This letter both gratified and perturbed me. It was pleasing to be hailed as one of the inner circle of a fellow like Tempest; but it made me suspect that I should not be taken into the fold at my own valuation, but that of my betters, which in a public school is a very different thing. The little details, too, about dress and manners rather startled me. For supposing I had gone up not knowing these things, what mistakes I should have made! Suppose, for instance, I had gone up in a billycock with a round instead of a square top; or suppose I had hailed Tempest without his first speaking to me, what would have become of me? I trembled to think of it, and was glad to feel I had a friend at court who would see I didn’t “shirk form.”
What made me still more uneasy was the reference to my connection with a girl’s school. The prize list had made it appear, to any one who did not know better, that I was a pupil from Miss Steele’s, High School, Fallowfield. Suppose this list should get into the hands of any of the fellows, or that some other new boy should carelessly leave his copy about! I wished I had had more sense than to mention the High School at all. This came of my chivalrous desire, said I to myself, to give Miss Steele and her principal the benefit of my distinction. Now I might have to thank them for endless trouble. I did my best to hope the worst would not happen.
“Fellows never read prize lists of exams, they’ve not been in for,” thought I; “and when they have been in, they never trouble themselves about any one’s name but their own. Why, I haven’t even noticed where a single other chap comes from. They may all be girls’ schools, for all I know. It’s not likely any one has noticed mine.”
And to avoid all accident I dropped mine into the fire, and had to stand my mother’s reproaches for destroying a document she had intended to treasure till her dying day.
As the time for my going to Low Heath approached, I began to turn my attention seriously to my trousseau.
My first care was to get the square-topped boiler, and a rare job I had to procure it. None of the hatters in Fallowfield knew of such a shape in young gents’ hats; and the shopkeepers in Wynd, whither I went over on purpose, were equally benighted. My mother, too, protested that she had never heard of such a kind of hat, and that it would be hideous when I got it.
That was no fault of mine. It was the Low Heath form, and that was enough for me.
At length I heard of a hat of the kind at Deercut, five miles off, and walked thither. It had been made, said the hatter, for a young sporting party who attended to a gentleman’s stables, and knew a thing or two. He had got into trouble, it was explained, and was “doing his time on the circular staircase,” which I took to mean the treadmill. That was the reason the article had been thrown on the maker’s hands. It seemed just the thing Tempest described. The top was as flat as the lid of a work-box; indeed, it was precisely like a somewhat broad-brimmed chimney-pot-hat cut down to half height; and after a little pinching in at the sides fitted me beautifully. The maker was delighted to be able to suit me, and smiled most graciously when I paid him my five shillings and walked out of the shop with my junior exhibitioner’s “boiler” on my head.
I set down to envy or ignorance the jeers of the village youths who encountered me on my way home. Some people will laugh at anything they do not understand. My mother’s protests, when she saw me, however, were not so easy to dispose of.
“Why, Tommy, it makes you look like a common cheap-jack,” said she. “It’s not a gentleman’s hat at all. I’m sure they would not tolerate it at Low Heath.”