The Human Boy and the War Part 14

And they will win, for right is on their side; And when they do, the neutrals shall not share The rich-earned booty the Allies divide; For, as they would not sail in and fight, it is not fair That they should win the fruits of this b.l.o.o.d.y tide.

We could see what the Doctor meant about Sutherland's poem--it didn't flow exactly; but it might have been worse. Then Dr. Dunston picked up Mitch.e.l.l's poem and frowned; and Peac.o.c.k frowned; and Fortescue also frowned. We didn't know what was going to happen, for the Doctor made no preliminary remarks on the subject of Mitch.e.l.l. He just gave his gla.s.ses a hitch and glared over the top of Mitch.e.l.l's effort and then read it out.

OLD ENGLAND FOR EVER

BY MITCh.e.l.l

Oh, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel, The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs, And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of man!

Rejoice, ye men of England, ring your bells.

King George, your King and England's, doth approach, Commander of this hot, malicious day!

Our armour, that marched hence so silver bright, Hither returns all gilt with German blood; Our colours do return in those same hands That did display them when we first marched forth; And, like a jolly troup of huntsmen, come Our l.u.s.ty English all with purple hands, Dyed in the slaughter of their Teuton foes.

But to their home they will no more return Till Belgium's free and France is also free; Then to their pale, their white-faced sh.o.r.e, Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides And coops from other lands her islanders-- Even to that England, hedged in with the main, That water-walled bulwark still secure, Will they return and hear our thunderous cheers.

But Belgium first, unhappy, stricken land, Which has, we know, and all too well we know, Sluiced out her innocent soul through streams of blood, Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries, Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth, To us for justice and rough chastis.e.m.e.nt, And, by the glorious worth of our descent, Our arm shall do it, or our life be spent.

The Doctor stopped suddenly and flung his eyes over us. Naturally we were staggered and full of amazement to think of a hard blade like Mitch.e.l.l producing such glorious stuff. Any fool could see it was poetry of the cla.s.siest kind.

"Do you desire to hear more?" shouted the Doctor.

And we said, "Yes, sir!"

"Then seek it in the immortal pages from whence the boy Mitch.e.l.l has dared to steal it!" he thundered out, growing his well-known, deadly red colour. "With predatory hand and audacity from which the most hardened criminal would have shrunk, this abominable boy, insolently counting on the ignorance of those whose unfortunate duty it is to instruct him, has appropriated the Bard to his own vile uses; and his cunning has led him to interpolate and alter the text in such a manner that sundry pa.s.sages are made to appear as one. Mitch.e.l.l will meet me in my study after morning school. I need say no more. Words fail me----"

And they actually did, which was a record in its way. The Doctor panted for a bit, then he picked up Mitch.e.l.l's poem, or rather, Shakespeare's, as if it was a mouse that had been dead a fortnight, and dropped it on the ground. It was rather a solemn moment--especially for Mitch.e.l.l--and the only funny thing about it was to see the Sixth. Of course, they'd been had by Mitch.e.l.l, just the same as us in the Fifth--in fact, everybody; but they tried to look as if they'd known it was Shakespeare from the first. As for Mitch.e.l.l, he had made the rather rash mistake of thinking old Dunston and Peac.o.c.k and Fortescue didn't know any more about Shakespeare than he did; and now he sat awful white, but resigned.

As a matter of fact, he got the worst flogging he ever did get, and had a narrow squeak of being expelled also. It calmed him down for days afterwards, and he was also called "King John" till the end of the term, as a mark of contempt, which he badly hated.

Then the Doctor snorted himself calm, and his face grew its usual colour. He picked up Thwaites, and ended with the tamest poem of the lot, in my opinion. Which shows that grown-up people and boys have a very different idea about what is poetry and what isn't.

"The verses of Thwaites have won the poet's bay," said Dr. Dunston.

"Thwaites alone has written a work worthy to be called a poem. His stanzas possess music and reveal thought and feeling. Neither technically are they open to grave objection. I congratulate Thwaites.

Though not robust, or a pillar of strength, either in his cla.s.s, or in the field, he possesses a refined mind, a capacity of emotion and a power for expressing that emotion in terms of poetry that time and application may possibly ripen and mature. Such, at least, is my opinion, and those who have sat in judgment share it with me."

