The Head of Kay's Part 10

X

FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF AN EXILE

Breakfast on the following morning was a repet.i.tion of the dormitory ordeal. Kennedy walked to his place on Mr Kay's right, feeling that everyone was looking at him, as indeed they were. He understood for the first time the meaning of the expression, "the cynosure of all eyes". He was modest by nature, and felt his position a distinct trial.

He did not quite know what to say or do with regard to his new house-master at this their first meeting in the latter's territory.

"Come aboard, sir," occurred to him for a moment as a happy phrase, but he discarded it. To make the situation more awkward, Mr Kay did not observe him at first, being occupied in a.s.sailing a riotous f.a.g at the other end of the table, that youth having succeeded, by a dexterous drive in the ribs, in making a friend of his spill half a cup of coffee. Kennedy did not know whether to sit down without a word or to remain standing until Mr Kay had time to attend to him. He would have done better to have sat down; Mr Kay's greeting, when it came, was not worth waiting for.

"Sit down, Kennedy," he said, irritably--rebuking people on an empty stomach always ruffled him. "Sit down, sit down."

Kennedy sat down, and began to toy diffidently with a sausage, remembering, as he did so, certain diatribes of Fenn's against the food at Kay's. As he became more intimate with the sausage, he admitted to himself that Fenn had had reason. Mr Kay meanwhile pounded away in moody silence at a plate of kidneys and bacon. It was one of the many grievances which gave the Kayite material for conversation that Mr Kay had not the courage of his opinions in the matter of food.

He insisted that he fed his house luxuriously, but he refused to brave the mysteries of its bill of fare himself.

Fenn had not come down when Kennedy went in to breakfast. He arrived some ten minutes later, when Kennedy had vanquished the sausage, and was keeping body and soul together with bread and marmalade.

"I cannot have this, Fenn," snapped Mr Kay; "you must come down in time."

Fenn took the rebuke in silence, cast one glance at the sausage which confronted him, and then pushed it away with such unhesitating rapidity that Mr Kay glared at him as if about to take up the cudgels for the rejected viand. Perhaps he remembered that it scarcely befitted the dignity of a house-master to enter upon a wrangle with a member of his house on the subject of the merits and demerits of sausages, for he refrained, and Fenn was allowed to go on with his meal in peace.

Kennedy's chief anxiety had been with regard to Fenn. True, the latter could hardly blame him for being made head of Kay's, since he had not been consulted in the matter, and, if he had been, would have refused the post with horror; but nevertheless the situation might cause a coolness between them. And if Fenn, the only person in the house with whom he was at all intimate, refused to be on friendly terms, his stay in Kay's would be rendered worse than even he had looked for.

Fenn had not spoken to him at breakfast, but then there was little table talk at Kay's. Perhaps the quality of the food suggested such gloomy reflections that n.o.body liked to put them into words.

After the meal Fenn ran upstairs to his study. Kennedy followed him, and opened conversation in his direct way with the subject which he had come to discuss.

"I say," he said, "I hope you aren't sick about this. You know I didn't want to bag your place as head of the house."

"My dear chap," said Fenn, "don't apologise. You're welcome to it.

Being head of Kay's isn't such a soft job that one is keen on sticking to it."

"All the same--" began Kennedy.

"I knew Kay would get at me somehow, of course. I've been wondering how all the holidays. I didn't think of this. Still, I'm jolly glad it's happened. I now retire into private life, and look on. I've taken years off my life sweating to make this house decent, and now I'm going to take a rest and watch you tearing your hair out over the job.

I'm awfully sorry for you. I wish they'd roped in some other victim."

"But you're still a house prefect, I suppose?"

"I believe so, Kay couldn't very well make me a f.a.g again."

"Then you'll help manage things?"

Fenn laughed.

"Will I, by Jove! I'd like to see myself! I don't want to do the heavy martyr business and that sort of thing, but I'm hanged if I'm going to take any more trouble over the house. Haven't you any respect for Mr Kay's feelings? He thinks I can't keep order. Surely you don't want me to go and shatter his pet beliefs? Anyhow, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to play 'villagers and retainers' to your 'hero'. If you do anything wonderful with the house, I shall be standing by ready to cheer. But you don't catch me shoving myself forward. 'Thank Heaven I knows me place,' as the butler in the play says."

Kennedy kicked moodily at the leg of the chair which he was holding.

