Vice Versa Part 17

"Sterling worth!" cried Paul. "A scoundrel, I tell you, a heartless, selfish young scoundrel. Call things by their right names, if you please."

"No, no," said Mr. Blinkhorn, "this extreme self-depreciation is morbid, very morbid. There was no actual vice."

"No actual vice! Why, G.o.d bless my soul, do you call ingrat.i.tude--the basest, most unfilial, most treacherous ingrat.i.tude--no vice, sir? You may be a very excellent young man, but if you gloss over things in that fashion, your moral sense must be perverted, sir--strangely perverted."

"There were faults on both sides, I fear," said Mr. Blinkhorn, growing a little scandalised by the boy's odd warmth of expression. "I have heard something of what you had to bear with. On the one hand, a father, undemonstrative, stern, easily provoked; on the other, a son, thoughtless, forgetful, and at times it may be even wilful. But you are too sensitive; you think too much of what seems to me a not unnatural (although of course improper) protest against coldness and injustice. I should be the last to encourage a child against a parent, but, to comfort your self-reproach, I think it right to a.s.sure you that, in my judgment, the outburst you refer to was very excusable."

"Oh," said Paul, "you do? You call that comfort? Excusable! Why, what the dooce do you mean, sir? You're taking the other side now!"

"This is not the language of penitence, Bult.i.tude," said poor Mr.

Blinkhorn, disheartened and bewildered. "Remember, you have put off the Old Man now!"

"I'm not likely to forget _that_," said Paul; "I only wish I could see my way to putting him on again!"

"You want to be your old self again?" gasped Mr. Blinkhorn.

"Why, of course I do," said Paul angrily; "I'm not an idiot!"

"You are weary of the struggle so soon?" said the other with reproach.

"Weary? I tell you I'm sick of it! If I had only known what was in store for me before I had made such a fool of myself!"

"This is horrible!" said Mr. Blinkhorn--"I ought not to listen to you."

"But you must," urged Paul; "I tell you I can't stand it any longer. I'm not fit for it at my age. You must see that yourself, and you must make Grimstone see it too!"

"Never!" said Mr. Blinkhorn firmly. "Nor do I see how that would help you. I will not let you go back in this deplorable way. You must nerve yourself to go on now in the path you have chosen; you must force your schoolfellows to love and respect you in your new character. Come, take courage! After all, in spite of your altered life, there is no reason why you should not be a frank and happy-hearted boy, you know."

"A frank and happy-hearted fiddlestick!" cried Paul rudely (he was so disgusted at the suggestion); "don't talk rubbish, sir! I thought you were going to show me some way out of all this, and instead of that, knowing the shameful way I've been treated, you can stand there and calmly recommend me to stay on here and be happy-hearted and frank!"

"You must be calm, Bult.i.tude, or I shall leave you. Listen to reason.

You are here for your good. Youth, it has been beautifully said, is the springtime of life. Though you may not believe it, you will never be happier than you are now. Our schooldays are----"

But Mr. Bult.i.tude could not tamely be mocked with the very plat.i.tudes that had brought him all his misery--he cut the master short in a violent pa.s.sion. "This is too much!" he cried--"you shall not palm off that miserable rubbish on me. I see through it. It's a plot to keep me here, and you're in it. It's false imprisonment, and I'll write to the _Times_. I'll expose the whole thing!"

"This violence is only ridiculous," said Mr. Blinkhorn. "If I were not too pained by it, I should feel it my duty to report your language to the Doctor. As it is, you have bitterly disappointed me; I can't understand it at all. You seemed so subdued, so softened lately. But until you come to me and say you regret this, I must decline to have anything more to say to you. Take your book and sit down in your place!"

And he went back to his exercises, looking puzzled and pained. The fact was, he was an ardent believer in the Good Boy of a certain order of school tales--the boy who is seized with a sudden conviction of the intrinsic baseness of boyhood, and does all in his power to get rid of the harmful taint; the boy who renounces his old comrades and his natural tastes (which after all seldom have any serious harm in them), to don a panoply of priggishness which is too often kick-proof.

This kind of boy is rare enough at most English schools, but Mr.

Blinkhorn had been educated at a large Nonconformist College, where "Revivals" and "Awakenings" were periodical, and undoubtedly did produce changes of character violent enough, but sadly short in duration.

He was always waiting for some such boy to come to him with his confession of moral worthlessness and vows of unnatural perfection, and was too simple and earnest and good himself to realise that such states of the youthful mind are not unfrequently merely morbid and hysterical, and too often degenerate into Pharisaism, or worse still, hypocrisy.

So when he noticed Mr. Bult.i.tude's silence and depression, his studied withdrawal from the others and his evident want of sympathy with them, he believed he saw the symptoms of a conscience at work, and that he had found his reformed boy at last.

It was a very unfortunate misunderstanding, for it separated Paul from, perhaps, the only person who would have had the guilelessness to believe his incredible story, and the good nature to help him to find escape from his misfortunes.

