Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

‘Brandiston’s! Bless my soul! why, so am I,’ said Venniker; but there was something in his tone which seemed to imply that the pale, spectacled boy to whom he spoke was not quite the kind of boy whom he had expected to find in Mr. Brandiston’s house, the most popular and fashionable house at St. Anselm’s. ‘They say he’s not a bad sort, old Brandiston, but awfully strict. However, I don’t mind that so long as he’s just. I know a lot of fellows there, some of them were at my preparatory school; it’s cock house at cricket; it has got five of the eleven in it, and one of them is the captain—Stanley, you know. But, I say, what school have you been at? Were you in the eleven there? What was your top score?’ But here he paused, as if a gentle voice had reminded him that the boy at his side was not quite likely to have achieved reputation as a cricketer, and he repeated his first question quickly, ‘What school?’

Gerald Eversley was fain to confess that he had never been to school before—in fact, had never left his home; and he felt that the confession somehow lowered him in his companion’s eyes, and would lower him in the eyes of all his schoolfellows at St. Anselm’s. It certainly seemed to make a breach at the moment between his companion and himself; they walked nearly fifty yards without speaking. But again Harry Venniker’s spirits were too buoyant to make prolonged silence natural or possible. His conversation took an air of superiority—that unconscious, unintentional superiority which is the prerogative of greater knowledge or wider experience. He felt somehow as if he had spent half his life at St. Anselm’s, and, being long familiar with its practices and observances, were called upon to initiate a young novice into the secret of them. He began to realise in himself a sense of patronage, a duty of protection, to the boy who was walking at his side. Just because Gerald was so ‘green’ (as schoolboys phrase it), and wholly unversed in the ways of the world, it was his office to give him a helping hand. A boy of duller or coarser temperament than Harry Venniker, even if he had abstained from teasing or harassing such a creature, would have left him severely alone. But Harry Venniker was full of manly, generous impulses; he was conscious of strength, but not less conscious of the obligation to use it beneficently; and while he would not himself have submitted to any bullying, he would have felt it a shame to let another weaker boy be bullied without coming to his rescue.

He resumed the conversation in a more sympathetic tone, turning it to those subjects which seem to be eternally interesting to males of thirteen years of age who are entering upon school life—a boy’s sisters’ names, his pocket-money, the sport he has had at home, and the means of satisfying a master’s requirements with the smallest possible expenditure of personal trouble. But he discovered—and the discovery was a great surprise to him—that these subjects, so natural among schoolboys, were nearly all painful or difficult to Gerald Eversley.

Boys have been always strangely sensitive about their female relations. They have often felt, or affected to feel, a shame of their sisters—though, heaven knows the sisters had generally far more cause to be ashamed of their brothers than their brothers of them—and it has been a point of honour to conceal their names and their very existence. Boys have been known to deny that they had sisters, though at the time they were receiving letters and presents from them. It is said that a boy once carried his dislike of the female sex to the point of denying that he had ever had a mother. Gerald Eversley was not experienced in the ways of school life; but when he was asked for his sisters’ names, he found a difficulty in admitting that he had eight sisters possessing an accumulated total of nineteen Christian names; and Harry Venniker, who had only one sister, and had not conceived the possibility of anybody having as many as eight, grew conscious, after hearing some half-dozen of the names, that his question was rather an awkward one, and he did not press for a complete answer to it.

He was not much more successful in introducing the subject of sport. To most British schoolboys, of the upper classes at all events, sport is a subject of fascinating and absorbing interest. Not to be a sportsman is in their eyes not to be an English gentleman. There is a story that a clever schoolmaster, who was conscientiously opposed to vivisection, offered a prize to any boy who should come back to school after the summer holidays without having killed any living creature; and the prize was not claimed, probably not because there was no boy in the school who had not handled either a gun or a rod in the holidays, but because there was not a boy bold enough to admit in the presence of his schoolfellows that he had spent the holidays in so unsportsmanlike a manner. But the 12th of August and the 1st of September were only common days to Gerald Eversley; they enjoyed no mystical significance in his eyes. Mr. Eversley, his father, was not a sportsman; he had neither the means nor the taste for ‘killing’ (as he would himself have said) ‘God’s dumb creatures.’ To say the truth, it is probable that he felt, like Sir Thomas More, a secret astonishment at finding that so many sober, responsible, Christian gentlemen experienced a pleasure or exhibited a pride in the magnitude of their slaughter. So it was that Gerald Eversley had never thought of handling a gun. A gunshot was apt to send a tremor through his body. It happened once that, as he was walking with a book of poetry in his hand in the covert immediately adjoining a part of his father’s glebeland, he came upon a number of pheasants that the keepers who were out with a shooting party had left—bedraggled, bleeding, some of them hardly yet dead—to be picked up in the evening when the day’s sport was finished. The sight was so painful that he turned away from it as if it sickened him, and the tears came into his eyes, and he wondered if any satisfaction derived from killing these beautiful creatures could be greater than his in being innocent of their blood. It was not much use, then, to talk to Gerald Eversley about sport; the subject was unwelcome to him, and Harry Venniker instinctively dropped it.

