Chapter Ten.
Brooding.
Haviland, fallen from his high estate, did not take his misfortunes well. He was of a proud and sensitive temperament, and now that he found himself humiliated, reduced to the level of the rank and file, deprived of the very material privileges he had formerly enjoyed, shorn of his powers, and now in a position to obey where for so long he had been accustomed to command—yes, the humiliation was intolerable, and for no greater crime than that his watch had unfortunately stopped. A mere accident.
Not that his former colleagues were in the least likely to add to his humiliation by word or act of theirs. Esprit de corps was strong among them, very largely fostered indeed by his own influence while in a position to exert it. Even the two or three among them who disliked him would have shrunk from such an act, as being one of unspeakable meanness. And his fall was great. In seniority he had stood next to Laughton, the captain of the school, and were he eventually reinstated, he would lose this, and have to start again at the bottom of the list.
As for the juniors, some were unfeignedly glad, though their instinct of self-preservation made them remarkably careful not to obtrude that fact upon him, yet, though his strictness while in office had rendered him unpopular, now that he had fallen most of their sympathies were with him.
But from sympathy or condolence alike he himself shrank. His mind was bitter with thoughts of hatred and revenge—the latter, if only it could be obtained—yet why not? He was utterly reckless now. They could but expel him, and for that he didn’t care—at least, so he told himself. It was in this dangerous mood the day after his suspension that he encountered Jarnley—Jarnley and his gang.
But Jarnley had seen him coming, and tried to shuffle away. So, too, did his gang.
“Here—Hi, Jarnley!” he cried. “Wait a bit. I want to speak to you.”
There was no escape, short of taking to his heels, wherefore Jarnley stopped, with a very bad grace and faced round.
“Eh? What is it, Haviland?”
“Just this. That day I smacked your head for bullying Cetchy you said you’d fight me if I wasn’t a prefect. Well, I’m not a prefect now, so—come on.”
“Oh, I was only humbugging, Haviland,” returned Jarnley, not in the least eager to make good his words.
“Then you’d rather not fight?”
“Of course I don’t want to,” said Jarnley, shrinkingly. “And, look here, Haviland, I’m beastly sorry you’ve been reduced.”
What was to be done with a cur like this? Haviland knew that the other was lying, and was the reverse of sorry for his misfortunes. He had intended to give Jarnley his choice between fighting and being thrashed, but how, in the name of common decency, could he punch a fellow’s head who expressed such effusive sympathy? He could not. Baulked, he glared round upon the group.
“Any one else like to take advantage of the opportunity?” he said. “You, Perkins?”
“I don’t want to fight, Haviland,” was the sullen answer.
“Very well, then. But don’t let me hear of any of you bullying Cetchy any more. He can tell me now, because I’m no longer a prefect; and any fellow who does will get the very best hammering he ever had in his life. That’s all.”
His former colleagues spared no pains to let him see that they still regarded him as one of themselves. Among other things they pressed him to use the prefects’ room as formerly, but this he refused to do. If he had been walking with any of them he would stop short at the door, and no amount of persuasion could prevail on him to enter.
“You needn’t be so beastly proud, Haviland,” Laughton had said, half annoyed by these persistent refusals. “Why, man, Nick’s bound to reinstate you before long. The notice, mind, says ‘suspended’ only.”
At which Haviland had shaken his head and laughed strangely.
The confinement to grounds told horribly upon his spirits. Three miserable cricket fields—as a matter of fact they were remarkably open and spacious—to be the sole outlet of his energies during all these weeks! He hated every stick and stone of them, every twig and leaf. He saw others coming and going at will, but he himself was a prisoner. Not even to the swimming pool might he go.
In sheer desperation he had followed Laughton’s advice, and gone in for cricket, but had proved so half-hearted over the game, then bad-tempered and almost quarrelsome, that no one was sorry when he declared his intention of giving it up. More and more he became given over to brooding—seeking a quiet corner apart, and looking out on to the open country from which he was debarred. While thus occupied one day, a hand dropped on his shoulder. Turning angrily—thinking some other fellow was playing the fool, and trying to startle him—he confronted Mr Sefton.
“What were you thinking about, Haviland?” said the latter in his quick, sharp, quizzical way.
“Oh, I don’t know, sir. Nothing very particular, I suppose,” forcing a laugh, for he was not going to whine to Sefton.
The latter looked at him with straight, penetrating gaze.
