Fathers of Men

by E. W. Hornung

Jan was prepared never to hear the last of his outrageous conduct in the big schoolroom; that was all he knew about his kind. It cost him one of the efforts of his school life to show his face again in Heriot’s quad; and the quad was full of fellows, as he knew it would be; but only one accosted him, and that was Sprawson, whose open hand flew up in a terrifying manner, to fall in a hearty slap on Jan’s back. “Well done, Tiger!” says Sprawson before half the house. “That’s the biggest score off Abinger there’s been since old Bewicke’s time.” And Jan rushed up to his study with a fresh lump in his throat, though he had come in vowing that the whole house together should not make him blub.

That night at tea Jane Eyre of all people (who was splendidly supplied with all sorts of eatables from home) pushed a glorious game pie across the table to Jan; and altogether there was for a few hours rather more sympathy in the air than was good for one who after all had made public display of a thoroughly unworthy propensity. It is true that Jan had gone short of sympathy all his life, and that a wave of even misplaced sympathy may be beneficial to a nature suffering from this particular privation. But a clever gentleman was waiting to counteract all that, and to undo at his leisure what Mr. Thrale had done in about two minutes.

No sooner had the form re-assembled in his hall next day than Haigh made them a set sarcastic speech on the subject of Jan’s enormity. He might have seen at a glance that even outwardly the boy was already chastened; that his jacket and his hair were better brushed than they had been all the term, his boots properly laced, his tie neatly tied; that in a word there were more signs of self-respect. Haigh, however, preferred to look at his favourites at the top of the form, and merely to jerk the thumb of contempt towards his aversion at the bottom. He reminded them of his prophecy that Rutter would disgrace them all before the school, and the triumph of the true prophet seemed at least as great as his indignation at what had actually happened. Even he, however, had not foreseen the quality of the disgrace, or anticipated a fit of sulks in public. Yet for his own part he was not sorry that the headmaster, and Mr. Heriot and all the other masters and boys in the school, should have had an opportunity of seeing for themselves what they in that room had to put up with almost every day of the term. And the harangue concluded with a plain hint to the form to take the law into its own hands, and “knock the nonsense out of that sulky bumpkin, who has made us the laughing-stock of the place.”

To all of which Jan listened without a trace of his old resentment, and then stood up in his place.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” said he. “I apologise to you and the form.”

Haigh looked unable to believe his eyes and ears. But he was not the man to revise judgment of a boy once labelled Poison in his mind. He could no longer fail to note the sudden improvement in Jan’s looks and manner; all he could do was to put the worst construction upon it that occurred to him at the moment.

“I shall entertain your apology when you look less pleased with yourself,” he sneered. “Sit down.”

But Jan’s good resolutions were not to be eradicated any more easily than the rooted hostility of Haigh, who certainly surpassed himself in his treatment of the boy’s persistent efforts at amendment. Jan, though no scholar, and never likely to make one now, could be sharp enough in a general way when he chose. But he never had chosen under Mr. Haigh. It was no use attending to a brute who “hotted” you just the same whether you attended or not. And yet that little old man in the Upper Sixth class-room, with a single stern analogy, had made it somehow seem some use to do one’s best without sulking, even without looking for fair play, let alone reward. And, feeling a regular new broom at heart, Jan was still determined to sweep clean in spite of Haigh.

It chanced to be a Virgil morning, and of course the new broom began by saying his “rep” as he had never said it before. Perhaps he deserved what he got for that.

“I thought you were one of those boys, Rutter,” said Haigh, “who affect a constitutional difficulty in learning repetition? I only wish I’d sent you up to Mr. Thrale six weeks ago!”