VI
The episode of the Shelton Greek Verse Prize marked a turning-point in O'Rane's early career at Melton and revealed to me for the first time his resourcefulness and concentrated determination no less than his innate and unconscious love of the dramatic. The story was all over the house that evening and was to spread throughout the school next day. Ishmael found himself of a sudden venerated and courted, and to do him justice he was far too young and human to remain uninfluenced. "Spitfire" dropped into desuetude as a nickname and was replaced by "Raney"; there were no more concerted "raggings" or resultant cut heads, and the former eccentricities of an outsider became the caprices of a hero. In a night and a morning O'Rane became a political leader.
The change was effected with little or no sacrifice of principle. He still came up for judgement before us once every ten days and was formally and efficiently chastised until the end of term, when he received his remove into the Sixth. The flow of his criticism was unchecked, but no longer so bitterly resented. With a little assistance from Sinclair and Mayhew, his social qualities were brought into play: we would hear his voice leading an unlawful sing-song in Middle Dormitory, occasionally he contributed to Mayhew's manuscript "Junior Mathesonian," and an echo of wild stories came to us with all the violence and bloodshed of the late Græco-Turkish War, to be followed by anecdotes of life in the Straits Settlements and Bret Harte tales of the Farther West. No one believed a half of what he said, but the stories—as stories—were good. His personality developed and lent weight to his opinions and criticism; he grew gradually more mellow, less alien in speech and habit of mind. His face became less thin, and the practice of promiscuous expectoration left him.
I was to have ocular proof of his new ascendancy before the end of the term. The evening of the last Saturday I was condemned to spend in Hall. There was a high, three-panelled board over the fireplace, carved with the names of monitors and members of either Eleven, and, as I was at that time credited with some facility in the use of a chisel, the unanimous vote of my fellows entrusted me with the arduous task of bringing the jealously guarded record up to date. Planting a chair in the fireplace, to the enduring mortification of a chestnut-roasting party, I settled to my work. The fags gradually resumed their interrupted occupations, and in the intervals of hammering I caught fragments of triangular conversation.
"I say, Raney," Palmer began, "is it true you're coming to watch the Cup Tie on Tuesday?"
O'Rane, seated for purposes of his own on the top of the lockers, six feet up the side of the wall, grunted and went on reading.
"It isn't compulsory, you know," Palmer went on. "You won't be thrashed if you don't."
"Silence, canaille," O'Rane murmured.
"I suppose you know the way to Little End? Across the court and under the arch.... I'll show you, if you like. The Matheson colours are blue and white. The game's quite easy to follow. There are two goals...."
O'Rane yawned indolently, closed his book and threw it at the speaker.
"See here, sonny, you'll rupture yourself if you do too much funny-dog. I'm just coming to your dime-show to watch you beach-combers doing your stunt. And when it's all over I want you to start in and tell me what good you think you've done."
One or two voices raised themselves improvingly in defence of sport, the tradition of fair play, working for one's side and not for one's self, physical fitness and the like—much as Loring had done a few weeks earlier.
"You bat-eared lot!" was O'Rane's withering commentary.
"Everyone knows you're an unpatriotic hog," observed Venables.
"'Cos I don't kick a filthy bit of skin about in the slime? You lousy, over-fed lap-dog, a fat lot you know about patriotism! See here, Venables, what use d'you think you are? Can you ride? No. Can you shoot? No. Can you row? Can you swim? Can you save yourself a God-Almighty thrashing any time I care to foul my hands on you?"
"If you fought fair...." Venables began indignantly.
"I fight with my two hands same as you. 'Course, if you fool round with your everlasting Queensberry Rules, don't be surprised if I hitch you out of your pants and break an arm or two. And, meantime, you sit and hand out gaff about patriotism and the fine man you're growing into by playing football. All the time you know you'd be turned up and smacked if you didn't, and you don't cotton on to that. I've a good mind to take you in hand, Venables."
Mayhew, who was struggling with the current number of his paper, laid his pen down and addressed the meeting.
"Proposed that O'Rane do now shut his face," he suggested.
"Seconded!" cried Sinclair, who was lying on his back in the middle window-seat, drinking cocoa through a length of rubber tubing stolen from the laboratory.
O'Rane smiled and drummed his heels against the echoing locker doors.
"Sinks, come here!" he commanded.
There was no movement on Sinclair's part.
"Laddie!" O'Rane's voice took on the very spirit of Burgess. "I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. I pray thee come to me lest a worse thing befall thee. For and if thou harden thine heart, peradventure I may come like a thief in the night and evilly entreat thee so that thou shalt wash thy couch with thy tears. Then shall thy life be labour and sorrow."
Unprotesting and under the eyes of Hall, Sinclair rolled off the window-seat and ambled round to O'Rane's corner.
"What's the row?" he demanded.
"I'm going to make a man of Venables—make men of them all," was the reply.
