Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

A STUDY IN REAL LIFE
BY THE
REV. J. E. C. WELLDON
HEAD MASTER OF HARROW SCHOOL
LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO. , 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1895
D. M. A.
It was a day in September 186-. It was between five and six o’clock in the afternoon. The railway station of St. Anselm’s seemed to be asleep save for the movement of four people, or, more strictly, of two pairs of people, who were pacing up and down at opposite ends of the platform, apparently awaiting the arrival of the same train to take them to London. Each pair consisted of a gentleman and a boy. It was evident that the two pairs were not acquainted one with the other. Once, but only once, in their patient promenade they approached and passed each other; and in so doing each of the two boys eyed the other with the curiously distant inquisitiveness of English schoolboys who have not met before, but who are dimly conscious that, as members of the same great institution, they have entered, or are about to enter, into a mysterious relation; and, as soon as they had got out of earshot, each of them, turning at the same moment almost half round, whispered to his father, ‘I’m sure that fellow is a new boy; I wonder whose house he’s in.’ It was one of the many questions that are asked in life more for the sake of putting them than in the hope that they will be answered. But there would have been no disposition to answer it, if answer had been possible; for just then a train drew up at the opposite platform, and out of it poured a number of boys, of all sorts and ages, clamouring for porters, clamouring for luggage, greeting one another, chaffing one another, rushing out of the station to secure cabs or other conveyances, rushing back to recover articles which they had left in the racks or under the seats of the carriages, turning the quiet of the little station into such a Babel or Bedlam as can be caused by no human beings but English public school boys in the last half-hour of freedom before the ringing of the bell which marks the fatal time when they must be all in their boarding houses—the end of the holidays, the beginning of a new term.