The Loom of Youth Part 46

He shrugged. There still remained a few hours in which to enjoy the fruits of a success which, if it meant little to him, conveyed a good deal to the world outside. And power is very sweet.

He tried to fling himself into the light-hearted atmosphere of rejoicing in which the whole House was revelling, but he found it impossible. His laughter was forced; yet his friends noticed no change in him; he was to them just as he had always been.

Even Morcombe, who was to him more than other friends, had failed to understand.

"It must be rather decent to be leaving in the way you are," he said, as they were sitting in the games study before evening chapel. "I doubt if you stopped on if you would ever quite equal the appropriateness of that last innings."

"Yes," said Gordon, with a conscious irony, "it's certainly dramatic."

What use was it to try and show him what he was thinking? He had learnt that it is better to leave illusions untouched.

Often in the past he had tried to imagine what a last chapel service must be like. The subject has been done to death by the novelist. In every school story he had read, the hero had always felt the same emotions: contentment with work well done, sorrow at leaving a well-loved place. He had wondered whether he would want to cry; and if so, whether he would be able to stop it. He had looked inquiringly in the faces of those who were leaving and had never read anything very new. Some were enigmas; some looked glad in a way that they were going to begin a life so full of possibilities. Some vaguely realised that they had reached the height of their success at nineteen.

But now that his time had come, his thoughts were very different from what he had imagined. He felt the sorrow that is inevitable to anyone who is putting a stage of his life clean out of sight behind him; but for all that he had come to the conclusion that he was not really sad at leaving. Fernhurst was for him too full of ghosts; so many dreams were buried there. His feelings were mixed. He felt himself that he had failed, but he knew that he was hailed a success. He half wished that in the light of experience he could go through his four years again; but if he did, he saw that in outward show, at any rate, he could never eclipse the glory that was his for the moment. He remembered that sermon over three years back in which the Chief had asked each boy to imagine himself pa.s.sing his last hours at school. "_How will it feel,_" the Chief had said, "_if you have to look back and think only of shattered hopes and bright unfulfilled promises?... To the pathos of human sorrow there is no need to add the pathos of failure._" What was he to think?--he whose career had so curiously mingled failure and success.

The service slowly drew to its end. The final hymn was shouted by small boys, happy at the thought of seven weeks' holiday. The organ boomed out _G.o.d Save the King_; there was a moment's silence. Then the school poured out into the cloisters. Gordon hardly realised his last service was over. He had been so long a spectator of these partings that he could not grasp the fact that he was himself a partic.i.p.ator in them.

He felt very tired, and was glad when bed-time came. He experienced the same sensations that he had known as a new boy--a physical and mental weariness that longed for the ending of the day.

For a few hours silence hung round the ghostly Abbey; then, tremendous in the east, Gordon's last whole day at Fernhurst dawned.

As far as the Sixth were concerned, work was over. The rest of the school had to go in for two hours for the rep. exam. The drowsy atmosphere of a hot summer morning overhung everything. The studies were very quiet. Gordon took a deck-chair on to the Sixth Form green and settled down to read _Endymion_.

But he found it impossible to concentrate his thoughts on anything but the riotous wave of introspection that was flooding his brain. He soon gave up the attempt; and putting down the book, he lay back, his hands behind his head, gazing at the great grey Abbey opposite him, while through his brain ran Gilbert Cannan's words: "Life is round the corner." He had failed. He knew he had failed. But where and why? Then, as he began to question himself, suddenly he saw it all clearly. He had failed because he had set out to gain only the things that the world valued. He had sought power, and he had gained it; he had asked for praise, and he had won it; he had fought, and he had conquered. But at the moment of his triumph he had realised the vanity of all such success; when he had come to probe it to the root, he had found it shallow. For all the things that the world valued were shallow and without depth, because the world never looked below the surface. He had found no continuing city; his house was built upon sand.

The truth flashed in on him; he knew now that as long as he was content to take the world's view of anything, he was bound to meet with disillusionment. He would have to sift everything in the sieve of his own experience. The judgment of others would be of no avail. He would be an iconoclast. The fact that the world said a thing was beautiful or ugly, and had to be treated as such, must mean nothing to him. He would search for himself, he would plumb the depths, if needs be, in search of the true ideal which was lurking somewhere in the dark. Tester had been right. It was useless to look back to the past for guidance. He had a few hours back asked for some fixed standard by which to judge the false from the true. There were no standards except a man's own experience.

Here at Fernhurst he had failed to find anything, because he had sought for the wrong things; he had at once accepted the crowd's statement for the truth. Now it would be different. In his haste he had said that Fernhurst had taught him nothing. He had been wrong. It had taught him what many took years to learn, and sometimes never learnt at all. It had taught him to rely upon himself. In the future he would take his courage in his hands, and work out his own salvation on the hard hill-road of experience.

The school was just pouring out from the rep. exam. He heard Foster shouting across the courts.

"Caruthers, you slacker, come up to the tuck-shop."

"Right-o!" he yelled back; and racing across the green jumped the railings, and went laughing up to the tuck-shop.

"I say, Foster, let's have a big tea this afternoon. We had a supper for the A-K side on Sat.u.r.day. Let's have the rest up to-day."

