Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

In point of fact, ‘swelldom’ (like some other highly coveted human distinctions) consists not so much in the possession of privileges as in the general belief that those privileges are possessed by the ‘swells.’

Mysterious indeed, except to the initiated, are the outward and visible signs of ‘swelldom,’ but not less mysterious is the fact of ‘swelldom’ itself. At St. Anselm’s (for of that school only is it necessary to speak) there were some boys who became ‘swells’ by prescriptive title, such as the captain of the school, and the boys of a year’s standing in the cricket and football elevens. About them no question could arise in any well-ordered mind. But a number of other boys there were who stood, as it were, on the borderline of ‘swell-land.’ They might or might not at any time be privileged to cross the border. Until or unless they could cross it, they were like the spirits which Dante saw in the first circle of his ‘Inferno.’ How a boy came to cross the border, he himself could hardly explain. But as a boy spends many days perhaps, or weeks, trying to swim, and all but swimming, and then one day, without any direct assignable cause, feels that he can swim, so a boy might aspire to ‘swelldom,’ and live close to it for ever so long a time and be excluded from it, and then at last wake up some morning and feel that he was a ‘swell,’ like the great poet who awoke to find himself famous.

Harry Venniker had been a ‘swell’ for a long time, ever since the term in which he ‘got his flannels.’ So good an athlete, so popular a boy was admitted to the charmed circle as of right. Gerald Eversley, it will be believed, had never dreamed of ‘swelldom;’ the ‘swells’ were the last boys with whom he would naturally associate. But it was the practice of the ‘swells’ to co-opt occasionally, though only on rare occasions, some boy who, by his position or character or attainments, might be thought not incapable of shedding lustre even upon their distinguished order. Gerald Eversley was now the third boy in the school. He was acknowledged to be the cleverest boy. He had won the school a holiday by winning the Balliol scholarship—and he was Harry Venniker’s friend.

The ‘swells’ were divided in opinion about co-opting him into their order. Some of them had hardly spoken to him, and doubted how they should get on with him. Others thought that he was ‘the kind of fellow to be encouraged.’ But it was Harry Venniker’s warm support that carried the day; Gerald Eversley might be passed over, but Harry Venniker’s friend could not. It was intimated to Gerald, according to the mysterious freemasonry of public-school life, that he might consider himself as exalted (not altogether through his own merit) to the august hierarchy of the ‘swells.’

If Gerald Eversley cared at all for being a ‘swell,’ it was only because his admission to ‘swelldom’ destroyed the last remaining barrier between himself and his friend. There was now no scene of life at St. Anselm’s to which he could not accompany Harry Venniker. They could talk more freely; they had more interests in common. They were more frequently seen together. Some one in the school began to call them ‘the inseparables.’ Never had their friendship seemed so intimate or complete as in their last days at St. Anselm’s. And yet what a gulf, that no man thought of, stretched between them!

Almost all boys whose lives in their public schools have been honourable, experience a sadness—a sinking of the heart—as they draw near to the time of leaving them for ever. They know the trials and dangers as well as the delights of school life; they do not know what may come after it. They have been sailing in waters where every reef and shoal is mapped out for them, and they are going to put forth on the untravelled illimitable ocean. The counsel which they valued, even when it was rejected, will be theirs no more. There will be no familiar hand, as of old, to bear them up, no voice to guide them aright. It is the mysteriousness of the future that appals them. If only they could foresee the worst, it would be less dreadful. Besides this, Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley stood at the parting of the roads. They would be friends perhaps, but at a distance. The old daily intercourse of the last four years was dying, and it could not be revived or replaced.

It was to this cause, and only to this, that Harry Venniker attributed the depression of spirits which he thought he noticed in his schoolfellow.

‘Cheer up, old man,’ he said one day. ‘You must not mope. I’ll write to you every week, and so must you to me; and you’ll come to Helmsbury in the holidays; it will be almost as good as being at St. Anselm’s.’

Light-hearted promises! Ah! how many a one has fondly deemed that the future would be as the present, and it never, never is the same!

But life is saved from the paralysis which reflection would cause by the blessed necessity of action. If there were more time for reflection, it would become impossible to act. But because the habitual daily duties of life demand action, we can live, and not live in vain. Thus it is that the saintliest Christians, like Bishop Wilson, who entered most deeply into the joy of communion with the All Holy, have yet given the preference to an active over a contemplative life.