CHAPTER XI
A MERRY CHRISTMAS
Christmas weather set in before the holidays. Old Boys came trooping down from Oxford and Cambridge, and stood in front of their old hall fires in astonishing ties and wondrous waistcoats, patronising the Loder of the house, familiar only with the Charles Cave. But when they went in a body to inspect the Upper, it was seen at once that the Old Boys’ Match could not take place for the ground was still thickly powdered with snow, and a swept patch proved as hard and slippery as the slide in Heriot’s quad. This slide was a duly authorised institution, industriously swept and garnished by the small fry of the house under the personal supervision of old Mother Sprawson, who sent more than one of them down it barefoot, as a heroic remedy for chilblains rashly urged in excuse for absence. Indeed it was exceptionally cold, even for a nineteenth-century December. The fire in the hall was twice its usual size; the study pipes became too hot to touch, yet remained a mockery until you had your tollies going as well and every chink stopped up. Sprawson himself was understood to be relying more than ever on his surreptitious flask; but as he never betrayed the ordinary symptoms of indulgence, except before a select and appreciative audience, and could sham sober with complete success whenever necessary, these entertainments were more droll than thrilling. It was Sprawson, however, who lit up the slide with tollies after lock-up on the last night, and kept the fun fast and furious until the school bell rang sharply through the frost, and the quad opened to dispatch its quota of glowing faces to prize-giving in the big schoolroom.
The break-up concert had been given there the night before; but the final function was more exciting, with the Head Master beaming behind a barricade of emblazoned volumes, the new school list in his hand. It was fascinating to learn the new order form by form, and quite stirring to hear and abet the thunders of applause as the prize-winners went steaming up for their books and came back with them almost at a run. Crabtree was the only one whom Jan clapped heartily; he was top of his form as usual, as was Devereux lower down the school, but Jan was not going to be seen applauding Evan unduly. Chips could not keep still when it came to the Middle Remove, and even Jan sat up with a tight mouth then. On their places depended their chance of a remove out of the clutches of old Haigh. And Jan was higher than he expected to be, but Chips was higher still, with the Shocker and Jane Eyre just above him, and Buggins the lowest of the group.
“I wish to blazes old Haigh would hop it in the holidays, Tiger,” said Buggins, and actually thrust his arm through Jan’s on their way back through the snow. “You and I may have another term of the greaser if he don’t.”
Jan said little, but it was not because he was particularly surprised at the sudden friendliness of an inveterate foe. Everybody was friendly on the last day. Jane Eyre was profuse in his hospitality at tea. Shockley himself had borrowed a bit of string that he would certainly have seized a week ago; as for Chips, he had already presented Jan with a German-silver pencil-case out of his journey money. And what made these signs so remarkable was that Jan himself had never been more glum than during the last days of the term, when all the rest were packing or looking up trains, and talking about their people and all they were going to do at home, and making Jan realise that he had no home and no people to call his own.
That was not perhaps a very fair or a grateful way of putting it, even to himself; but Jan had some excuse for the bitterness of his heart. He had not received above three letters from the rectory in all these thirteen weeks; the poverty of his correspondence had in fact become notorious, because he soon ceased looking for a letter, and when there was one for him it lay on the window-sill until some fellow told him it was there. This circumstance had provided the chivalrous Shockley with yet another taunt. Then that occasional letter never by any chance enclosed a post-office order, or heralded a hamper on its way by rail; and Jan had brought so little with him in the first instance, in the way either of eatables or of pocket-money, that a time had come when he flatly refused Chips’s potted-meat because he saw no chance of ever having anything to offer him in return. These of course had been among the minor troubles of the term; but they were the very ones a fellow’s people might have foreseen and remedied, if they had really been his people, or cared for a moment to do the thing properly while they were about it. But all they had done was to write three times to remind him of their charity in doing the thing at all, and to impress upon him what a chance in life he was getting all through them! That again was only Jan’s view of their letters, and was perhaps as ungrateful and unfair as his whole instinctive feeling towards his mother’s family; but it was strong enough to make him more than ever the pariah at heart when he came down from dormitory on the last morning, in his unaccustomed bowler (but not the “loud tie” of all the bigger fellows), and partook of the meat breakfast provided in the gaslit hall; and so out into the chilling twilight, to squeeze into some omnibus because he had failed to take Chips’s advice and order a trap in the middle of the term.
Jan’s journey was all across country, and long before the end he had shaken off the last of his schoolfellows travelling in the same direction. It happened that he knew very few of that contingent even by name, and yet he was sorry when they had all been left behind; they were the last links with a place where he now realised that he felt more at home than he was ever likely to feel in the holidays. Eventually he reached a bleak rural station, where there was nothing to meet him, and walked up to the rectory, leaving casual instructions about his luggage.
It was not a pleasant walk; there had evidently been more snow in Norfolk than at school, and it had started to thaw while Jan was in the train. The snow stuck to his boots, and the cold was far more penetrating than it had seemed during the frost. The rectory, however, was the nearest point of the thatched and straggling hamlet of which it was also the manor house. It stood in its own park, a mile and more from the vast flint church in which a handful of people were lost at its two perfunctory services a week. The rector was in fact more squire than parson, though he wore a white tie as often as not, and conducted a forbidding form of family prayer every week-day of his life. He chanced to be the first person whom Jan saw in the grounds, on the sweep of the drive between house and lawn. On the lawn itself a lady and a number of children were busy making a snow-man; and the old gentleman, watching with amusement from the swept gravel, cut for the moment a sympathetic figure enough. Jan had to pass so close that he felt bound to go up and report his return; but no one seemed to see him, which made it awkward. He had been for some moments almost at the rector’s elbow, too shy to announce himself in words, when the lady came smiling across the snow.
“Surely this is Jan, papa?” she said, whereupon the rector turned round and exclaimed: “Why, my good fellow, when did you turn up?”
Jan succeeded in explaining that he had just walked up from the station; then there was another awkward interval, in which his grandfather took open stock of him, with quite a different face from that which had beamed upon the children in the snow. The lady made amends with a readier and heartier hand, and a kind smile into the bargain.