Gordon flushed with excitement at what lay before him. He wanted everyone else to laugh with him too. An enormous tea was ordered. Men from the outhouses came down, the tables were drawn up on the V. A green, and the afternoon went by in a whirl of happiness. They rolled out arm in arm for the prize-giving. For the last time Gordon saw the whole staff sitting on "their dais serene." He looked at the row of faces. There was Rogers puffed out with pride; Christy, pharisee and humbug, superbly satisfied with himself. Finnemore sat in the background, a pale grey shadow, that had been too weak to get to grips with life at all. Trundle nursed his chin, twittering in a haze of indecision. Ferrers was fidgeting about, impatient of delay. He, at any rate, was not being misled by outside things; if he was misled by anything, it was by the impulse of his own feverish temperament. He was the splendid rebel leader of forlorn hopes, the survival of those

"_Lonely antagonists of destiny_ _That went down scornful before many spears._"

There, again, was Macdonald, with the same benign smile that time could not change. As he looked at him, Gordon thought that he at least could not have been deceived, but had too kind, too wide a heart to disillusion the young. And, above all, sat Buller, a second Garibaldi, with a heart of gold, an indomitable energy, a splendid sincerity, the most loyal of Fernhurst's sons. And as Gordon looked his last at his old foe, he felt that "the Bull" was so essentially big, so strong, so n.o.ble of heart, that it hardly mattered what he worshipped. There hung round him no false trapping of the trickster; sincerity was the keynote of his life. Gordon would search in vain, perhaps, for a brighter lodestar. As two vessels that have journeyed a little way together down a river, on taking their different courses at the ocean mouth, signal one another "good luck," so Gordon from the depth of his heart wished "the Bull"

farewell and G.o.dspeed.

At last the form lists were read out. A t.i.tter rewarded Gordon's position of _facile ultimus_. The cups were distributed. Gordon went up for the batting cups, his own individual one, and the challenge one that went to the House. Foster went up for the Senior cricket; it was a veritable School House triumph. The Chief made his usual good-bye speech, kindly, hopeful, encouraging. The head of the school shouted "Three cheers for the masters!"--the gates swept open, the cloisters were filled with hurrying feet.

The last hours pa.s.sed all too swiftly. In a far corner of the gallery Gordon sat with Morgan, listening to his last school concert. Opposite the choir in their white shirts, and brushed-back hair, sang the school songs inseparable from the end of the school year. There was the summer song, the "G.o.dspeed to those that go," the poignant _Valete_:

"_We shall watch you here in our peaceful cloister_, _Faring onward, some to renown, to fortune_, _Some to failure--none if your hearts are loyal--_ _None to dishonour._"

To Gordon every word brought back with it a flood of memories. He could see himself, the small boy, reading those verses for the first time before he went to Fernhurst, ignorant of what lay before him. How soon he had changed his fresh innocency! How soon his bright gold had grown dim! Then he saw himself this time last year, listening to those words with an unbounded confidence, certain that he at least would never achieve failure. Visions in the twilight! And what was the dawn to bring?

The Latin _Carmen_ began. The school stood on their seats and howled it out. Then came _Auld Lang Syne_. They clasped hands, swaying in chorus.

The echoes of _G.o.d Save the King_ shook the timbered ceiling, someone was shouting "Three cheers for the visitors!"; the school surged towards the door; Gordon found his feet on the small stone stairway. He looked back once at the warm lights; the honour-boards that would never bear his name; the choir still in their places; the visitors putting on their coats and wraps. Then the stream moved on; the picture faded out; and from the courts came the noise of motors crunching on the gravel.

As Gordon walked into the cool air he ran into Ferrers.

"Good-bye, sir."

"You are off, are you? Well, good luck. Write to me in the hols; I'll look you up if I'm in town. If not, cheer-o!"

He was gone in a second.

"_'So some time token the last of all our evenings_ _Crowneth memorially the last of all our days ...'_"

Gordon murmured to himself as he walked slowly down to the dining hall....

The next morning there was the inevitable bustle, the tipping of the servants, the good-byes, the promises to write at least twice during the holidays, the promises which were never kept.

"Here, Bamford, I say," shouted Gordon, "take my bag down to the station."

Bamford looked almost surly at being told to do anything on that last day. "Authority forgets a dying king," thought Gordon. His power could not have been so great if it began to wane almost before he had gone.

The eight-forty came into the station, snorting and puffing.

Gordon secured a corner seat, and leant out of the window, shaking hands with everyone he could see.

"You'll be down next term, won't you?" yelled Morgan, bursting as ever with good will.

"I expect so," said Gordon.

But in his heart of hearts he knew that he would never come back. He would be afraid lest he should find the glamour with which he had surrounded the grey studies and green walks of Fernhurst merely a mist of sentiment that would fade away. So many things that he had believed in he had found untrue. But he wanted to keep fresh in his mind the memory of Fernhurst as he had last seen it, beautiful and golden in the morning sun.

The train slowly steamed out. Hands were waved, handkerchiefs fluttered.

Slowly the Abbey turned from ochre-brown to blue, till it was hidden out of sight.

Gordon sank back into his seat. He was on the threshold of life; and he stepped out into the sunlight with a smile, which, though it might be a little cynical, as if he had been disillusioned, held none the less the quiet confidence of a wayfarer who knew what lay before him, and felt himself well equipped and fortified "for the long littleness of life."