02 A Prefect's Uncle Read online

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and there’s another thing I ought to warn you about. Have you brought much money with you?’

  ‘Bout fourteen pounds, I fancy,’ said Farnie carelessly.

  ‘Fourteen what!’ said the amazed Bishop. ‘Pounds!’

  ‘Or sovereigns,’ said Farnie. ‘Each worth twenty shillings, you know.’

  For a moment Gethryn’s only feeling was one of unmixed envy. Previously he had considered himself passing rich on thirty shillings a term. He had heard legends, of course, of individuals who come to School bursting with bullion, but never before had he set eyes upon such an one. But after a time it began to dawn upon him that for a new boy at a public school, and especially at such a House as Leicester’s had become under the rule of the late Reynolds and his predecessors, there might be such a thing as having too much money.

  ‘How the deuce did you get all that?’ he asked.

  ‘My pater gave it me. He’s absolutely cracked on the subject of pocket-money. Sometimes he doesn’t give me a you, and sometimes he’ll give me whatever I ask for.’

  ‘But you don’t mean to say you had the cheek to ask for fourteen quid?’

  ‘I asked for fifteen. Got it, too. I’ve spent a pound of it. I said I wanted to buy a bike. You can get a jolly good bike for five quid about, so you see I scoop ten pounds. What?’

  This ingenious, if slightly unscrupulous, feat gave Gethryn an insight into his uncle’s character which up till now he had lacked. He began to see that the moral advice with which he had primed himself would be out of place. Evidently this youth could take quite good care of himself on his own account. Still, even a budding Professor Moriarty would be none the worse for being warned against Gethryn’s bete noire, Monk, so the Bishop proceeded to deliver that warning.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you seem to be able to look out for yourself all right, I must say. But there’s one tip I really can give you. When you get to Leicester’s, and a beast with a green complexion and an oily smile comes up and calls you “Old Cha-a-p”, and wants you to swear eternal friendship, tell him it’s not good enough. Squash him!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Farnie. ‘Who is this genial merchant?’

  ‘Chap called Monk. You’ll recognize him by the smell of scent. When you find the place smelling like an Eau-de-Cologne factory, you’ll know Monk’s somewhere near. Don’t you have anything to do with him.’

  ‘You seem to dislike the gentleman.’

  ‘I bar the man. But that isn’t why I’m giving you the tip to steer clear of him. There are dozens of chaps I bar who haven’t an ounce of vice in them. And there are one or two chaps who have got tons. Monk’s one of them. A fellow called Danvers is another. Also a beast of the name of Waterford. There are some others as well, but those are the worst of the lot. By the way, I forgot to ask, have you ever been to school before?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Farnie, in the dreamy voice of one who recalls memories from the misty past, ‘I was at Harrow before I came here, and at Wellington before I went to Harrow, and at Clifton before I went to Wellington.’

  Gethryn gasped.

  ‘Anywhere before you went to Clifton?’ he enquired.

  ‘Only private schools.’

  The recollection of the platitudes which he had been delivering, under the impression that he was talking to an entirely raw beginner, made Gethryn feel slightly uncomfortable. What must this wanderer, who had seen men and cities, have thought of his harangue?

  ‘Why did you leave Harrow?’ asked he.

  ‘Sacked,’ was the laconic reply.

  Have you ever, asks a modern philosopher, gone upstairs in the dark, and trodden on the last step when it wasn’t there? That sensation and the one Gethryn felt at this unexpected revelation were identical. And the worst of it was that he felt the keenest desire to know why Harrow had seen fit to dispense with the presence of his uncle.

  ‘Why?’ he began. ‘I mean,’ he went on hurriedly, ‘why did you leave Wellington?’

  ‘Sacked,’ said Farnie again, with the monotonous persistence of a Solomon Eagle.

