It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic justice cried out that he, the railway porter’s son, should defeat Bull, whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a merchant prince whose “Hong” was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai as his name in Princess Street and on ‘Change; but it was hopeless. The prize lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like ducks to water and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their form-mates struggled with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were both unpopular, both prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were two. Had it been a case of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have worked heroically on the off-chance, that his rival would be ill at examination time, but it was too far-fetched to hope that both would simultaneously ail.
He had long passed beyond Anne’s powers of tuition. It was not a “sound commercial education” that one got on the Classical side, and mathematics had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical side because Lance was there and stayed because of Anne’s golden dream of Oxford. The gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer saw in Sam the winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not abandoned hope that he might carry off one of the close scholarships which the School commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that qualified ambition.
But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she did not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not only to a form but to the whole school—a prize for reading.
He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of beating Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam’s fancy. Not that he was cocksure. He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always known it, and from the first day of his school life studied to correct his accent. He did not, even now, even at the price of being thought pedantic, indulge in slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a motherless home, perhaps from a stupid bravado, larded his speech with silly blasphemies and the current vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it with an air; but Sam had to guard his tongue. There is a difference, too easily detected, between correct slang and incorrect English: one must first speak correctly before one can dare successfully to be incorrect, and Sam’s handicap was that he came from a home where they used, in Sarah Pullen’s words, “the sort of English we speak in Manchester;” the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an affectation of the insincere.
There was a set piece—the opening speech in Comus—the inefficients were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was the “unseens” that frightened Sam: he rehearsed Comus till a misplaced aitch was a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his rhythm and the intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches were elusive when he was nervous. “Then don’t be nervous,” was counsel of perfection: the ordeal of the “unseen” test intimidated him.
But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood would win that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the hour—classics of course suffering—with a pin in his hand with which he resolutely drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he was fortunate. He read The Spectator which he had borrowed by pure chance from the school library, and the judges handed him a passage from The Spectator to read at the unseen test, and one of the great speeches of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, whose thundering music had so much attracted Sam that he knew the purple patch by heart.
He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that it was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last “Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the crowd.
“Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her.
“Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to show that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended dryly, “and you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. Will they move you up?”
She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit.