said Frank.

  David gave it up, and lay back on the sand again, beginning to unbutton.

  “I know it is,” he said. “You yawned jolly well.”

  Frank picked up a handful of the dry powdery sand and let it trickle gently into the gap of shin that showed between the end of David’s trousers, and the beginning of his sock. This caused him to spring up.

  “Lord, what’s that?” he said. “Oh, I see. Funny; I thought it was a bug of sorts.”

  “Well, if you will grow so that your trousers only reach half-way down your legs, what else is to be done with the intervals? “ asked Frank.

  “I grew two inches last half,” said David. “I shall be taller than you before I’ve done.”

  “Very likely. You will be the image of a piece of asparagus, if you like that. And certainly, if you grow up to the size of your feet, you’ll be big enough. I shall call you Spondee.”