"Pip" Part 13

Uncle Bill had created a sensation this time. There was a startled stir all round the table, and one or two glanced stealthily in the direction of Linklater. He was deathly pale. He was an ambitious boy,--as he was an ambitious man in after life,--and the snub hurt his pride more than most of them suspected. The fact that a far better man than himself had been pa.s.sed over, too, did not occur to him. He was not that sort.

"That is not an agreeable message to have to deliver," continued Uncle Bill, who felt the necessity of breaking the silence. "But whatever our private feelings in the matter may be,"--Uncle Bill did not like Mr.

Bradshaw, and he was inwardly raging at the calamity which had befallen his beloved Eleven,--"we have no choice in the matter but to obey orders and--er--pull together for the good of the school. We have still to elect a Captain."

"I should like to propose Ellis," said Pip at once.

"Ellis is proposed. Will somebody second?"

All eyes were turned upon Linklater, but that modern Achilles was too mortified to respond to their mute inquiry. Accordingly, after an awkward little pause, Ellis was seconded by Mr. Hanbury, who was present in his capacity of Treasurer, and unanimously elected. Pip was appointed Secretary.

"I'm sorry for Ellis," remarked Hanbury to his colleague as they sat down for a pipe after the meeting. "It's a poor business giving orders to two infinitely better players than yourself, especially when they enjoy the advantage of being martyrs into the bargain."

"If I wasn't a parson I should call the whole thing d----d nonsense,"

remarked Uncle Bill with sudden heat. He had fathered the School Eleven for fourteen years, and he was now very sore that this disaster should have fallen upon the most promising side he had ever coached. "I don't want that young a.s.s Linklater particularly, although they'd have followed him all right; but, as I said to the Head, here was a splendid opportunity for making an exception to the rule about not appointing a Fifth-Form fellow. If there had been a decent alternative to Pip I should have said nothing. Ellis is not popular with the school as it is, and the fact of his having supplanted two favourites will make his position simply unendurable. Poor chap! For sheer moral worth I don't suppose there are half a dozen boys in the school to compare with him.

But after all he's only a plodder. He has no more influence than--than Bradshaw himself. The Eleven won't follow him: they think he is 'pi.'

He'll stick to his guns, but he'll be miserable all the time, and he'll look it too, and altogether he'll cast a blight over the best Eleven I have ever seen at Grandwich."

Hanbury, who knew that his senior would feel better if allowed to have his say, smoked on. Presently he said--

"I think you are rather reckoning without our friend Pip. He hasn't an ounce of jealousy or meanness in his composition. Linklater will behave like the young sweep that he is, but Pip will back Ellis through thick and thin. Just you see if he don't. Cheer up, old man, and we trample on the County and St. Dunstan's yet!"

The school had already regretfully resigned themselves to the prospect of not having Pip as Captain of the Eleven, but the news that Linklater had been barred too created a storm that was not allayed for some weeks.

Linklater, much to his own gratification, found himself a hero, and without ado collected around him a band of sympathisers of the baser sort, who a.s.sured him twenty times a day that he was the only "sportsman"--overworked word!--in the school, and a.s.serted with the unreasoning logic of their kind that things ought to be "made warm" for Ellis when the summer term arrived.

Pip said nothing about the matter at all. It was a way he had. He methodically made up his fixture card for the cricket season, and remarked to Ellis that if the present extraordinarily mild winter ended as it had begun, they ought to be able with any luck to get up a little net practice during the f.a.g-end of the spring term after the Sports.

But all thoughts of cricket, and indeed of every other suggestion of summer, were speedily brought to an end by the coming of the great and historic frost--subsequently known as the Hot-Water Frost--which is talked about in Grandwich to this day. It arrived rather late,--the first week in February,--and it held continuously and unrelentingly until the last week in March.

Morning after morning the mercury in the thermometer outside Big School was found to have retreated unostentatiously into its bulb; day after day a watery and apologetic sun shone forth upon a curiously resonant and rigid world; and night after night the black frost came down like a cast-iron pall, repairing in a moment the feeble and ineffective ravages of the winter day.

Not very far away enthusiastic persons were endeavouring to roast an ox whole in the middle of the Thames, and at Grandwich many an equally unusual and delightful pastime was improvised. There was much sliding: there was no other way of getting about; and boys and masters slid or glid, with more or less agility and immunity from disaster, to and fro between house and school for several weeks. There was a magnificent slide, slightly downhill, all the way from Big School door to the Gymnasium, which offered an exhilarating rush through the air of nearly seventy yards--an offer of which Mr. Bradshaw, accidentally discovering the existence of the slide when walking home from dinner one dark night, involuntarily availed himself.

