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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Fathers Of Men," E. W. Hornung adopts a vivid and compelling narrative style to explore themes of generational conflict, paternal relationships, and the evolution of personal identity against a backdrop of societal change. The novel delves into the lives of its characters with rich detail, blending psychological depth with social commentary as it unravels the intricacies of father-son dynamics in a rapidly transforming world. Hornung's prose captures the nuanced interplay of love, disappointment, and resilience, reflecting the literary contexts of Victorian and early Edwardian literature while pushing the boundaries of character-driven storytelling. E. W. Hornung, best remembered for his creation of the gentleman thief A.J. Raffles, was deeply interested in the complexities of human relationships and societal values. Born in 1866, his experiences in both literature and life'—including his marriage to a strong, independent woman'—greatly informed his writing. "Fathers Of Men" showcases his keen observations of familial bonds and personal struggle, rooted in the challenges faced during his time, particularly in terms of emerging masculinity and evolving social norms. For readers seeking a profound exploration of familial ties and legacy, "Fathers Of Men" is a captivating choice. Hornung's masterful storytelling and intricate characterizations invite readers to reflect on their own relationships and the legacies they inherit. This novel is not only an examination of the past but also a mirror reflecting contemporary issues of identity and connection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Fathers Of Men
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its heart, Fathers of Men contemplates how boys become men under the stern, fallible, and sometimes tender stewardship of those who teach, test, and ultimately trust them with their own consciences, tracing the slow alchemy whereby rules harden into principles, rivalries deepen into loyalties, and youthful impulses are tempered into considered courage, while pressing the abiding questions of what kind of authority truly nurtures character and what kind merely compels conformity, how friendship can sharpen or soften ambition, and where the contested line falls between justice and mercy within the formative arenas of school life and the threshold of adulthood.
Written by E. W. Hornung (1866–1921), best known for the A. J. Raffles stories, this novel shifts from criminal capers to the moral theater of education. First published in the early 1910s, in the years just before the First World War, it belongs to the British school-story and coming-of-age tradition while reflecting the subtler social awareness of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. Set in and around an English boarding-school milieu, the book uses the routines and rituals of term time to stage larger questions about character. Its period setting is not mere backdrop but a living system of expectations, opportunities, and constraints against which young lives are measured.
The premise is straightforward and humane: a boy’s critical school years are observed with care as he encounters mentors, adversaries, and the unseen pressures that shape his choices. Rather than relying on melodrama, Hornung builds his narrative from recognizably ordinary crises—classroom tests, house loyalties, athletic trials, and disciplinary scrapes—that accrue moral weight. The result is a reading experience grounded in close observation and patient momentum. The voice is lucid and composed, more reflective than showy, attentive to telling gestures and small decisions. The mood balances warmth with sobriety, inviting readers to inhabit a world where every concession and stand taken matters to the person one is becoming.
Hornung’s style here is measured, ironical without cynicism, and unmistakably sympathetic to flawed effort. Scenes move with the cadence of institutional life—bells, roll calls, practices, prep—yet the prose keeps sight of the private hesitations and sudden intensities that animate adolescence. Humor appears in dry flashes, never undercutting the gravity of moral testing. Dialogue tends toward understatement, the better to reveal character through action and silence. The narrative architecture is classical in its clarity: a steady accumulation of episodes whose consequences unfold naturally. What distinguishes the book is not spectacle but the fidelity with which it renders the textures of growth under watchful, imperfect stewardship.
Authority and responsibility, discipline and compassion, loyalty and independence—these are the book’s central poles. Fathers of Men asks what schools truly teach beyond curricula: codes of honor, habits of courage, the cost of conformity, and the uses of mercy. It examines mentorship as both privilege and peril, acknowledging the limits of any adult’s power to guide without coercing. Friendship is treated as a crucible for character, capable of both rescue and ruin. Class and tradition exert pressure, yet the novel refuses caricature, preferring particular people with particular choices. Throughout, Hornung probes how the outer order of a community intersects with the inner government of conscience.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s questions feel immediate: How do institutions shape us for good or ill? What does humane leadership look like in practice? Where is the line between firm standards and rigid dogma? In an age still debating the purposes of education and the meanings of masculinity, Fathers of Men offers a nuanced portrait of formation that resists easy answers. Its attention to incremental growth, to the dignity of second chances, and to the lifelong consequences of youthful decisions, keeps it resonant. The book also invites reflection on how traditions can be refined rather than discarded, and how empathy can coexist with exacting expectation.
Approached on its own terms, this is a novel for readers who value moral texture over sensational turns, who enjoy the steady illumination of character through everyday tests. Admirers of classic British school fiction will find familiar scaffolding, but Hornung’s humane intelligence and disciplined restraint lend the material fresh seriousness. Fathers of Men rewards attentive reading: it is less a parade of episodes than a quietly accumulating reckoning with influence and choice. Without announcing lessons, it leaves the reader weighing what kind of guidance truly helps the young to stand alone. In that sense, its pre-war setting frames a timeless inquiry into the making of adults.
Synopsis
Fathers of Men by E. W. Hornung is a public-school novel set in late Victorian or Edwardian England, following a cohort of boys through the formative years that shape them for adult life. The narrative moves term by term, depicting the customs, hierarchies, and rituals of a traditional boarding school. Hornung presents a close view of house life, games, classroom discipline, and chapel, using these familiar elements to trace the growth of character. Without advocating or condemning, the book observes how loyalty, courage, and truthfulness are tested in small and large ways, and how the school’s system intends to produce young men ready to shoulder responsibility beyond its walls.
