THE COMPLETE DAVID BLAIZE TRILOGY (Illustrated Edition). Эдвард Бенсон
previously agreed on, in case David used the word again, and he was scored off.
“Oh, funny asses,” he said witheringly, which was about the best thing that could be done under the circumstances.
David walked down the path that led to the Head’s study with a suspended heart, feeling certain that this was scholarship news, and not one of his private misdeeds that was to be set before him, but yet hurriedly attempting to recollect the omissions and trespasses of which he had lately been guilty. But he credited himself with so stainless a record that he was really open to the damning imputation of having become a saint. For the effect of that glimpse of public school life had been magical on his conduct: he had literally not cared to do the sort of things any more that spelt trouble at Helmsworth. At Marchester, for example, only scugs smoked, and therefore the temptation of so doing (especially since he did not like it) had ceased to beckon him. The only reason for indulging in it had really been the notion that it was grand, and if by a higher standard it was not grand at all, the point of it was gone. Again, the fact that at Adams’s house it was the thing to work, had made industry a perfectly palatable mode of passing the time. Or where, when he had once seen a master like Adams, was the use of cheeking that dreary ass Dubs? You couldn’t cheek Dubs any more: it was beneath you to do any such thing. Dubs was pure piffle.
There had been a paralysing row in the school a few days before, at which the Head had appeared in his most terrific light; but David had had nothing to do with that. A series of small thefts had been going on, and the culprit had eventually been caught red-handed in a dormitory deserted for cricket, had been held up to public execration, and expelled. That scene had made David feel sick with terror: personally he did not in the least desire to steal other fellows’ things, but he quaked at the thought of being made the scorn of the assembled school as had happened to Anstruther. He supposed that his whole subsequent life would be cursed and blasted, as indeed the Head had assured Anstruther that his was.
David tapped at the door, and entered in obedience to a stern, gruff permission. The Head looked up, frowning.
“Blaize; yes, wait a moment.”
He finished a letter, reread it and directed it, and threw it on the floor. That was one of his great ways: he just threw letters on the floor, if he wanted them to be posted, and they were picked up and stamped.
“I have just heard from Marchester,” he said. “You have done well, but you have not got a scholarship. There were six given, and you were eighth on the list. Don’t be discouraged; you have done well. But I am recommending your father to send you to Mr. Adams’s house, anyhow. It is more expensive than an in-boarder’s, and I wish you had got a scholarship, so as to begin helping in your own education. But I think you may consider that you will go to Mr. Adams’s next September.”
The Head suddenly took his keys from his pocket, and rattled them in the lock of the drawer that held the canes. But he was doing it, so it seemed to David, in a sort of absence of mind and not to be thinking of what lay within. Then, leaving them there, he got up and rocked across to the fireplace, where he stood on the hearthrug, looking gigantic. He began a portentous, terror-breathing discourse.
“David,” he said, “a few days ago you saw a schoolfellow publicly expelled. I saw you turn white; I saw your horror at the task that was forced on me. Now you are on the point of going out into the bigger life of a public school, and when you have been a week at Marchester you will look back on the time you have passed here as a sort of babyhood, and wonder whether it was you who smoked half a cigarette now and then, and cheeked Mr. Dutton, and put—er—put resurrection pie into envelopes and burned it.”
(“Good Lord,” thought David. “Is it going to be a caning for sundries?”)
Apparently it wasn’t.
“But you will find,” continued the Head, “that there are worse things than smoking, and all the misdeeds you may or may not have been punished for, and you will find out that there are even worse things than stealing, and that many quite good chaps, as you would say, don’t think there is any harm in them. Do you know what I mean?”
David looked up in quite genuine bewilderment.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Thank God for it, then,” said the Head. Then he moved across the room to his cabinet of cigars, and broke his own rule, for he took one out and lit it and smoked it in silence for a moment in the sacred presence of one of the boys. Then he turned to David again.
“You don’t understand me now,” he said, “but you will. And when you do understand, try to remember for my sake, if that is anything to you, or for your own sake, which certainly is, or for God’s sake, which is best of all, that there are worse things than stealing. Things that damn the soul, David. And now, forget all I have said till the time comes for you to remember it. You will know when it comes. And don’t listen to any arguments about it. There is no argument possible.”
“Yes, sir,” said David blankly.
He could not understand why it was the Head had thanked God; but there was no time for wonder, for instantly the Head’s whole gravity and seriousness vanished.
“That is all I wanted to say to you,” he said, “and I feel sure you won’t forget it. Now when does the old boys’ match begin? Twelve, isn’t it? I hope you’ll be in form to-day with your bowling. We haven’t beaten the old boys for six years, but I don’t think we’ve ever had such a good chance as we have to-day. The wicket ought to suit you, if the sun comes out.”
Gradually the sense of this dawned on David, its tremendous import. He flushed with incredulous pride.
“Oh, but fellows like Hughes will hit me all round the clock, sir,” he said.
“They will if you think they are going to,” remarked the Head. “That’s all then, David. Hughes is staying with me over the night. You’ll sup with us.”
“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” said David.
In spite of his failure to win a scholarship David walked on air as he went back to the packing of his play-box, for far more important, from his own point of view, than the getting of a scholarship was the fact that he was going to Adams’s. For a minute he wondered about what the Head had said concerning things that were worse than stealing; but, having been told to forget all about it, instantly proceeded to put the question out of his mind in favour of more agreeable topics. And there was no doubt that the Head implied that it was he who might win the old boys’ match for the school. Jolly decent of him, considering that it was he who had certainly lost the Eagles match for them.
Soon after the great men from Eton and Harrow and Marchester began to arrive, and each appeared more enormous than the last. To-day, however, there was no baleful father to trouble David’s peace, and in the half-hour before the match began he went and bowled to Hughes at the nets, who incontinently hit him three times running out of the field. But David had the true temper of the slow bowler who expects to be hit, while he studies the hitter, and observed that Hughes was not nearly so comfortable with a slightly faster ball pitched a little outside the leg stump, and (if luck accompanied the intention) breaking in. He quite mistimed two that David sent down, upon which, having got this valuable hint, David bowled no more of that variety, lest Hughes should get used to them. Then, as there were plenty of bowlers at Hughes’s net, he went on to the next, where Cookson, who had left two years before, was batting. There, again, the wily David tried the ball which Hughes did not care about, but found that Cookson had a special affection for it, and hit it juicily to square leg. But he was less confident with a very slow ball, such as Hughes had hit so contemptuously; so here was a second bit of information. David committed that to memory, and tried a third net, where he had no success of any sort or kind.
There had been six school matches before this; Stone had lost the toss on five occasions, and on the sixth, when he had won, had put the other side in with disastrous results. To-day, however, having, contrary to all expectation, won the toss, he took the innings, and by lunch-time six wickets were down for a hundred and three, while Cookson, the only bowler of any real merit, was losing his sting,