There was a whispered consultation, and I caught "Mud-Crushers"—contemptuous appellation of a despised Cadet Corps. "No, I'm blowed if I do," Sinclair flung up to the figure on the lockers. "I will if you will," whispered O'Rane. A moment's hesitation followed. "It'll be rather a rag," Sinclair admitted.
"We'll start on Palmer," O'Rane pronounced. "He's the biggest. Hither, Palmer."
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Palmer, still with a cross of sticking-plaster on his forehead, look up from his book.
"Go to——," he began valiantly enough, and then anticlimactically as he caught sight of me, "What d'you want?"
"Thee, laddie. Sinks and I are old men, broken with the teares and sorrows of this life. If you don't come, I don't mind telling you you'll get kidney-punch in Dormitory to-night. That's better. I'm joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. Sinks is joining too. He didn't want to, but I threatened him with kidney-punch."
"More fool him," returned Palmer, preparing to go back to his book.
"Half a sec.," cried Sinclair, with a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Raney and I are joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. If you don't join too, and recruit Cottrell, you'll get kidney-punch from us both."
Palmer looked his persecutors up and down. He was no coward and would have left enduring marks on Sinclair, but of O'Rane's disabling, Japanese methods no one had yet made beginning or end.
"But what's the good of my mucking about in a filthy uniform?" he demanded. "I'm going to be a land agent."
"Decide. Don't argue," ordered O'Rane. "Think how useful a little rifle practice will be when you're invited to murder hapless driven birds."
"But it's all rot...."
O'Rane waved him away. "If you will arrange to be in bed at 9.45 to-night, Sinks and I will give ourselves the pleasure of waiting on you."
Palmer hesitated a moment longer.
"Oh, anything for a quiet life," he exclaimed.
"Now go and recruit Venables," said O'Rane. "Sinks and I are old men, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. We should hate to be dragged into a vulgar brawl, but you may use our names as a guarantee of good faith. I saw a man killed with a kidney-punch out in Kobe once."
The recruiting was going briskly forward when I gathered up my mallet and chisel, picked the chair out of the fireplace and returned to my study. Early in life O'Rane had learned three lessons in collective psychology: a sense of humour is a strong ally; fifty sheep follow when one has butted a gap in a hedge; and the basis of democracy is that all men are entitled to see that their neighbours suffer equally with themselves.
After Third Hour on Monday a batch of forty-three recruits (the Corps was unfashionable in Matheson's) presented themselves at the door of the Armoury graded according to height. I was passing through Cloisters with Tom Dainton, and we heard Sinclair's voice leading the marching song:
"Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em!"
The words aptly described the internal relationships of the Press Gang. The smallest fag marched under the suspicious eye of one slightly larger than himself, the slightly larger was in turn under the surveillance of a fag yet larger. There was an eleventh-hour flicker of mutiny, promptly extinguished.
"I'm hanged if I can see the fun of this," cried Venables, flinging down the pen.
Sinclair, Palmer and Cottrell had already signed and were with difficulty restrained from tearing the would-be deserter limb from limb.
"It's the damnedest silly rot I was ever mixed up with," he grumbled, as he signed his name viciously in the Recruits' Book. "Nobody but a congenital idiot like Raney——Here, Carlisle, come and sign, curse you!"
Two days later, term came to an end. My mother and sister were in Cairo, and as I did not fancy spending Christmas by myself in the wilds of the County Kerry, I had accepted Loring's invitation to stay with him in London. We were almost the last to shake little Matheson's hand and leave the house, for Loring never cared what train he took, so long as he was not hurried. He was now lying contentedly back in his arm-chair, divested of his responsibilities as Head of the house and appreciatively tasting the first savour of the holidays. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and O'Rane had just finished packing the last box of books.
"Is there anything more?" he asked, stretching his back and brushing the dust from his clothes.
"I think not, thanks. You're not a bad fag, young man. I'm quite sorry you've got into the Sixth."
"No more of our ten-day meetings," said O'Rane.
Loring half-closed his eyes.
"Believe me or not," he said, "I always regarded those meetings as a blot on our otherwise delectable friendship. Are you going home for the holidays, Spitfire?"
"I haven't got a home," O'Rane answered, with a sudden return of his old sullenness.
Loring opened his eyes and bowed apologetically.
"Sorry. I didn't know. No offence meant. What are you going to do with yourself?"
"Oh, I shall find something to do."
"Would it amuse you to stay with me any part of the time? Oakleigh's coming, in case you feel you can't stand me alone. I'll take you to a Christmas pantomime as a reward for being a good little fag."
"It's awfully kind of you, Loring." O'Rane hesitated and grew very red. "I don't think I shall have time, though."
"Not for one night, even? Loring House, Curzon Street, will find me all the holidays."
"I'm afraid I shall be working."
"Bunkum! You've not got any work to do."
"I have."
"What kind?"
The old expression of defiance battling with prolonged persecution came into O'Rane's black eyes. "If you must know," he said, "I came here with enough money for one term and I must raise some more. It's awfully kind of you, though. Good-bye. I hope you'll have a pleasant time. Good-bye, Oakleigh."
