The Blower of Bubbles Part 3

IV

I have never known any one to change so little with the cycle of years as Basil Norman. When he came to Westminster, at the age of twelve, he had an easy nonchalance, a delightful insouciance, that never left him.

He went from form to form, trod the stone-flagged pa.s.sages as others did; but the youth of seventeen that left Westminster bore the same smiling, detached personality as when he entered. The atmosphere of tradition interested but did not drug him; the Elizabethan pancake impressed him less than did a contemporary Edwardian soap-bubble.

Conscientious form-masters recognized his extraordinary abilities, and gave him the benefit of well-worded and impressive homilies on achievement. Sometimes for effect they quoted Latin. Norman would counter with a "Greek remark." He never studied, but more than one scholar owed success to the eleventh-hour coaching of Basil Norman.

Learning, like everything else, came to him as a needle to a magnet.

With a curious air of detachment he watched the panorama of schoolboy life, noticing with a discerning eye the various strata upon which public-school morality is founded, a.s.signing the relative importance of scholarship and cricket, and nodding knowingly as the process of standardization brought similarity of speech, accent, thought, and vocabulary to all his fellows.

He was like a Puck who had never been really young, but who refused to become a day older.

For a few weeks he played cricket, but without reverence. During a match he kept up (_sotto voce_, of course) a running commentary of philosophy which, according to our ethics, was vulgar. I shudder to think what he would have done if Westminster had adopted baseball.

On one occasion the captain of the eleven took upon himself to point out to Basil Norman the error of his ways. The worthy demiG.o.d deplored Norman's habit of lying on the gra.s.s during practice and inventing couplets on the various members of the team. The captain also said that, providing he would take the game seriously, there was a future for him as a cricketer. Whereupon Norman, from his rec.u.mbent position, misquoted most of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, unblushingly attributing Hamlet's indecision towards living to his doubts of himself as a cricketer. When he finished he rose to his feet, and our comments were frozen at the sight of his face.

His cheeks had a ghastly pallor and his eyes were brilliant, but with a fixed, glaring intensity. And as we looked his expression changed--the color returned with a glow of warmth to his skin, and his eyes were gray and humorous. Being boys, we forgot about it as quickly as it had happened.

The next Sat.u.r.day we played Charterhouse, and though the score was heavily against us, Norman gave the finest exhibition of batting I have seen in public-school cricket, scoring a century and winning the match for us. He was frail but lithe, and with an air of aplomb batted the offerings of Charterhouse to all points of the compa.s.s. At the finish of the game we crowded around him, but he smiled a little wearily, and shook his head.

"I am finished with cricket," he said.

Bewilderment, then anathema, broke like a thunder-shower upon the head of Basil Norman. We pleaded; we argued; we threatened; then we used language which possessed the merit of forcefulness and frankness. We called him a swine, a rotter, a skunk, and an absolute cad. Some one ventured the opinion that he was a perfect stink, and we all stood about him like the Klu Klux Klan trying a negro malefactor.

"Gentlemen," he said--and there was a delightful touch of irony in the word--"you have come to bury, not to praise, me; yet, unlike Caesar, I am not ambitious."

"Swine!" said Smith tertius (or was it quartus?).

"In spite of the witty comment of me learned friend," said Norman, after the manner of the leading counsel of the day, "I have always held the opinion that life is a thing to be sipped, not drunk. I have played cricket--_veni, vidi_, I scored a century! I would not spoil me appet.i.te, milords, by overgorging."

"Your conduct," said Grubbs, the captain, "is rotten. It shows that you don't give a fig for the honor of the school. If you want to be a pig, you can wear the cap of one." (We all knew what he meant, and admired him frightfully for his venture into the quagmire of metaphor.) "We will send you to Coventry until you come to your senses."

The culprit bowed airily.

"You will lose much more by my silence than I by yours," he said--and it takes considerable courage to make such a statement to a tribunal of schoolboys.

If Norman suffered from our aloofness, he took it with the same nonchalance as he had taken our plaudits. Oddly enough, he had no intimate friends, and all of us, partly out of resentment against his pose of onlooker, and more from the love of torture which links the schoolboy to the savage, performed our duty of silent punishment with a zeal which deserved a better inspiration. We forgot how he had made friends with the misfits whose square personalities were being drawn through the round hole of public-school life. Little chaps he had taken in hand on arrival when they wanted to weep for loneliness turned from him as if he held contagion. All the sensitive, shrinking ones about whom he had thrown his cloak of vivacity, and who were now grown bold and self-reliant, let him pa.s.s from the Little Dean's Yard to his house and through the ancient pa.s.sages, a lonely debonair figure that always smiled.... And no one spoke to him. I, whom he had named "The Pest,"

thus turning my naturally perverse sulkiness into a subject of jest and good-humor, took a special delight in watching the man who had been sentenced by his peers to solitude in the midst of a crowd.

His peers?... Was it Smith tertius (or quartus) who used the word "swine"?

Two weeks had pa.s.sed, and we were to play Winchester a decisive match on our grounds, which, as land near the cathedral is rather difficult to obtain, are almost a mile from the school.

