Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

For the chapel had other hallowed associations. To most boys perhaps religious services at school are apt to appear mechanical if not irksome duties. It was not so with Gerald Eversley. To him the great act of communion with God was a vivid reality. It seemed as if his very alienation from the practices and thought of ordinary boys drew him nearer to the Divine Presence. Sunday was not, nor had it ever been, a dull day to him. He had always reckoned his life from Sunday to Sunday. But the parts of the Sundays which he liked best at St. Anselm’s were the evening services when Dr. Pearson preached. Dr. Pearson’s sermons seemed different from other people’s, not only because he was the head master, but because he was Dr. Pearson. Others spoke of the temptations, trials, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, of boyhood, as though they stood outside them. But he spoke of them as one who had lately passed through them, and had not forgotten the art of expressing them. Other preachers in addressing the boys generally said you; Dr. Pearson said we. That was perhaps why the boys liked to hear him. Gerald wrote one Sunday evening to his father that he did not see how a boy could go on sinning willingly who listened every week to such sermons as these.

Yet one more point of his life must not be omitted. In front of the old church at St. Anselm’s is a terrace commanding a wide, impressive view of the wold. To this he would resort in the evening when the sunset tinged the horizon and the hills and woods beneath with an exquisite wealth of colouring. Under its elms he would stand, thinking and thinking. Somehow, whether from association with the graves or from the setting of the sun, the view, beautiful as it was, impressed him with a feeling of sadness; or perhaps it was that few views so extensive are so free from the traces of human habitation. Anyhow it harmonised with his own solitary temper. Thus it was by a strange coincidence, that, as at home, so at school, a churchyard became an element of his life. He was fond of it because he was naturally serious, and it made him more serious still. But nobody knew how often he went thither.

So divergent in all outward appearance were the lives of the two boys, living together at the same time, in the same school; yet between them a strong mutual attachment was springing up. They were still occupants of the same room. They might have changed; sometimes they thought, or at least Harry did, of changing; but they remained together, though they might have had rooms to themselves.

The motives of this singular intimacy were not the same.

On Harry Venniker’s side it was in the main a generous sense of protective obligation. Since the night when, in an impulse of sympathetic emotion, he had promised to be Gerald’s friend for ever, he had somehow felt that it would be a dereliction of duty to leave this strange unsophisticated boy to shift for himself. Harry believed that he could help him, and that nobody else could or would, and that, if he were left alone, he would be sure to be bullied. Helplessness is itself a title to the service of generous souls. The mean, cruel soul may impose upon it, but the noble soul reverences it, and nobility of thought and action was native to Harry Venniker. It ought to be said, too, that he was in some sense an admirer of Gerald’s intellectual ability. Being no student himself, he could not help respecting a life devoted to study. And, in proportion as learning assumed for him the general aspect of a difficult and irksome duty, he looked with a reverential surprise upon one who loved it as a mistress.

Gerald Eversley’s feeling for his friend was of a different kind. Although standing to some extent outside the common interests and quarrels of school life, he was not unappreciative of those who shone in them. No one can live in a busy and intent society without thinking somewhat of the subjects of which it thinks much. And there had arisen in Gerald’s mind a passionate admiration, a sentiment akin to hero-worship, for the boy, his inferior in intellect, but so brilliant, so prominent in the common ways of school life. It was a sentiment of which he could give, or did give, no account to himself. But he felt, as others felt, the charm of Harry’s presence. To be near him was a delight. To be parted from him was a bereavement. If the exquisite Aristotelian test of love be true, that it is not so much the sense of pleasure in the presence of the beloved one as the sense of pain at his absence, it was satisfied by Gerald Eversley. In his admiration for Harry Venniker there was no tinge or trace of jealousy. He looked up to him as to a being of higher order. That his own intellectual distinction could be weighed in the balance against Harry’s popularity and athletic powers, was an idea that never entered his mind. Who will say that it had been better if he had formed a more just estimate of human worth? What would not the world lose in happiness, nay in sublimity, if there were no souls exalted by strong, unspoken reverence for those whom they mistakenly deem higher and nobler than themselves?

Harry Venniker was totally unaware of the devotion which he had stirred in the deep places of his friend’s heart. He knew that Gerald was kind to him, and even submissive, but he was not unaccustomed to kindness and submissiveness; they were the attributes of his position and character, and he regarded them as matters of course. Could he have known how his lightest word was cherished by the boy who was so near him, and yet so far away, he would have been filled with a sentiment of awe.

He who has many friends knows not, and cannot know, the value of one. To Gerald Eversley Harry Venniker was all in all.

When boys become friends they begin to talk about their homes. No sign of friendship is surer than this. It is true that Gerald was generally the listener; for what could he tell about Kestercham Vicarage that was worth telling? Besides, he knew something of Harry Venniker’s father, who had paid his son a good many visits at St. Anselm’s; he had spoken to him, and had once been invited by him to luncheon at the hotel. Harry, of course, talked chiefly about his father. But he often spoke of his mother, of her grace and gentleness and goodness, of her long illness and her never-failing patience.

‘I don’t think,’ he said once with unwonted gravity, ‘I don’t think I could ever go far wrong, for fear of breaking her heart.’ He spoke of his sister too, the beautiful girl, so like her mother, whose portrait hung above the mantelshelf; she was only a year younger than himself, and they had never been separated until he went to school, and he wrote to her every week; she was so thoughtful, that he always consulted her about everything in his life, and found her opinion better than anybody’s—except his father’s. Once he held out the hope of inviting Gerald to stay for a few days at Helmsbury in the holidays, but the idea was forgotten, or some difficulty came in the way of it, and the invitation did not arrive. Gerald was partly disappointed, but partly relieved, as he did not know exactly how he should adapt himself to the ways of aristocratic society.