His growing conviction that his companion was a ‘rum ’un’ was not diminished when it appeared that Gerald had not come to school with any thought of waging war against the masters, or with any animosity towards them as the natural enemies of boyhood; that he was not looking forward to any ‘larks;’ that he did not understand what a ‘beak’ or a ‘crib’ was; that he hoped to be left alone to study by himself; that he cared more to know where the library was than where the cricket-field was; and that he shrank at heart from contact with a company of strangers, not the less because those strangers were public school boys. But his astonishment reached its height when at the mention of pocket-money and of the ways of spending it on a large scale—Harry Venniker having a 5l. note in his pocket and being empowered to write home for more as soon as he wanted it—his companion, who had been sent to school with only half a sovereign (though he did not confess the amount), and that a sum which his father had given him with the solemn air of one who is making a sacrifice that it would be impossible to repeat, stammered and faltered, and at last broke into tears. He had lived a solitary, sheltered life until then; he was quite unworldly; he had never known what it was to receive gold as a present; and it was more than he could bear to listen to a boy of his own age talking about ‘fivers,’ not at all boastfully, but in the most natural manner possible, as if they were matters of almost everyday experience. He did his best to check his tears, but they would come.

Harry Venniker looked at him with a mingled sentiment of surprise and commiseration. He had an awkward consciousness (to express his own thought) that he had ‘put his foot into it,’ and that, if he had chosen his topics of conversation with more delicacy or discretion, this ‘scene’—disagreeable as ‘scenes’ always are to boys—would not have occurred. For the moment it was difficult to avoid a feeling of contempt for this strange, emotional creature. Boys have a horror of tears; they think them fit only for women or for Frenchmen; they regard them as essentially un-English. But Harry Venniker’s heart was touched to sympathy; he realised the fact of sorrow, and tacitly blamed himself for being, although unwittingly, the cause of it. He wanted, if he could, to make amends, though he hardly knew how, and so, after hesitating for a moment, he put out his hand and said hastily, ‘I say, never mind; don’t blubber. You’ll want a little more pluck, I can tell you, if you’re to get on among fellows; but I’ll be your friend; I’ll stick up for you—I swear I will; I’ll be your friend, whatever happens.’

By this time they were ascending the short, steep road which leads to the crest of St. Anselm’s hill. Harry Venniker had not long finished speaking when they came in sight of Mr. Brandiston’s house—it juts out a little into the road just beyond the chapel—and without another word they walked to the door of it and entered, passing through a group of boys who were clustered by the entrance, and who stared at them with the supercilious curiosity of older and superior beings at the sight of a new boy.

‘I say,’ cried Harry Venniker, who had been holding a brief but earnest consultation with the butler, ‘you fellow, Eversley; we’re in a room together, No. 13; come along, let’s have a look at it.’ And so saying, he hurried the butler and Gerald up two flights of stairs and along a narrow, tortuous passage, actually known in the language of the house as the ‘corkscrew,’ to a room which bore the external signs of being intended for the conjoint but exclusive occupation of two boys. The walls were bare; for its former occupants, whether they had left the school or had only migrated to some better room in the house, had bequeathed to their successors no traces of decorations except the nails which had supported their pictures and now remained without any apparent use, like ghosts of an ancient and departed glory; but it contained two beds, which it was the fashion to fold up during the day and let down at night, two chairs, two tables deeply scarred with the names of several generations of boys who had occupied the room, two bookcases, two washstands and basins—in a word, all the conventional phenomena of a dual existence. The butler—a venerable character in the house—stood quietly by while the two boys surveyed the scantily furnished apartment, the virgin soil, as it were, which they were destined to cultivate; then he claimed the privilege of long experience by giving vent to the hope that they would ‘chum along all right together,’ and left them alone, telling them they must come down to the hall when the bell rang for prayers.

While they were unpacking their boxes, which were, it must be admitted, widely different in character and contents, Harry Venniker received a good many visits from old friends who had known him at home or at school, who greeted him and were greeted by him with much cordiality, passed some merry jokes with him at the expense of two or three of the masters and of their houses, which were declared to be in all respects vastly inferior to Mr. Brandiston’s, so that the boys professed themselves unable to imagine how ‘any decent chap’ could go into such ‘holes,’ and informed him in a congratulatory spirit that Stanley had been heard to express the intention of conferring upon him the singular honour of choosing him as one of his fags. Nobody asked for Gerald Eversley, or addressed any word to him, though to one of the boys who came into the room Harry Venniker introduced him as ‘an old friend of mine,’ using a form of speech not unnatural to schoolboys to whom a day is a long time, and a ceremony or practice which came into use a year ago is as if it had existed since the Creation. The business of unpacking boxes, interrupted as it was by numerous sallies of Harry Venniker to the window or the door, for the purpose of taking observations or renewing acquaintances, filled a considerable time. Then there was the further business of adorning the walls with pictures and trophies. Poor Gerald endured a fresh mortification at finding that he was expected to have brought certain decorative ornaments with him, and that he had not brought them. But Harry with great good nature did his best to set him at ease. He produced from the bottom of one of his boxes a number of engravings, all of a sporting kind, exhibiting with rare uniformity the triumphs of human skill over wild boars, elks, tigers, bears, and lions, to say nothing of the various species of British game, an enormous stag’s head—a ‘royal’ he called it, but Gerald had no idea what he meant—the trophy of his father’s prowess in sport, a clock, a hand-screen, two cabinet photographs of his father and mother, and the picture of a beautiful girl whom he explained a little apologetically to be his sister Ethel, a year younger than himself, ‘a real good sort, you know, for a girl; it was she who gave me this knife just as I was starting. Now we’re beginning to look a little shipshape,’ he continued; but just then the bell rang, and the two boys went downstairs with all the others for prayers in the hall.