Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 53

  Sir Alfred came striding along the passage to the library when he suddenly stopped in utter astonishment. “Tom!” he gasped as he saw the boy’s pale face.

  Chapter III

  When Tom came to consciousness he found himself in a soft feather bed with a nurse at his bedside. “Ah! that’s good, he is conscious now” she whispered. “Why did Smith attack me? asked Tom feebly. “He’s delirious” said the nurse turning to the doctor, “I thought he would be after that fall, poor boy”; for the library being at the foot of a flight of steps, Sir Alfred and the nurse naturally thought he had fallen down them.

  A long time had past and Tom had not been allowed to see anyone as he had concussion of the brain. At last he was allowed to see someone and nurse asked him who he would choose for his first visitor. “Smith” was the reply. In came Smith very shyly. Why did you fling me down on that stone” demanded Tom.

  Chapter IV

  Now Smith was not usually a butler. He was really a professional thief and so he soon thought of what to say, so turning to the nurse he said “I think I had better go for the excitement of seeing anybody after such a long time of quiet has made him a bit mad,” with that he left the room.

  Tom was quite well and able to run about the house, so he thought he would see Smith. Smith was not in his room, so Tom thought that he would go into the secret cave. He went to the old carving, pressed the letter “U,” immediately the same door opened. He went along the passage. Suddenly he stopped abruptly, for footsteps could be heard coming towards him. He crouched down waiting ready to spring. The footsteps came nearer and nearer. Tom could feel his heart thumping against his ribs. Suddenly appeared round the corner of the passage, Tom was on his in a minute and taken by surprise Smith was flung senseless to the ground. Tom was just getting up when he saw a piece of old parchment, he opened it and this is what he read—“I, Wilfred James have stolen these articles of great price from Queen Elizabeth. I could not keep the secret so I put my confidence in Sir Walter Raleigh who gave a hint about it to the great statesman Bacon, who told Queen Elizabeth. The troops of soldiers will be here in one hour and if they find the jewels I shall be locked in the Tower.” There the paper ended, so Tom began to look for the jewels, and found them in Smith’s pocket. Then putting Smith back on his bed he went to his father’s study and told Sir Alfred all the paper had said, and showed him the jewels.

  The next day Sir Alfred gave Smith the “sack” and the day after he was found to be the worst thief that ever puzzled Scotland Yard and was arrested and sent to Dartmoor convict prison.

  THE END

  FRAGMENT OF

  A NOVEL

  To myself,

  Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

  to whose sympathy and

  appreciation alone it owes its being,

  this book is dedicated.

  Dedicatory letter,

  My dear Evelyn,

  Much has been written and spoken about the lot of the boy with literary aspirations in a philistine family; little can adequately convey his difficulties, when the surroundings, which he has known from childhood, have been entirely literary. It is a sign of victory over these difficulties that this book is chiefly, if at all, worthy of attention.

  Many of your relatives and most of your father’s friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of books, their writers and producers; ever since, as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipate school-boy, you were allowed to sit up with our elders in the “bookroom” after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books. Your home has always been full of them; all new books of any merit, and most of none, seem by one way or another to find their place in the files which have long overflowed the shelves. Among books your whole life has been layed and you are now rising up in your turn to add one more to the everlasting bonfire of the ephemeral.

  And all this will be brought up against you. “Another of these precocious Waughs,” they will say, “one more nursery novel.” So be it. There is always a certain romance, to the author at least, about a first novel which no reviewer can quite shatter. Good luck! You have still high hopes and big ambitions and have not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism. Soon perhaps you will join the “wordsmiths” jostling one another for royalties and contracts, meanwhile you are still very young.

  Yourself,

  Evelyn

  I

  Peter Audley awoke with “second bell” ringing dismally down the cloisters and rolling over in bed looked at his watch. Reassured that he had another five minutes before he need begin getting up, he pulled his rug up over his shoulders and lay back gazing contentedly down the dormitory, which was already stirring with the profoundly comforting sounds made by other people dressing. The splashing of the showers next door, the chipping of the thick crockery and the muttered oaths at backstuds accentuated the pleasure of the last minutes.

  Early school was kept up practically all the year round at Selchurch, which took a certain pride in the gloom of these early mornings. Peter, however, had got his “privileges” which took away the bitterest sting of frantic punctuality and allowed him, after reporting to his form master, to sit out and work in his study.

  With a heave he got out of bed and went to wash. The showers looked singularly uninviting but the water for the basins was stone cold—the furnaces were not lit until midday in March 1918—and with rising gloom he returned shivering and half dry to the dormitory. Some fanatic had opened one of the high Gothic windows and a cold gust of wind swept down the room. There was a chorus of protestastion and the window was closed. He dressed dully and leaving the dormitory at a few minutes past seven crossed the quad to “report.” Several fags, laden with books, dashed past him, trying desperately to avoid recognition by the prefect “taking lates.” His form master nodded to him and he turned on his heel and made for his study. The gravel was dark with fallen rain, the sky menacing with monstrous rough hewn clouds; over everything spread a fine, wet mist.