  Gethryn felt at this juncture much as the unfortunate gentleman in Punch must have felt, when, having finished a humorous story, the point of which turned upon squinting and red noses, he suddenly discovered that his host enjoyed both those peculiarities. He struggled manfully with his feelings for a time. Tact urged him to discontinue his investigations and talk about the weather. Curiosity insisted upon knowing further details. Just as the struggle was at its height, Farnie came unexpectedly to the rescue.

  ‘It may interest you,’ he said, ‘to know that I was not sacked from Clifton.’

  Gethryn with some difficulty refrained from thanking him for the information.

  ‘I never stop at a school long,’ said Farnie. ‘If I don’t get sacked my father takes me away after a couple of terms. I went to four private schools before I started on the public schools. My pater took me away from the first two because he thought the drains were bad, the third because they wouldn’t teach me shorthand, and the fourth because he didn’t like the headmaster’s face. I worked off those schools in a year and a half.’ Having finished this piece of autobiography, he relapsed into silence, leaving Gethryn to recollect various tales he had heard of his grandfather’s eccentricity. The silence lasted until the College was reached, when the matron took charge of Farnie, and Gethryn went off to tell Marriott of these strange happenings.

  Marriott was amused, nor did he attempt to conceal the fact. When he had finished laughing, which was not for some time, he favoured the Bishop with a very sound piece of advice. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I should try and hush this affair up. It’s all fearfully funny, but I think you’d enjoy life more if nobody knew this kid was your uncle. To see the head of the House going about with a juvenile uncle in his wake might amuse the chaps rather, and you might find it harder to keep order; I won’t let it out, and nobody else knows apparently. Go and square the kid. Oh, I say though, what’s his name? If it’s Gethryn, you’re done. Unless you like to swear he’s a cousin.’

  ‘No; his name’s Farnie, thank goodness.’

  ‘That’s all right then. Go and talk to him.’

  Gethryn went to the junior study. Farnie was holding forth to a knot of fags at one end of the room. His audience appeared to be amused at something.

  ‘I say, Farnie,’ said the Bishop, ‘half a second.’

  Farnie came out, and Gethryn proceeded to inform him that, all things considered, and proud as he was of the relationship, it was not absolutely essential that he should tell everybody that he was his uncle. In fact, it would be rather better on the whole if he did not. Did he follow?

  Farnie begged to observe that he did follow, but that, to his sorrow, the warning came too late.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t the least idea you wanted the thing kept dark. How was I to know? I’ve just been telling it to some of the chaps in there. Awfully decent chaps. They seemed to think it rather funny. Anyhow, I’m not ashamed of the relationship. Not yet, at any rate.’

  For a moment Gethryn seemed about to speak. He looked fixedly at his uncle as he stood framed in the doorway, a cheerful column of cool, calm, concentrated cheek. Then, as if realizing that no words that he knew could do justice to the situation, he raised his foot in silence, and ‘booted’ his own flesh and blood with marked emphasis. After which ceremony he went, still without a word, upstairs again.

  As for Farnie, he returned to the junior day-room whistling ‘Down South’ in a soft but cheerful key, and solidified his growing popularity with doles of food from a hamper which he had brought with him. Finally, on retiring to bed and being pressed by the rest of his dormitory for a story, he embarked upon the history of a certain Pollock and an individual referred to throughout as the Porroh Man, the former of whom caused the latter to be decapitated, and was ever afterwards haunted by his head, which appeared to him all day and every day (not excepting Sundays and B
ank Holidays) in an upside-down position and wearing a horrible grin. In the end Pollock very sensibly committed suicide (with ghastly details), and the dormitory thanked Farnie in a subdued and chastened manner, and tried, with small success, to go to sleep. In short, Farnie’s first evening at Beckford had been quite a triumph.

  [4]

  PRINGLE MAKES A SPORTING OFFER

  Estimating it roughly, it takes a new boy at a public school about a week to find his legs and shed his skin of newness. The period is, of course, longer in the case of some and shorter in the case of others. Both Farnie and Wilson had made themselves at home immediately. In the case of the latter, directly the Skinner episode had been noised abroad, and it was discovered in addition that he was a promising bat, public opinion recognized that here was a youth out of the common run of new boys, and the Lower Fourth—the form in which he had been placed on arrival—took him to its bosom as an equal. Farnie’s case was exceptional. A career at Harrow, Clifton, and Wellington, however short and abruptly terminated, gives one some sort of grip on the way public school life is conducted. At an early date, moreover, he gave signs of what almost amounted to genius in the Indoor Game department. Now, success in the field is a good thing, and undoubtedly makes for popularity. But if you desire to command the respect and admiration of your fellow-beings to a degree stretched almost to the point of idolatry, make yourself proficient in the art of whiling away the hours of afternoon school. Before Farnie’s arrival, his form, the Upper Fourth, with the best intentions in the world, had not been skilful ‘raggers’. They had ragged in an intermittent, once-a-week sort of way. When, however, he came on the scene, he introduced a welcome element of science into the sport. As witness the following. Mr Strudwick, the regular master of the form, happened on one occasion to be away for a couple of days, and a stop-gap was put in in his place. The name of the stop-gap was Mr Somerville Smith. He and Farnie exchanged an unspoken declaration of war almost immediately. The first round went in Mr Smith’s favour. He contrived to catch Farnie in the act of performing some ingenious breach of the peace, and, it being a Wednesday and a half-holiday, sent him into extra lesson. On the following morning, more by design than accident, Farnie upset an inkpot. Mr Smith observed icily that unless the stain was wiped away before the beginning of afternoon school, there would be trouble. Farnie observed (to himself) that there would be trouble in any case, for he had hit upon the central idea for the most colossal ‘rag’ that, in his opinion, ever was. After morning school he gathered the form around him, and disclosed his idea. The floor of the form-room, he pointed out, was some dozen inches below the level of the door. Would it not be a pleasant and profitable notion, he asked, to flood the floor with water to the depth of those dozen inches? On the wall outside the form-room hung a row of buckets, placed there in case of fire, and the lavatory was not too far off for practical purposes. Mr Smith had bidden him wash the floor. It was obviously his duty to do so. The form thought so too. For a solid hour, thirty weary but enthusiastic reprobates laboured without ceasing, and by the time the bell rang all was prepared. The floor was one still, silent pool. Two caps and a few notebooks floated sluggishly on the surface, relieving the picture of any tendency to monotony. The form crept silently to their places along the desks. As Mr Smith’s footsteps were heard approaching, they began to beat vigorously upon the desks, with the result that Mr Smith, quickening his pace, dashed into the form-room at a hand gallop. The immediate results were absolutely satisfactory, and if matters subsequently (when Mr Smith, having changed his clothes, returned with the Headmaster) did get somewhat warm for the thirty criminals, they had the satisfying feeling that their duty had been done, and a hearty and unanimous vote of thanks was passed to Farnie. From which it will be seen that Master Reginald Farnie was managing to extract more or less enjoyment out of his life at Beckford.

  Another person who was enjoying life was Pringle of the School House. The keynote of Pringle’s character was superiority. At an early period of his life—he was still unable to speak at the time—his grandmother had died. This is probably the sole reason why he had never taught that relative to suck eggs. Had she lived, her education in that direction must have been taken in hand. Baffled in this, Pringle had turned his attention to the rest of the human race. He had a rooted conviction that he did everything a shade better than anybody else. This belief did not make him arrogant at all, and certainly not offensive, for he was exceedingly popular in the School. But still there were people who thought that he might occasionally draw the line somewhere. Watson, the ground-man, for example, thought so when Pringle primed him with advice on the subject of preparing a wicket. And Langdale, who had been captain of the team five years before, had thought so most decidedly, and had not hesitated to say so when Pringle, then in his first term and aged twelve, had stood behind the First Eleven net and requested him peremptorily to ‘keep ‘em down, sir, keep ‘em down’. Indeed, the great man had very nearly had a fit on that occasion, and was wont afterwards to attribute to the effects of the shock so received a sequence of three ‘ducks’ which befell him in the next three matches.