The stage was set. Youthful scholars of ten and twelve walked in their gowns, their brows knit with thought, their eyes blinking from over-study. Little chaps struggled under the responsibility of silk toppers, and conversed solemnly on the deterioration of the tuck-shop; and the Olympian creature who was the head-boy of the school lounged outside the scoring-booth as if he were "fed up" with nectar, and would like some brown October ale for a change--a pose much favored by the best people in England. There was an excellent audience of the secondary s.e.x, composed of proud mothers and apologetic sisters, whose presence was necessitating a sort of Jekyll and Hyde att.i.tude on the part of their schoolboy relatives, who were endeavoring to be polite to their "people" and at the same time give the impression to their _confreres_ that the women were mere acquaintances--accidental dinner partners, as it were.

No schoolboy of twelve likes to admit to a mother.

Surrounding the field there is a high iron fence, through the railings of which, or on top, a motley collection of gamins cheer on their wealthier brethren of the silk hats. Naturally no notice is taken of these uninvited guests. It is quite all right for them to shout for Westminster if it gives them any pleasure, but what has a silk hat in common with a red kerchief and a slouch-cap?

On the day of the match they seemed in larger numbers than usual, and the top of the fence was covered with urchins, who retained their position of vantage as though the law of gravitation were no concern of theirs, keeping up a shrill chorus as Winchester went out for a moderate score.

With the odds all in our favor we went in to bat, Grubbs, the captain, and I leading off. The first ball was wide, but to feel the play of my muscles I took a perfunctory swing at it with my bat. The effect was extraordinary.... The crowd of c.o.c.kney youngsters raised a volume of sound as if my bat had been a baton and they a chorus.

"Gow it, Pest!" "That's the style, Gloomy!" "Troy t' other hend, Bluntnose!" "Gee, he's got odd socks on!" "Nah then, Spiderlegs!" (The blunt nose and the legs I admit to, but the accusation of odd socks was pure malice.)

The next ball, with no twist at all, bowled me clean, and I walked off the field to the tune of high-pitched shrieks of delight, and with a face that flushed a dark red. My place was taken by Smith tertius (or quartus), whose appearance caused an even greater furore than mine.

"'Ooray for Bones!" greeted the lanky youth as he emerged--"'im as his the loife of the school!" (He was the most morose of boys.) "'I, Bones, 'oo did you crib from this time, eh?" (A subtle allusion to an ancient offense which had almost earned him expulsion.)

The first ball came for Smith with an inviting hop. He watched it--went to strike at it--changed his mind--reconsidered his decision, and swung at the air as the ball pa.s.sed over the bails by an inch, a feat which seemed to gratify our enemies on the fence immensely.

"Nah then, Bones, non o' that there contortionizing!" "'It the ball, Bones; don't miss it!"

And he did--a miserable little pop into the air; the chap in the slips didn't have to move a foot to gather it in.

Mr. Smith then added his proof that Shakespeare was right when he said in this world we have our exits and our entrances.

The next six batters went out for a score of eleven, bowled clean by the most intimate volume of abusive chaff ever endured by a cricket team. Skeletons were not only being taken from their closets, but paraded brazenly before the eyes of the world. The secret history of Westminster was screamed from the fence-tops.

It was after the loss of our eighth wicket that Grubbs and I, who had stolen round by the street, stalked and discovered their ringleader.

"That's him," said the captain hoa.r.s.ely--the situation was too tense to permit of the niceties of grammar. I followed the line of his accusing finger--and gasped. There was no mistaking those gray twinkling eyes, although they were almost hidden behind a huge bandage, presumably for mumps. He was dressed in a rough coster suit, with a villainous cap on one side of his head and a bandit's red kerchief about his neck.

"It _is_ him," I said dramatically.

"I thought so," said Grubbs, and cleared his throat. "Norman," he cried. "Kid--Norman."

The young rascal, who was sitting on top of a post, more like a Puck than ever, swiveled about and solemnly winked one eye. "Do I understand that the ban of silence is lifted?" he said from behind the mumps bandage.

Grubbs considered, and then made a tactful and instantaneous decision.

(Small wonder that a few years later he was entrusted with a war mission to Washington, of the utmost delicacy.)

"You've had your revenge," he said, "and the joke is on us. Call your mob off, will you?"

"You're quite sure you wouldn't like us to encourage the remainder for a change?"

"Quite sure."

"So be it, my captain."

He blew a whistle through his fingers, and in a moment the fence was denuded of mortals like a tree smitten by an autumn gale. The Blower of Bubbles removed his bandage, and presented a stocky youth with three shillings.

"Buy sweets for the crowd," he said, "and mind--play fair."

"Right you har', guv'nor"; and the mob disappeared. And thus ended the riot of the slouch-cap against the silk hat. To-day, if you are pa.s.sing the field during a match, you will see that the gamins are still there, but they shout only for Westminster.

We were just turning away, when Basil Norman laid his hand on Grubbs's forearm, as a girl might do, and his eyes had a wistful look.

"Before I change into more fitting garb," he said airily, then paused.... My breathing seemed to stop at the sight--his face had gone suddenly white, and his eyes were glazed.