There was skating galore, for the Head, taking it for granted that each day's frost must be the last, gave extra half-holidays with a liberality which continued, perforce, for seven weeks. There was tobogganing, too, down a smooth hillside ending in a plantation of young trees, against which the adamantine heads of the youth of Grandwich crashed unceasingly from dinnertime till tea. Every night, between "prep" and prayers, a picked band from the Hivites house, which stood adjacent to the slope, sallied out, often headed by their house-master in person, carrying pots and kettles filled with hot water to pour upon the worn parts of the toboggan-slide; rags and sacking, too, wherewith to bandage the trunks of such of the young trees as were beginning to suffer from unceasing collision with the heads of youthful Grandwich. Under this scientific treatment the toboggan-slide increased rather than decreased in excellence. The long slope, though slightly abraded towards the end of a day, always emerged glossy and speckless with the morning's light, and fearsome was the speed with which the toboggans rushed down to arboreal destruction at the foot. "Monkey" Merton, the most agile boy in the school, used to shoot down on skates, saving his life with incredible regularity at the end of each descent by hooking on to a tree as a street arab hooks on to a lamp-post.

And if there were joys outside there were others within. The cla.s.srooms were so cold that the benches were deserted, and boys and master sat round the great open fireplace in a sociable semicircle. In the houses too, there were unlimited fires; and unlimited fires meant unlimited other things. There was a fireplace at the end of each of the big dormitories, and fires now blazed in these from seven o'clock every evening. Theoretically these dormitory fires, not being stoked after 9 P.M., died a natural death shortly after the boys had retired to bed. In practice, however, they glowed like the altars of Vesta all night long, for every boy made it his business to convey a regular contribution of coal to his dormitory. (Handkerchiefs were an appalling item in the laundry-bill that term.) Their united efforts were thus sufficient to keep the fire going all night, and the _elite_ of the dormitory used to bivouac round it, in baths filled with bedclothes. This practice, of course, varied in its extent, and depended entirely on the house-master's capacity for keeping his house in order. Among the Hivites it is sufficient to say that the nocturnal fire-worshippers were never once disturbed during the whole seven weeks of frost.

Besides fuel, it was only natural that light refreshments should find their way up to the dormitories, and many and festive were the supper-parties which were held, with the senior monitor in the chair--or rather the bath-chair--supported by the n.o.bility and gentry sitting well into the fire, while the f.a.gs sat and munched upon their hat-boxes in the outer circle.

A change of routine always tugs at the bonds of discipline; for a boy, like his n.o.ble and infinitely more useful fellow-creature, the horse, though you may drive him daily with ease and comfort so long as you do so under monotonously normal conditions, kicks over the traces at once if you change his oats or take his blinkers off. Pip's house, the Hivites, had recently changed hands. "Uncle Bill" had been promoted to the largest house in Grandwich, and had left his flock lamenting, taking Hanbury with him; and the house, under the benevolent sway of his successor, Mr. Chilford, a fine scholar but no master of men, was in that state of discipline usually described as "lax." Mr. Chilford, who disliked boys, and saw as little of them as possible, left a good deal of the management of his house to monitors--a sound plan, provided, firstly, that it is adopted by the house-master to give his monitors experience and reliability, and not to save himself trouble; and secondly, that the monitors have the right stuff in them. But when the monitors' excessive authority is entirely due to the house-master's lack of the same, things are bound to happen.

Now, Mr. Chilford's monitors that term were not a very strong lot.

They were chiefly of the clever and rather undersized type, with an unwholesome respect for the burly malefactors of the Fifth and Modern Side. Their ranks had recently been stiffened by the inclusion of Pip,--non-membership of the Sixth was no bar to a house-monitorship,--and he and Linklater were the only representatives of authority for whom the house could be said to have any respect whatsoever. Pip, as junior monitor, did not partic.i.p.ate largely in the direction of affairs, but he backed the house's nominal head, one Maxwell, with a good deal of unostentatious energy whenever that incompetent official could be cajoled or reviled into doing his duty; and he kept a quiet but effective hand upon the house-bullies.

