Fathers of Men

by E. W. Hornung

Once, in the very oldest days, when the pretty boy and the stable brat were playing together for almost the first time, the boy had broken a window and begged the brat to father the crime. Jan would not have told Chips for worlds; indeed, he was very sorry to have recalled so dim an incident out of the dead past; but there it was, unbidden, and here was the same inveterate abhorrence, not so much of actual punishment, but of being put in an unfavourable light in the eyes of others. That was a distinctive trait of Evan’s, peculiar only in its intensity. Both his old companions were equally reminded of it now. But Jan’s was the hard position! To have got in touch with Evan at last, to admire him as he always had and would, and yet to have that admiration promptly tempered by this gratuitous exhibition of a radical fault! Though he put it to himself in simpler fashion, this was Jan’s chief trouble, and it would have been bad enough just then without the necessity that he foresaw of choosing between Chips and Evan.

“I don’t know about duty,” he temporised, “but I don’t believe we should be licked.”

“Of course we shouldn’t!” cried Chips. “But it wouldn’t kill us if we were.”

“You agree with him?” persisted Evan, in a threatening voice of which the meaning was not lost on Jan. It meant out-of-touch again in no time, and for good!

“I don’t know,” sighed Jan. “I suppose we ought to say what we’ve seen; and it’ll pay us, too, if it’s going to get out anyhow; but I do think it’s hard on you—Devereux. We dragged you into it. You never wanted to come in; you said so over and over.” Jan gloomed and glowered, then brightened in a flash. “Look here! I vote us two tell Heriot what we’ve seen, Chips! Most likely he won’t ask if we were by ourselves; he’s sure to think we were. If he does ask, we can say there was another chap, but we’d rather not mention his name, because he was dead against the whole thing, and never saw all we did!”

Jan had unfolded his bright idea directly to Carpenter, whose opinion he awaited with evident anxiety. He resented being placed like this between the old friend and the new, and having to side with one or the other, especially when he himself could not see that it mattered so very much which course they took. They could not bring the dead man back to life. On the whole he supposed that Chips was right; but Jan would have held his tongue with Evan against any other fellow in the school. It was the new friend, however, who had been the true friend these two terms, and it was not in Jan’s body to go against him now, though he would have given a bit of it to feel otherwise.

“If that’s good enough for Devereux,” said Chips, dryly, “it’s good enough for me. But I’m blowed if I could sleep till that poor chap’s cut down!”

Devereux now became far from sure that it was good enough for him; in fact he declared nearly all the way back that he would own up with the others, that they must stand or fall together, even if he himself was more sinned against than sinning. That was not indeed the expression he used, but the schoolboy paraphrase was pretty close, and his companions did not take it up. Chips, having gained his point, was content to look volumes of unspoken criticism, while Jan felt heartily sick of the whole discussion. He was prepared to do or to suffer what was necessary or inevitable, but for his part he had talked enough about it in advance.

Evan, however, would not drop the subject until they found the familiar street looking cynically sleepy and serene, the same and yet subtly altered to those young eyes seared with a horror to be fully realised only by degrees. It began to come home to them now, in the region of other black caps with red badges, and faces that met theirs curiously, as though they showed what they had seen. Their experience was indeed settling over them like a blight, and two of the trio had forgotten all about the consequences when the third blushed up and hesitated at Heriot’s corner.

“Of course,” he stammered, “if you found, after all, that you really were able to keep my name out of it, I should be awfully thankful to you both, because I never should have put my nose into the beastly place alone. But if it’s going to get you fellows into any hotter water I’ll come forward like a shot.”