He then gave us Thwaites--twittering sort of stuff, and interesting, not because Thwaites had got "the poet's bay," whatever that is, but because he had landed Peac.o.c.k's guinea. n.o.body much liked his prize poem except the masters, and even Thwaites himself said it wasn't any real good, and was written when he had a beastly sore throat and was feeling utterly down on his luck. In fact, he was going to call it "Lines Written in Dejection at Merivale," like real poets do, only he got better before he finished the last verse, and so didn't.

TO THE EARTH

BY THWAITES

Suffer, sad earth; no pain can equal thine: Thy giant heart must ever be a shrine For all the sorrows of Humanity.

As one by one the stricken ages die, The bright beams of the stars are turned to tears, And howling winds that whistle down the years Sigh "Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow!" and are gone Into the silence of oblivion.

Suffer, great world; the poison fangs of Death Can only wound, not kill thee.... Lo! the breath Of everlasting dawn is in the wind; The distant throbbing of a giant Mind Shall set the music of the Universe Once more in time--with harmony coerce The discord of a warring race to cease And sorrow die within the arms of peace.

Thwaites spent his guinea almost entirely on tuck, and though he was very generous with it, and shared the grub with the compet.i.tors Rice and Sutherland minor, who were his friends, he still kept enough to make himself ill again. For it was one of the unlucky things about Thwaites that any muck really worth eating always bowled him over. He wrote a poem three times as long as his War poem, called "Effect of Cocoanut Rock on the Tummy of Thwaites"; but Dunston wouldn't have purred much over that.

THE REVENGE

If anybody has done a crime, Dr. Dunston generally speaks to them before the school, so that all may hear what the crime is. And according to the way he speaks to them, we know the sort of fate in store.

If he says he remembers what it was to be a boy himself, there is great hope, for, as Mitch.e.l.l pointed out, that means the Doctor has himself committed the crime in far-off times when he was young; but if he doesn't say he remembers what it was to be a boy himself, then the crime is probably a crime he never committed; and these are the sort he punishes worst.

Well, in the case of Tudor, he had never committed Tudor's crime, and he himself said, when ragging Tudor before punishment, that he had never even heard of such a crime. Therefore the consequences were bad for Tudor, and he was flogged and his greatest treasure taken away from him for ever.

It was, no doubt, a very peculiar crime, and Mitch.e.l.l told Tudor that it was not so much the crime itself as the destructive consequences, that had put the Doctor into such a bate. But we found out next term that the destructive consequences had been sent home in a bill for Tudor's father to pay, and they amounted to two pounds, so Tudor caught it at home also.

Well, it was like this: Tudor came back for the spring term with a remarkably interesting tool called a glazier's diamond. He had saved up and bought it with his own money, and it was valuable, having in it a real diamond, the beauty of which was that it could cut gla.s.s. It could also mark gla.s.s for ever; and, after a good deal of practice, on out-of-the-way panes of gla.s.s in secluded places, Tudor had thoroughly learned the difficult art of writing on gla.s.s. We were allowed to walk round the kitchen garden sometimes upon Sunday afternoons, and, occasionally, if a boy was seedy and separated from the rest for a day or two, for fear he had got something catching, such a boy was allowed in the kitchen garden under the eye of Harris, the kitchen gardener.

And Tudor often got queer and threatened to develop catching things, though he never really did; but on the days when he threatened, he generally escaped lessons and was allowed in the kitchen garden.

Needless to say, that this place was full of opportunities for practising the art of writing on gla.s.s, and, as nothing was easier than to escape from the eye of Harris, he used these opportunities, and wrote his name and mine and many others on cuc.u.mber frames, and on the side of a hot-house used for growing grapes, and also on the window of a potting-shed.

I am Pratt, and Tudor and me were in the Lower Fourth. It was a cla.s.s that Dr. Dunston, unfortunately, took for history, and on those occasions we went to his study for the lesson and stood in a row, which extended from the window to the front of Doctor Dunston's desk. He sat behind the desk, and took the cla.s.s from there. But there was a great difference in Tudor and me, because I was at the top of the Lower Fourth and he was at the bottom. In the case of the Doctor's history cla.s.s, however, this was a great advantage for Tudor, because the bottom of the cla.s.s was by the window, and the top was in front of the Doctor.