The feeling that his whole world had fallen about his ears was increasing with every hour he spent in Kay's. Last term he and Fenn had been as close friends as you could wish to see. If he had asked Fenn to help him in a tight place then, he knew he could have relied on him. Now his chief desire seemed to be to score off the human race in general, his best friend included. It was a depressing beginning.

"Do you know what the sherry said to the man when he was just going to drink it?" inquired Fenn. "It said, '_Nemo me impune lacessit_'.

That's how I feel. Kay went out of his way to give me a bad time when I was doing my best to run his house properly, so I don't see that I'm called upon to go out of my way to work for him."

"It's rather rough on me--" Kennedy began. Then a sudden indignation rushed through him. Why should he grovel to Fenn? If Fenn chose to stand out, let him. He was capable of running the house by himself.

"I don't care," he said, savagely. "If you can't see what a cad you're making of yourself, I'm not going to try to show you. You can do what you jolly well please. I'm not dependent on you. I'll make this a decent house off my own bat without your help. If you like looking on, you'd better look on. I'll give you something to look at soon."

He went out, leaving Fenn with mixed feelings. He would have liked to have followed him, taken back what he had said, and formed an offensive alliance against the black sheep of the house--and also, which was just as important, against the slack sheep, who were good for nothing, either at work or play. But his bitterness against the house-master prevented him. He was not going to take his removal from the leadership of Kay's as if nothing had happened.

Meanwhile, in the dayrooms and studies, the house had been holding indignation meetings, and at each it had been unanimously resolved that Kay's had been abominably treated, and that the deposition of Fenn must not be tolerated. Unfortunately, a house cannot do very much when it revolts. It can only show its displeasure in little things, and by an increase of rowdiness. This was the line that Kay's took.

Fenn became a popular hero. f.a.gs, until he kicked them for it, showed a tendency to cheer him whenever they saw him. Nothing could paint Mr Kay blacker in the eyes of his house, so that Kennedy came in for all the odium. The same f.a.gs who had cheered Fenn hooted him on one occasion as he pa.s.sed the junior dayroom. Kennedy stopped short, went in, and presented each inmate of the room with six cuts with a swagger-stick. This summary and Captain Kettle-like move had its effect. There was no more hooting. The f.a.gs bethought themselves of other ways of showing their disapproval of their new head.

One genius suggested that they might kill two birds with one stone--snub Kennedy and pay a stately compliment to Fenn by applying to the latter for leave to go out of bounds instead of to the former.

As the giving of leave "down town" was the prerogative of the head of the house, and of no other, there was a suggestiveness about this mode of procedure which appealed to the junior dayroom.

But the star of the junior dayroom was not in the ascendant. Fenn might have quarrelled with Kennedy, and be extremely indignant at his removal from the headship of the house, but he was not the man to forget to play the game. His policy of non-interference did not include underhand attempts to sap Kennedy's authority. When Gorrick, of the Lower Fourth, the first of the f.a.gs to put the ingenious scheme into practice, came to him, still smarting from Kennedy's castigation, Fenn promptly gave him six more cuts, worse than the first, and kicked him out into the pa.s.sage. Gorrick naturally did not want to spoil a good thing by giving Fenn's game away, so he lay low and said nothing, with the result that Wren and three others met with the same fate, only more so, because Fenn's wrath increased with each visit.

Kennedy, of course, heard nothing of this, or he might perhaps have thought better of Fenn. As for the junior dayroom, it was obliged to work off its emotion by jeering Jimmy Silver from the safety of the touchline when the head of Blackburn's was refereeing in a match between the juniors of his house and those of Kay's. Blackburn's happened to win by four goals and eight tries, a result which the patriotic Kay f.a.g attributed solely to favouritism on the part of the referee.

"I like the kids in your house," said Jimmy to Kennedy, after the match, when telling the latter of the incident; "there's no false idea of politeness about them. If they don't like your decisions, they say so in a shrill treble."

"Little beasts," said Kennedy. "I wish I knew who they were. It's hopeless to try and spot them, of course."

XI

THE SENIOR DAYROOM OPENS FIRE

Curiously enough, it was shortly after this that the junior dayroom ceased almost entirely to trouble the head of the house. Not that they turned over new leaves, and modelled their conduct on that of the hero of the Sunday-school story. They were still disorderly, but in a lesser degree; and ragging became a matter of private enterprise among the f.a.gs instead of being, as it had threatened to be, an organised revolt against the new head. When a Kay's f.a.g rioted now, he did so with the air of one endeavouring to amuse himself, not as if he were carrying on a holy war against the oppressor.