“They tell me you’ve given up cricket again. Why?”
“I don’t care for it, sir, never did. Everybody seems to have a notion that nothing can be of any use, or even right, but that confounded—I beg your pardon, sir—cricket and football. A fellow is never to be allowed to take his own line.”
“Yes, but it’s a good wholesome rule that if a fellow can’t take his own line he’d better adapt himself to the lines of others. Eh?”
Haviland did not reply. He merely smiled, cynically, disdainfully. Mr Sefton, watching his face, was interested, and more sorry for him than his official position allowed him to say. He went on:—
“Don’t mope. There’s nothing to be gained by it. Throw yourself into something. If one has lost a position, it is always possible to regain it. I know, and some others know, your influence has always been used in the right direction. Do you think that counts for nothing? Eh?”
“It hasn’t counted for much, sir, in a certain quarter,” was the bitter reply. “It isn’t the position I mind—I don’t care a hang about it, sir!” he burst forth passionately, “but to be stuck down in these three beastly fields, in the middle of a crowd all day and every day—I’d rather have been expelled at once.”
“Don’t be an ass, Haviland,” said the master, stopping short—for they had been walking up and down—and peering at him in his quaint way. “Do you hear? Don’t be an ass.”
This commentary, uttered as it was, left no room for reply, wherefore Haviland said nothing.
“Why don’t you go to the Doctor and ask him to remove your ‘gates’?” went on Mr Sefton.
“I wouldn’t ask him anything, sir.”
The tone, the expression of hatred and vindictiveness in the young fellow’s face, almost startled the other. As a master, ought he not to administer a stern rebuke; as a clergyman, was it not his duty to reason with him? But Mr Sefton, no part of an ass himself, decided that this was not the time for doing anything of the sort.
“You talk about not caring if you were expelled, Haviland,” he went on. “How about looking at it from your father’s point of view? How would he feel, d’you think, if you ended up your school life with expulsion? Eh?”
He had struck the right chord there, for in the course of their conversations he had gathered that the young fellow was devotedly attached to his father, whom he regarded as about a hundred times too good for the barren, ungrateful, and ill-requited service to which he had devoted his life—at any rate, looking at it from the unregenerate and worldly point of view. And, with a consciousness of having said just the right thing at the right time, Mr Sefton wisely decided to say no more.
“Think it over, Haviland. Think it over. D’you hear?” and with a friendly nod of farewell, he went his way.
A few minutes later he was walking along a field-path, his hat on the back of his head as usual, and swinging his stick. With him was Mr Williams.
“I’ve just been talking to that fellow Haviland,” he was saying. “Of course, I didn’t tell him so, but Nick has made a blunder this time. He’s piled it on to him too thick.”
The Doctor’s sobriquet, you see, had got among the assistant masters. It was short and handy, and so among themselves they used it—some of them, at any rate.
“I think he’s been most infernally rough on him, if you ask me,” replied Mr Williams, who, by the way, was not in orders, but an athletic Oxford graduate of sporting tastes, and who was generally to be met when off the grounds surrounded by three or four dogs, and puffing at a briar-root pipe. This he was even now engaged in relighting. “One would think it’d be enough to kick the poor devil out of his prefectship without gating him for the rest of the term into the bargain. I promptly let him off the lines I’d given him when I heard of it.”
“That’s just my opinion, Williams. And it’s the gating that’s making him desperate. And he is getting desperate, too. I shouldn’t be surprised if he did something reckless.”
“Then he’ll get the chuck. That’ll be the last straw. Why has Nick got such a down on him, eh, Sefton?”
“I don’t know, mind, but perhaps I can guess,” said the other, enigmatically. “But look here, Williams. Supposing we put in a word for him to Nick. Get him to take off the fellow’s gates, at any rate? Eh? Clay would join, and so would Jackson, in fact we all would.”
“That’d make it worse. Nick would think we were all in league against him. He isn’t going back one jot or tittle on his infallible judgment, so don’t you believe it. We’d get properly snubbed for our pains.”
“Well, I’m going to tackle him, anyhow. I’m not afraid of Nick for all his absurd pomposity,” rejoined Mr Sefton, with something like a snort of defiance, and his nose in the air. He meant it, too. Yet, although the above expression of opinion between these two masters very fairly represented the general estimate in which the whole body held the Head, they were fully alive to the latter’s good points, and supported him loyally in upholding the discipline and traditions of the school.