Well, Tudor actually got the great idea of writing with his glazier's diamond on the Doctor's window! I advised him not, but he disdained my advice, and wrote in the left-hand top corner of the bottom sheet of gla.s.s. He wrote very small, but with great clearness, and it took him seven history lessons to finish, because it was only at rare moments he could do it. But the Doctor was now and then called out of his study by Mrs. Dunston, or somebody; and once he had to go and see the mother of a new boy who had written home to say he was being starved. It took ten minutes to calm this mother down, and during that interval Tudor finished his work. He had written the amusing words--

"BEYNON IS A LOUSE,"

and we were all rather pleased, except Beynon. But he well deserved the insult, being a fearful outsider and generally hated; and, in any case, he couldn't hit back, for though he had been known to sneak many a time and oft, yet it wasn't likely he would sneak about a thing that showed him in his true colours, like the writing on the Doctor's study window.

Well, it was a triumph in a way, and everybody heard of it, and it was a regular adventure to go into the Doctor's study and see the insult to Beynon, which, of course, would last forever, unless somebody broke the window; and, in fact, Beynon once told me, in a fit of rage, that he meant to break the window and take the consequences. But he hadn't the pluck, even when he got an excellent chance to do so; and when, in despair, he tried to bribe other chaps to break the window, he hadn't enough money, so he failed in every way, and the insult stood.

I must tell you the writing was very small, and could only be seen by careful scrutiny. It was absolutely safe from the Doctor, or, in fact, anybody who didn't know it was there; and, naturally, Tudor never felt the slightest fear that it would ever be seen by the eyes of an enemy.

When, therefore, it was discovered, and shown to the Doctor, and all was lost, Tudor felt bitterly surprised. It came out that a housemaid, who disliked Beynon, found it when she was cleaning the window, and she showed it to Milly Dunston, and the hateful Milly, who loathed Tudor, because he had once given her a cough lozenge of a deadly kind, and made her suck it before she had found out the truth, promptly told her mother about the inscription, and her mother sneaked to the Doctor.

Discovery might still have been avoided, but, unfortunately, Tudor's glazier's diamond was well known, because he had been reported by Brown for scratching Brown's looking-gla.s.s over the mantelpiece in Brown's study, when he thought Brown was miles away, and Brown came in at the critical moment. So Dunston knew only too well that Tudor had a glazier's diamond, and, owing to the laws of cause and effect, felt quite sure that Tudor had done the fatal deed.

Therefore Tudor suffered the full penalty, and Dr. Dunston told the school that Tudor's coa.r.s.eness was only exceeded by his lawless insolence and contempt for private property. That it should have been done in his own study, during intervals of respite in the history lesson, naturally had its effect on the Doctor, and made it worse for Tudor. The glazier's diamond had to be given up, and Tudor was flogged; but being very apt to crock and often bursting out coughing without any reason, the Doctor did not flog Tudor to any great extent; and it was not the flogging, but the loss of his glazier's diamond that made Tudor so mad and resolved him on his revenge.

Well, he had a very revengeful nature, as a matter of fact, and if anybody scored on him, he was never, as you may say, contented with life in general until he had scored back. And he always did so, and sometimes, though he might have to wait for a term or even two, he was like the elephant that a man stuck a pin into, who remembered it and instantly killed the man when he met him again twenty years later.

To be revenged in an ordinary way is, of course, easy; but to be revenged against the Doctor is far from easy, and I reminded Tudor how hard it had been even to revenge himself on Brown, when Brown scored heavily off him; and if it was hard to be revenged on a master like Brown, what would it be to strike a blow at the Doctor?

He said it might or might not come off; but he should be poor company for me, or anybody, until he had had a try, and he developed his scheme of a revenge, and thought of nothing else until the idea was ready to be put into execution.

He said:

"It's not so much a revenge, really, as simple justice. He took my glazier's diamond, which was the thing I valued most in the world, naturally; and what I ought to do, if I could, Pratt, would be to take from him the thing he values most in the world."

I said:

"That's hidden from you."