Kennedy's difficulties were considerably diminished by this change. A head of a house expects the juniors of his house to rag. It is what they are put into the world to do, and there is no difficulty in keeping the thing within decent limits. A revolution is another case altogether. Kennedy was grateful for the change, for it gave him more time to keep an eye on the other members of the house, but he had no idea what had brought it about. As a matter of fact, he had Billy Silver to thank for it. The chief organiser of the movement against Kennedy in the junior dayroom had been the red-haired Wren, who preached war to his fellow f.a.gs, partly because he loved to create a disturbance, and partly because Walton, who hated Kennedy, had told him to. Between Wren and Billy Silver a feud had existed since their first meeting. The unsatisfactory conclusion to their encounter in camp had given another lease of life to the feud, and Billy had come back to Kay's with the fixed intention of smiting his auburn-haired foe hip and thigh at the earliest opportunity. Wren's att.i.tude with respect to Kennedy gave him a decent excuse. He had no particular regard for Kennedy. The fact that he was a friend of his brother's was no recommendation. There existed between the two Silvers that feeling which generally exists between an elder and a much younger brother at the same school. Each thought the other a bit of an idiot, and though equal to tolerating him personally, was hanged if he was going to do the same by his friends. In Billy's circle of acquaintances, Jimmy's friends were looked upon with cold suspicion as officious meddlers who would give them lines if they found them out of bounds. The aristocrats with whom Jimmy foregathered barely recognised the existence of Billy's companions. Kennedy's claim to Billy's good offices rested on the fact that they both objected to Wren.

So that, when Wren lifted up his voice in the junior dayroom, and exhorted the f.a.gs to go and make a row in the pa.s.sage outside Kennedy's study, and--from a safe distance, and having previously ensured a means of rapid escape--to fling boots at his door, Billy damped the popular enthusiasm which had been excited by the proposal by kicking Wren with some violence, and begging him not to be an a.s.s.

Whereupon they resumed their battle at the point at which it had been interrupted at camp. And when, some five minutes later, Billy, from his seat on his adversary's chest, offered to go through the same performance with anybody else who wished, the junior dayroom came to the conclusion that his feelings with regard to the new head of the house, however foolish and unpatriotic, had better be respected. And the revolution of the f.a.gs had fizzled out from that moment.

In the senior dayroom, however, the flag of battle was still unfurled.

It was so obvious that Kennedy had been put into the house as a reformer, and the seniors of Kay's had such an objection to being reformed, that trouble was only to be expected. It was the custom in most houses for the head of the house, by right of that position, to be also captain of football. The senior dayroom was aggrieved at Kennedy's taking this post from Fenn. Fenn was in his second year in the school fifteen, and he was the three-quarter who scored most frequently for Eckleton, whereas Kennedy, though practically a certainty for one of the six vacant places in the school scrum, was at present ent.i.tled to wear only a second fifteen cap. The claims of Fenn to be captain of Kay's football were strong, Kennedy had begged him to continue in that position more than once. Fenn's persistent refusal had helped to increase the coolness between them, and it had also made things more difficult for Kennedy in the house.

It was on the Monday of the third week of term that Kennedy, at Jimmy Silver's request, arranged a "friendly" between Kay's and Blackburn's.

There could be no doubt as to which was the better team (for Blackburn's had been runners up for the Cup the season before), but the better one's opponents the better the practice. Kennedy wrote out the list and fixed it on the notice board. The match was to be played on the following afternoon.

A football team must generally be made up of the biggest men at the captain's disposal, so it happened that Walton, Perry, Callingham, and the other leaders of dissension in Kay's all figured on the list. The consequence was that the list came in for a good deal of comment in the senior dayroom. There were games every Sat.u.r.day and Wednesday, and it annoyed Walton and friends that they should have to turn out on an afternoon that was not a half holiday. It was trouble enough playing football on the days when it was compulsory. As for patriotism, no member of the house even pretended to care whether Kay's put a good team into the field or not. The senior dayroom sat talking over the matter till lights-out. When Kennedy came down next morning, he found his list scribbled over with blue pencil, while across it in bold letters ran the single word,

ROT.