Mr. Bult.i.tude on his part was more angry and disgusted than ever. He began to see that there was a muddle somewhere, and that his ident.i.ty was unsuspected still. This young man, for all his fair speaking and pretended shrewdness, was no conjurer after all. He was left to rely on his own resources, and he had begun to lose all confidence in their power to extricate him.

As he brooded over this, the boys straggled down as before, and looked over their lessons for the day in a dull, lifeless manner. The cold, unsatisfying breakfast, and the half-hour a.s.signed to "chevy," followed in due course, and after that Paul found himself set down with a cla.s.s to await the German master, Herr Stohwa.s.ser.

He had again tried to pull himself together and approach the Doctor with his protest, but no sooner did he find himself near his presence than his heart began to leap wildly and then retired down towards his boots, leaving him hoa.r.s.e, palpitating, and utterly blank of ideas.

It was no use--and he resigned himself for yet another day of unwelcome instruction.

The cla.s.s was in a little room on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, with a linen-press taking up one side, some bare white deal tables and forms, and, on the walls, a few coloured German prints. They sat there talking and laughing, taking no notice of Mr. Bult.i.tude, until the German master made his appearance.

He was by no means a formidable person, though stout and tall. He wore big round owlish spectacles, and his pale broad face and long nose, combined with a wild crop of light hair and a fierce beard, gave him the incongruous appearance of a sheep looking out of a gun-port.

He took his place with an air of tremendous determination to enforce a hard morning's work on the book they were reading--a play of Schiller's, of the plot of which, it is needless to say, no one of his pupils had or cared to have the vaguest notion, having long since condemned the whole subject, with insular prejudice, as "rot."

"Now, please," said Herr Stohwa.s.ser, "where we left off last term. Third act, first scene--Court before Tell's house. Tell is vid the carpenter axe, Hedwig vid a domestig labour occupied. Walter and Wilhelm in the depth sport with a liddle gross-bow. Biddlegom, you begin. Walter (sings)."

But Biddlecomb was in a conversational mood, and willing to postpone the task of translation, so he merely inquired, with an air of extreme interest, how Herr Stohwa.s.ser's German Grammar was getting on.

This was a subject on which (as he perhaps knew) the German never could resist enlarging, for in common with most German masters, he was giving birth to a new Grammar, which, from the daring originality of its plan, and its extreme simplicity, was destined to supersede all other similar works.

"Ach," he said, "it is brogressing. I haf just gompleted a gomprehensive table of ze irregular virps, vith ze eggserzizes upon zem. And zere is further an appendeeks which in itself gontains a goncise view of all ze vort-blays possible in the Charman tong. But, come, let us gontinue vith our Tell!"

"What are vort-blays?" persisted Biddlecomb insidiously, having no idea of continuing with his Tell just yet.

"A vort-blay," exclaimed Herr Stohwa.s.ser; "it is English, nicht so? A sporting vid vorts--a 'galembour'--a--Gott pless me, vat you call a 'pon.'"

"Like the one you made when you were a young man?" Jolland called out from the lower end of the table.

"Yes; tell us the one you made when you were a young man," the cla.s.s entreated, with flattering eagerness.

Herr Stohwa.s.ser began to laugh with slow, deep satisfaction; the satisfaction of a successful achievement. "Hah, you remember dat!" he said, "ah, yes, I make him when a yong man; but, mind you, he was not a pon--he was a '_choke_.' I haf told you all about him before."

"We've forgotten it," said Biddlecomb: "tell it us again."

As a matter of fact this joke, in all its lights, was tolerably familiar to most of them by this time, but, either on its individual merits, or perhaps because it compared favourably with the sterner alternative of translating, it was periodically in request, and always met with evergreen appreciation.

Herr Stohwa.s.ser beamed with the pride of authorship. Like the celebrated Scotchman, he "jocked wi' deeficulty," and the outcome of so much labour was dear to him.

"I zent him into ze Charman _Kladderadatch_ (it is a paper like your _Ponch_). It--mein choke--was upon ze Schleswig-Holstein gomplication; ze beginning was in this way----"

And he proceeded to set out in great length all the circ.u.mstances which had given materials for his "choke," with the successive processes by which he had shaped and perfected it, pa.s.sing on to a recital of the masterpiece itself, and ending up by a philosophical a.n.a.lysis of the same, which must have placed his pupils in full possession of the point, for they laughed consumedly.

"I dell you zis," he said, "not to aggustom your minds vid frivolity and lightness, but as a lesson in ze gonstruction of ze langwitch. If you can choke in Charman, you will be able also to gonverse in Charman."

"Did the German what's-its-name print your joke?" inquired Coggs.

"It has not appeared yet," Herr Stohwa.s.ser confessed; "it takes a long time to get an imbortant choke like that out in brint. But I vait--I write to ze editor every week--and I vait."

"Why don't you put it in your Grammar?" suggested Tipping.