  The handle of his study door was cold; he went in, kicked the door to and fell into an easy chair gazing round the tiny room. It was pleasant enough and he had spent considerable pains on it, but this morning it afforded him no pleasure.

  The carpet was black—a burst of aestheticism which he had long regretted as it took a great deal of brushing and earned his study the name of the “coal cellar”—and the walls distempered a bluish grey. On them were hung four large Medici prints, the gift of his grandmother but his own choice; Botticelli’s Mars & Venus—he had had some difficulty over this with his house master, to whom a nude was indecent whether it came from the National Gallery or La Vie Parisienne—Beatrice d’Este, Rembrandt’s “Philosopher” and Holbein’s Duchess of Milan. These he liked either because they were very beautiful or because they gave an air of distinction which his friends’ Harrison Fishers and Rilette pictures lacked. The curtains, cushions on the window seat and table cloth were blue; the whole room was pleasantly redolent of the coffee of the evening before.

  Peter, however, lay back staring gloomily at the grey block of class rooms opposite. It was Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon was the time chosen, as being the longest uninterrupted time in the week, for the uniform parade. He could just remember when, his first term, summer 1914, it had been the great social time of the week when tea was brewed and quantities of eclaires eaten, and now that he had grown to an age to have a study and enjoy these things, they were all blotted out and from two to six he would have to manoeuvre a section of sullen fags over the wet downs in some futile “attack scheme.”

  He knew exactly what would happen. They would fall in on one of the quads and be inspected—that meant half an hours work with reeking brasso and s.a.p. cleaning his uniform and equipment. They would then march up to the downs and in a driving wind stand easy while the O.C. explained the afternoons work. Or
dnance maps would be issued to all N.C.O.’s with which to follow the explanation; these always bulged with incorrect folding and flapped in the wind.

  It was never considered sufficient for one company merely to come and attack the other; a huge campaign of which they formed a tiny part would have to be elaborated. A company would be the advanced guard of part of an army, which had landed at Littlehampton and was advancing upon Hasting, intending to capture important bridge heads on the local river on their way; B company, with white hat bands, would be a force set to hold the spur of the downs above the Sanatorium cooperating with hypothetical divisions on either flank, until another division could arrive from Arundel. Rattles would be issued to serve as Lewis guns and this game of make-believe would go on for three hours, with extreme discomfort to both sides, when whistles and bugles would sound and the corps form up again for a criticism of the afternoon’s work. They would be told that, when the parade was dismissed, all rifles were to be wiped over with an oily rag before being returned to the armoury and that all uniforms were to be back in the lockers before six o’clock. They would then dismiss, hungry, bad tempered and with only twenty minutes in which to change for Chapel.

  He hated the corps and all the more now that he had to take it seriously. He was seventeen and a half; next year, if the war was still on, as it showed every sign of being, would see him fighting. It brought everything terribly near. He had learnt much of what it was like over there from his brother, but Ralf saw everything so abstractedly with such imperturbable cynicism. Peter flattered himself that he was far more sensitive and temperamental. He was sure that he would not be able to stand it; Ralf had won the D.S.O. some months ago.

  He collected his thoughts with a start and looked at his time table. He had to finish the chapter of Economics which he had left the evening before. The book was lying where he had tossed it and, like everything that morning, looked singularly uninviting. It was bound in a sort of greasy, limp, oil cloth, “owing,” a label half scraped off the back proclaimed, “to shortage of labour”; it was printed crookedly on a thin greyish paper with little brown splinters of wood in it; it was altogether a typical piece of wartime workmanship. He took it up with listless repulsion and began to read.

  “From considerations of this nature,” he read, “which, while not true of every person, taken individually, are yet on the average true, it may be inferred, with approximate accuracy, that by adding to the wealth of the poor, something taken, by some recognised and legal process, from the wealth of the rich, while some dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction is inevitably caused, yet, provided that the poor be greater in number than the rich, the satisfaction is greater than the dissatisfaction. Inequality of wealth, insofar as . . .”

  It was all ineffably tedious. He tossed the book on to the table in the corner and taking up a novel passed the next half hour in dissatisfied gloom.

  II

  The clock in the quad struck quarter to eight and voices and shuffling sounded across the gravel as the forms began emptying. The door of his study was burst open and Bellinger came in.

  “Edifying spectacle of history specialist at work! Here have I been doing geography with the ‘door mouse’ for three mortal quarters of an hour, while you read low novels.”

  Bellinger was in the army class, a cheery soul, athletic, vacant, with an obsession for clothes. This was the only subject about which he could talk; he was always perfectly dressed himself and had earned something of a reputation by it. People would bring him patterns of cloth and consult him when they were getting suits, which was complimentary, although they never took his advice. It was said of him that he had once cut the headmaster in London because he met him wearing a brown overcoat with evening dress.

  Peter turned down the corner of his page—a pernicious habit even in a wartime “Outlines of Economics” of which he could never cure himself—and got up.

  “Come across to hall, you silly old ass, and tell me the latest bulletins from Sackville Street.”