But, as has been the case ever since history grew old enough to repeat itself, the chief danger came not from without but within. Linklater, second only to Pip in popularity and influence, once deposed from the captaincy of the Eleven, became, as Ham had predicted, the prey of the parasite and the flatterer. Such, little though they cared for their much vaunted hero-martyr, were delighted with any policy which presented them with an opportunity of pursuing a career of misdemeanour under monitorial authority. Did Pip go to quell a riot in a study, Linklater was in the midst of it; was a boy of the baser sort detected in any particularly unlawful offence, he said that "Linklater had given him leave."

Pip bore it all patiently, while he thought the matter over. Linklater was his friend, the one boy in Grandwich for whom he felt any real affection. He had an intense admiration for Linklater's superb brilliancy in many departments of school life, and especially for the readiness and vivacity that he himself lacked. They had fought their way up the school together, and had stood back to back in more than one tight place. The fact that "Link" was at present completely "off his rocker" was entirely due to the scurvy manner in which he had been treated by the Head--or rather by Braddy; for the Head, Pip admitted, was bound to back weak masters up. Link would inevitably recover his balance in time: at present allowances must be made for him.

However, there is a limit to all things. One evening, after the frost had lasted for nearly a month, the monitors were lingering over the tea-table in their own private apartment. A half-holiday for skating had been granted that day, and the monitors, pleasantly replete, reclined round the greatly lightened board, unwilling to drag themselves away from the _debris_ of a fine veal-and-ham pie which somebody's "people"

had kindly sent for somebody's birthday.

Suddenly the door was opened with a rapid, nervous flourish, and the Reverend James Chilford appeared on the threshold. It was plain that he was suffering from an attack of energy. For days he would leave his house to its own devices, and then, suddenly goaded to a sense of duty by some slight misdemeanour, would make a lightning descent upon his pupils, and, having thoroughly punished the wrong boy, disappear as suddenly as he came.

"Maxwell!" he exclaimed, in his high, querulous voice, to the head boy, "are you _quite_ incapable of maintaining discipline in the house? Here I have a letter from the parents of Butler, complaining that their son is being shamefully and systematically bullied by an organised gang. I look to you to clear the matter up immediately. Come and report to me at nine o'clock that you have detected the offenders and soundly punished them!"

The door banged, and this paragon among house-masters was gone.

Maxwell looked round feebly.

"Well, what are we to do, you chaps?" he inquired, seeking to shift responsibility in his turn.

"What's the good of doing anything for a swine who doesn't knock at the door when he comes in?" grunted Blakely, the second monitor.

"I suppose we'd better have Butler in and ask him," said Maxwell, forced to take the initiative.

"Fat lot of good that would do," put in Pip. "He wouldn't dare to tell you even if he _has_ been bullied, which I doubt."

"Better send for Kelly and Hicks," said somebody.

Maxwell grew red, and there was a general laugh, for it was known that he was desperately afraid of Kelly and Hicks, two bulky and muscular libertines who did pretty well what they liked in the house.

"It's not Kelly or Hicks this time," said Pip, getting up and going to the door, "I'm pretty sure of that."

"How do you know?"

"Had my eye on them all the time."

"Oh!" The other monitors sighed rather enviously. Their chief object in life was not to keep their eye on Kelly and Hicks, but to keep the eye of those freebooters off themselves.

"Where are you going? Don't clear out till we have settled something,"

said Maxwell helplessly, as Pip turned the door-handle.

"All right!" said Pip, and was gone.

He turned down a pa.s.sage towards a district known as "the Colony," where the boys' studies were situated. He was not on the track of Kelly and Hicks this time. Another idea had occurred to him--an idea which set the seal of certainty on a series of conjectures which had been forcing themselves upon his reluctant mind for some weeks. After a brief sojourn in a study _en route_--usually known as "the Pub," from the fact that it was always full--into which he was unanimously haled to decide an acrid dispute over certain questions connected with the Outside Edge, he steered a course for Linklater's apartment, which was situated somewhat remotely at the end of the pa.s.sage. Linklater, by the way, had left tea some time before Mr. Chilford's angry visit.

He gave his usual heavy thump on the door, and walked in.

Linklater was at home. He sat in an armchair with his back to the door.

In his hand he held a red-hot poker, the end of which swayed gently backwards and forwards not more than two inches from the paralysed countenance of Master Butler, who, cut off from retreat by an intervening table, and rigid with terror, was staring helplessly at the glowing point with the thoroughness of a fascinated rabbit.

III

Hearing the door open, Linklater looked round. Almost simultaneously a brown and muscular hand reached over his right shoulder and whipped the poker from his grasp.

"You can clear out, Butler," said Pip.