Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

‘My father says it’s a wicked word,’ was the answer.

It was an answer which Harry Venniker found some difficulty in meeting, for it was an article of his moral code that parental authority ought to be respected, however irrational it might be.

‘All I can say is,’ he continued after an interval, ‘that I don’t see how you are to get on if you are always thinking things wrong.’

‘But isn’t it wrong?’ said Gerald.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Harry; ‘I suppose it is, if you look at it in that way; but it’s what everybody does, and, upon my word, I don’t see the harm of it.... However, if you object to it,’ he added, when he had meditated upon the problem for a few moments, ‘I suppose you are right, and if fellows try to bully you, I’ll let them know what I think, only you can’t exactly wear a pinafore in a house like this.’

And that was the limit of the sympathy which Gerald experienced in his first protest against public opinion.

Still, it soon became known in the house that Harry Venniker, while regarding his room-fellow as ‘rather a muff, don’t you see?’ was not disposed to see him the victim of systematic persecution. He was reported to have ‘punched’ the red head of the boy Thornton, who had intruded with malicious purpose into the room, whistling the tune of the song which had proved fatal to poor Gerald’s peace of mind, and making two or three mimetic pauses in the first lines of the chorus. This tacit championship was of the highest value to Gerald Eversley. For boys possess a singular faculty (if they care to exercise it) of making other boys’ lives intolerable. They are masters of the art of annoyance and irritation. They understand how by speech, and still more by silence, to convey the killing sense of their displeasure. I will undertake to say that half a dozen small boys, without committing any such action as could bring them within reach of the law, will drive a schoolfellow to the verge of despair. But against this organised, though indeterminate, persecution, the voice of one boy, if clear and courageous, possesses great weight. Gerald Eversley owed more than he was aware of to the stalwart, if somewhat unsympathetic, defence of Harry Venniker. But for that, it is probable that his social error in coming to school with ‘stick-up’ collars, and his moral error (for so it was widely considered) in refusing to sing a song selected in due order by the captain of Hall, would have brought him into considerable trouble. As it was, however, the boys did nothing worse than leave him very much to himself; they would look at one another in a knowing way, and perhaps shrug their shoulders, when he passed, or one of them would nudge his arm at dinner to prevent his eating with absolute equanimity, or ask him the Latin for a saint, or inquire if his mother or his sisters knew that he was out; once or twice he found his boots filled with water in the morning, or a blot of ink upon his carefully written exercise; or his hat was hidden away, to make him late for chapel; or he received on the first of April a packet of ‘stick-up’ collars as a present.

Boys’ memories are generally short-lived. Nine days’ wonders do not last nine days in a school. Events follow each other with such rapidity and variety that neither successes nor defeats are long remembered. The nickname ‘Stick-ups’ adhered to Gerald Eversley for about five weeks, and then, as the original cause of it had disappeared after the first two or three days of the term, it dropped. The incident of the song was remembered a little longer; but its only permanent result was that the Sixth Form decided not to leave the choice of songs to the captain of Hall, but to prescribe a song of which a verse should be sung by all new boys, and after much consideration the ‘March of the Men of Harlech’ was adopted for this purpose as being at once simple, moral, and inspiriting.

There came to be a tacit understanding among the boys in Mr. Brandiston’s house that Gerald Eversley was not altogether like others, and that it was necessary to treat him differently from them, that he was a fair subject for good-humoured chaff, but that it was a ‘chouse’ to bully him, and that as Venniker (who was admitted to be a downright good fellow) could put up with him in his room, the boys generally could put up with him in the house.

Harry Venniker wrote home to his father a long letter telling him that the ‘chap’ whom they had seen on the platform was in his house and in his room, that he was ‘awfully pious,’ and Harry doubted if he had ever been out of his nursery; that he had got himself into trouble by refusing to sing a song in which the word ‘damn’ occurred, and that Harry did not know what a boy was to do ‘with notions like that;’ but, added Harry at the end of his letter, ‘he is not such a bad fellow, though a terrible milksop, and if other boys are down upon him, I mean to stick up for him as well as I can.’ In addition, Harry said that he was ‘getting on all right,’ and life at St. Anselm’s was ‘good fun on the whole.’