  “Nothing doing,” said Bellinger with the self righteous gloom of one whose religion has been insulted and pulled at the points of his waistcoat, “nothing doing at all. It’s the curse of this infernal war. While all the best people are in uniform they don’t pay any attention to civilian fashions. Thank the Lord I shall be in khaki in a couple of months.”

  They linked up and walked down to hall, Bellinger earnestly enlarging upon the advantages of the R.A.F. over the ordinary uniform.

  When they arrived at the “pits-table,” where people with studies sat, a heated discussion was going on. The head, Peter gathered, had proposed to the Games Committee the night before that none of the house cups should be competed for until after the war and that the time saved should be devoted to more parades and longer digging upon the house potatoe plots. Cook, the captain of Lane’s, had apparently been the only one with the courage to hold out against him. Lane’s were certain to get the open football and stood a good chance for the Five Mile.

  Beaton, a small science specialist, was voluble in the head’s defence.

  “After all,” he was saying, “what effects has the war had on us here? We’ve had a little less food and coal, people have been leaving a little earlier, the young masters have gone and these antiquated old fools like Boyle have taken their places, parades have become a bit longer, but is this enough? Has anything been done to make us realize that we are in the middle of the biggest war in history?”

  “Everything has been done,” said Peter, “to make school life excessively unpleasant—after you with the bread, please Travers—what little of the old life does remain, is what keeps it just tolerable. Good God, isn’t it bad enough for you. I pity the men who’ve come during the last year and know only this side of Selchurch. I hate school, now, and shall be only too glad to get away; why utterly spoil it for the ‘underschools’?”

  “Yes,” said Travers a large, sad “historian” on the other side of the table, “You seem to be one of the maniacs who believe in making themselves wretched because other people are. It’s only by the misery of three quarters, that life can be even tolerable for a quarter of society. It’s unjust but it’s better than the whole show being miserable. It’s a fundamental principle of political science”—any particularly sweeping cynicism was a “fundamental principle” with Travers.

  “My pater had that craze badly in 1914,” said Garth, a pleasant, spotty youth, next to Peter, “he dug up the tennis court to grow vegetables when there was plenty of waste ground behind the stable yard.”

  “And the mater makes me wear old clothes,” said Bellinger, “because she thinks it looks bad to wear new ones in war time.”

  “Everyone is quite imbecile about the war”—Travers loved dismissing subjects—“they don’t realize that it is a natural function of development. It’s a fundamental principle that society can only remain normal if it is decimated at regular periods.”

  The “paper boy” came to the table. Every day it was the duty of one of the fags to fetch the house papers from the porter’s lodge, as soon as he came out of early school, and bring them up to hall. They were supposed to go to the people who had bought them at the “paper auction” at the beginning of term, but in practice they went first to the high table where the prefects sat with the housemaster; when they had made their choice, he took them to the “pits-table” and distributed what were left as he liked.

  “Times, please” said Peter over his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Audley, that’s gone.”

  “All right, Morning Post. Thanks.”

  He spread it out over the table and glanced down the columns. It was full of the usual war news (Peter wondered vaguely what they managed to put in the papers in peace time); there were rumours of preparations for a big German offensive, factious political questions in the house, pages of minor engagements in the East. He folded it and passed it on to Bellinger.

  III

  It was a gloomy morning; gloomy even for the
Easter term 1918. For half an hour after breakfast he sat in his study cleaning his uniform; in chapel he could smell the cleaning stuff up his nails. After chapel he had to go in for a double period of European History. He went into school profoundly depressed.

  The “historians” were now taken by one Boyle. He had been, until the outbreak of war, the headmaster of a prosperous preparitory school on the East coast and had lived a life of lucrative dignity, making himself agreeable to distinguished parents and employing a large and competent staff to do the teaching. For two years he had kept doggedly on, feeling that it would be a surrender to the barbarian enemy if he left, but the numbers steadily sank, until one night a bomb was actually dropped onto the gymnasium breaking every frame of glass in the house. Then he realized that he must give it up, “St. Pendred’s” was commandeered to house a garrison staff, and Mr. Boyle set about finding other employment. The head forced to choose between Mr. Boyle and a mistress, to his eternal discredit chose Mr. Boyle and in less than a year the Senior History Specialist Set had sunk from the intellectual mekka of the school to the haven which sheltered those who considered that the work they had had to do to pass the School Certificate absolved them from any further exertions, at any rate, while they were at Selchurch. Not that he was ragged—that would have been beneath the dignity of a Sixth Form set—They merely sat through his hours in complete apathy. His predecessor had been a young man fresh from Cambridge and had made his history extremely entertaining, they had held debates, read each other papers and discussed current politics, but now there were no Varsity scholarships, the battle clouds of France shut out all but the immediate future and no one had any particular motive for, or interest in, working. Mr. Boyle certainly had not and Youth, far from being the time of burning quests and wild, gloriously vain ideals beloved of the minor poets, is essentially one of languor and repose. Every hour he dictated notes, from a large leather bound note book, which most people took; every week he set an essay which several people wrote; every month he gave out a syllabus of books for out of school study, which nobody read. He asked for little and was content with far less but the Senior History Specialist set often seemed unsatisfactory even to Mr. Boyle.