As the door closed behind him, Loring turned to me with a rueful shake of the head.
"I seem to have a genius for putting my foot into it with him," he observed.
"It couldn't be helped," I said. "He's a mysterious little animal."
Loring sat staring into the fire. At length he roused himself with the question:
"But what's he going to do with his little self? I rather feel as if I'd been what he'd call a 'God-Almighty brute' to him this term. I'd no idea he was ... I wonder if the Guv'nor can do anything for him."
"I shouldn't dare," I said.
Loring stretched himself and looked for his coat and hat.
"Come along if we're going to catch the 4.10," he said. "I say, what a cheerful prospect for the little beast to look forward to, if he has to do this every holiday."
We were a small party at Loring House that Christmas. The Marquess divided his time between London and Monmouthshire according to the weather and the possibility of hunting; Lady Loring departed to San Remo with the New Year; and Lady Amy arrived spasmodically for a night and a day between visits to school friends, sometimes alone, but once with my cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, with whom at this time Loring was unblushingly in love. For the most part we had the great house to ourselves for such times as we could spare to be at home. And the arrangement suited all parties. Though devoted to his mother and sister, I always fancied there was a perplexed misunderstanding between Jim and his father. I do not suggest a want of affection, but their minds were cast in different moulds, and I sometimes wonder if the Marquess, with his zest for pleasure and society, ever found common ground with his serious, detached and incurably romantic son. Be that as it may, we had no time to get bored with our own society. Loring's passion for the theatre dated from early years, and if we went once we went five times a week for the period of the holidays. The day was not hard to get through, as we ran breakfast and luncheon into one, rode in the Park on fine afternoons and returned in time to drink a cup of tea, dress, and dine out at one or other of Loring's favourite eating-houses. Lady Amy accompanied us when she was in town,—a tall, grey-eyed, dark-haired girl of sixteen she was then, wonderfully like her good-looking brother in speech, appearance and manner,—but as a rule the two of us roamed London by ourselves.
Taken all in all, they were very pleasant holidays, though in the last seventeen years I have forgotten nine-tenths of what we did or where we went. Our New Year's Eve party, however, lingers in my memory. Lord Loring took us all to supper at the Empire Hotel. It was the first time I had been there, and from our place overlooking the river we commanded the room. To this day I can recall something of the crowded, brilliantly lit scene; the little tables with their pink-shaded lights, the red uniforms of the orchestra, the waiters in their knee-breeches and silk stockings, the white shoulders of the women and the shimmer of their diamonds. Party followed party, till it seemed as if the great room could never contain them, and in the entrance-hall beyond the stairs we could see fresh parties arriving, more ermine cloaks being shed, new ranks of men settling their waistcoats and straightening their ties as they approached with an air of well-bred, bored indifference, bowing to friends here and there and working slowly forward in search of their tables.
"Not a bad sight, is it?" said Lord Loring. "They stage-manage the thing very fairly well. If only our waiter would unbend to take our orders." He looked round and caught sight of the manager with a plan of the restaurant in his hand, allotting tables and ushering parties through the narrow gangways.
"I'll catch hold of this fellow," said Jim, rising up and intercepting the manager. There was a moment's conversation, punctuated by deprecatory play of the hands and apologetic shrugging of the shoulders. "He says our man will be here in a minute. A wild Grand Duke has just arrived here from Russia and lost his suite on the way. Apparently our waiter is the only man who speaks the lingo."
Lord Loring accepted the situation and began to describe the arrangements for marking the arrival of midnight. On the first stroke of twelve all lights were to be put out; as the last died away there would be a peal of bells, limelight would be thrown on the entrance-hall, and a sledge drawn by dogs would make its appearance with a child on board to symbolize the advent of the New Year.... He interrupted his account to give the order for supper to our waiter who had at last arrived.
"Then link hands for 'Auld Lang Syne,'" added Lady Loring.
At that moment I received a disconcerting kick and looked up to find Jim gazing at the end of the table where his father was seated. I followed the direction of his eyes, saw the waiter raise his head and take the wine-list, and as he did so I caught a glimpse of his face.
In a claret-coloured livery coat, black knee-breeches and white stockings stood David O'Rane. Our eyes met, but he gave no sign of recognition and a moment later he had hurried away with an obsequious "Very good, my lord."
As we waited for our coats an hour or two later, Jim whispered, "I'm going to tell the Guv'nor. It's hardly decent, you know. A Meltonian assing about like that. The Guv'nor must get him out of it." He turned to his father. "I say, dad, did you particularly notice our waiter?"
"Yes. Rather a capable youngster, I thought."
"Well, he's ... he's...." Jim stammered unwontedly and seemed suddenly to repent his purpose.
"What about him?" asked Lord Loring.
"Oh, nothing. He comes from Melton, that's all."
"From the 'Raven'?"
"No, another place farther up the hill," Jim answered vaguely.
"Funny you should meet him here," observed Lord Loring, as he lit a cigar.
And with those words the subject was dropped.