  In short, in every department of life, Pringle’s advice was always (and generally unsought) at everybody’s disposal. To round the position off neatly, it would be necessary to picture him as a total failure in the practical side of all the subjects in which he was so brilliant a theorist. Strangely enough, however, this was not the case. There were few better bats in the School than Pringle. Norris on his day was more stylish, and Marriott not infrequently made more runs, but for consistency Pringle was unrivalled.

  That was partly the reason why at this time he was feeling pleased with life. The School had played three matches up to date, and had won them all. In the first, an Oxford college team, containing several Old Beckfordians, had been met and routed, Pringle contributing thirty-one to a total of three hundred odd. But Norris had made a century, which had rather diverted the public eye from this performance. Then the School had played the Emeriti, and had won again quite comfortably. This time his score had been forty-one, useful, but still not phenomenal. Then in the third match, versus Charchester, one of the big school matches of the season, he had found himself. He ran up a hundred and twenty-three without a chance, and felt that life had little more to offer. That had been only a week ago, and the glow of satisfaction was still pleasantly warm.

  It was while he was gloating silently in his study over the bat with which a grateful Field Sports Committee had presented him as a reward for this feat, that he became aware that Lorimer, his study companion, appeared to be in an entirely different frame of mind to his own. Lorimer was in the Upper Fifth, Pringle in the Remove. Lorimer sat at the study table gnawing a pen in a feverish manner that told of an overwrought soul. Twice he uttered sounds that were obviously sounds of anguish, half groans and half grunts. Pringle laid down his bat and decided to investigate.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘This bally poem thing,’ said Lorimer.

  ‘Poem? Oh, ah, I know.’ Pringle had been in the Upper Fifth himself a year before, and he remembered that every summer term there descended upon that form a Bad Time in the shape of a poetry prize. A certain Indian potentate, the Rajah of Seltzerpore, had paid a visit to the school some years back, and had left behind him on his departure certain monies in the local bank, which were to be devoted to providing the Upper Fifth with an annual prize for the best poem on a subject to be selected by the Headmaster. Entrance was compulsory. The wily authorities knew very well that if it had not been, the entries for the prize would have been somewhat small. Why the Upper Fifth were so favoured in preference to the Sixth or Remove is doubtful. Possibly it was felt that, what with the Jones History, the Smith Latin Verse, the Robinson Latin Prose, and the De Vere Crespigny Greek Verse, and other trophies open only to members of the Remove and Sixth, those two forms had enough to keep them occupied as it was. At any rate, to the Upper Fifth the prize was given, and every year, thr
ee weeks after the commencement of the summer term, the Bad Time arrived.

  ‘Can’t you get on?’ asked Pringle.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s the subject?’

  ‘Death of Dido.’

  ‘Something to be got out of that, surely.’

  ‘Wish you’d tell me what.’

  ‘Heap of things.’

  ‘Such as what? Can’t see anything myself. I call it perfectly indecent dragging the good lady out of her well-earned tomb at this time of day. I’ve looked her up in the Dic. of Antiquities, and it appears that she committed suicide some years ago. Body-snatching, I call it. What do I want to know about her?’

  ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?’ murmured Pringle.

  ‘Hecuba?’ said Lorimer, looking puzzled, ‘What’s Hecuba got to do with it?’

  ‘I was only quoting,’ said Pringle, with gentle superiority.

  ‘Well, I wish instead of quoting rot you’d devote your energies to helping me with these beastly verses. How on earth shall I begin?’

  ‘You might adapt my quotation. “What’s Dido got to do with me, or I to do with Dido?” I rather like that. Jam it down. Then you go on in a sort of rag-time metre. In the “Coon Drum-Major” style. Besides, you see, the beauty of it is that you administer a wholesome snub to the examiner right away. Makes him sit up at once. Put it down.’

  Lorimer bit off another quarter of an inch of his pen. ‘You needn’t be an ass,’ he said shortly.

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Pringle, enjoying himself immensely, ‘what on earth is the good of my offering you suggestions if you won’t take them?’