The story begins with a new boy’s arrival, capturing first impressions of the school’s imposing buildings, strict routines, and unwritten codes. He quickly learns the distinctions between houses, forms, and the privileges of prefects, as well as the obligations of fags. Early episodes establish his blend of eagerness and uncertainty, as he navigates minor injustices, awkward blunders, and the search for reliable allies. A sympathetic older boy, already established in house life, helps him grasp when to show deference and when to stand firm. Small triumphs and lapses in these opening chapters foreshadow later, weightier trials of judgment and nerve.
Hornung devotes sustained attention to the school’s social fabric. Rivalries within and between houses set the pace of everyday life, as do the tacit rules about fairness, sportsmanship, and discretion. Classroom scenes show the mixture of rote learning, quick wit, and stern correction that defines the academic day. Out of school hours, a code of honor polices behavior as effectively as any master. An early nuisance prank, the whiff of bullying, and the allocation of chores test the new boy’s instincts about right and wrong. Friendships form across boundaries of background and ability, binding diverse boys into a shared identity.
The playing fields provide a second arena for development, with cricket and football seasons furnishing rhythm and purpose. Games become a practical education in leadership, self-restraint, and perseverance. Practices, selection committees, and house challenges place boys under public scrutiny, exposing temperament as much as talent. Hornung shows how a seat on the sidelines can matter as much as scoring, and how failure is judged by effort as much as result. A tense inter-house match becomes an early proving ground, not only for athletic skill but for loyalty under pressure, opening space for the protagonist and his peers to earn quiet confidence.
The masters and the headmaster emerge as distinct figures, each shaping conduct in his own way. A housemaster’s steady influence contrasts with a sharper classroom disciplinarian, while the head’s addresses sketch the institutional ideal. Phrases about duty, service, and the school’s mission to make “fathers of men” anchor the moral argument. Assemblies, detentions, and private interviews reveal a system that prefers persuasion to spectacle, but does not shrink from decisive judgment. Academic benchmarks—examinations and prize lists—run in parallel with the informal tribunal of school opinion. Together they form the scaffolding within which character either consolidates or comes apart.
At the book’s center lies a serious incident that brings the school’s principles into sharp focus. What begins as an ordinary breach of rules deepens into a question of honor and trust, entangling friends, rivals, and authorities. Rumor hardens into suspicion, and silence becomes risky. The prefects’ quasi-judicial role is tested against the masters’ authority, while individual boys confront the cost of truth-telling. The protagonist is drawn into the matter through divided loyalties, aware that any action may carry consequences for others as well as himself. The episode shifts the tone of the narrative from boyish scrapes to moral decision-making.
The aftermath explores isolation, resilience, and the gradual earning or forfeiture of respect. Lines between popularity and esteem are redrawn as conduct under strain becomes known. A younger boy’s vulnerability calls for protection; an older boy’s influence demands scrutiny. Responsibilities increase for those who have shown steadiness, with informal leadership often preceding any official role. The social temperature of house and form fluctuates, but the protagonist’s choices help set a new equilibrium. Hornung traces the slow work of reconciliation and the clearer-eyed understanding that follows a crisis, without reducing it to melodrama or easy absolution.
The final terms bring converging pressures: a decisive match, significant examinations, and the rituals of departure. House unity and school spirit are both tested and affirmed as boys weigh personal ambitions against collective goals. The climactic events demand not only performance but judgment—what to risk, when to speak, and how to carry success or setback. Hornung withholds grand heroics, focusing instead on controlled moments that reveal the habits the school has fostered. Outcomes arrive with a sense of earned inevitability, and resolutions close the central threads while preserving the privacy of individual fates.
By the end, Fathers of Men conveys an understated but clear message: institutions shape character through daily discipline, shared endeavor, and a lived code of honor. The boys are poised to leave as young men, aware of the obligations attached to privilege and the value of fellowship under rule. Hornung’s narrative neither glorifies nor indicts the public-school world; it records its pressures and promises with measured attention. The title’s phrase becomes a criterion rather than a boast, suggesting that fatherhood—influence, example, responsibility—begins in how one treats peers and uses authority. The book closes on continuity, duty, and earned self-command.
Historical Context
Fathers of Men unfolds within the closed world of an English public school in the late Victorian and early Edwardian decades, roughly the 1880s to the years just before 1914. Though the school is fictional, its topography—a market town, railway connections, chapel, quadrangles, playing fields, and a self-contained house system—closely recalls institutions such as Uppingham in Rutland, where E. W. Hornung was educated (1880–1883). The period’s technologies and routines—gas and early electric lighting, telegraph-borne news, and regimented timetables—frame the boys’ lives. Masters wield pastoral and disciplinary authority, prefects police dormitories and corridors, and organized games dominate afternoons. The setting provides a precise social microcosm of upper- and middle-class Britain training its future administrators, officers, and professionals.
The school world Hornung depicts grew from mid-Victorian reform. The Clarendon Commission (1861–1864) investigated elite schools, leading to the Public Schools Act (1868), which reorganized governance at nine institutions (Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul’s, Merchant Taylors’). The Headmasters’ Conference (founded 1869) consolidated a professional ethos among leaders. At Uppingham, Edward Thring (headmaster, 1853–1887) advanced house-based pastoral care, broadened curricula, and emphasized character training. Prefect systems, fagging’s regulation, and corporate self-government were hallmarks by the 1880s. In the novel, the authority of housemasters, the moral responsibility vested in senior boys, and the school’s semi-autonomous governance closely mirror these reforms, dramatizing how bureaucracy and tradition shape adolescent lives and calibrate virtue, rank, and reputation.
The ethic popularly called “muscular Christianity” saturated public schools from the 1850s through 1900. Preached by figures like Charles Kingsley and popularized in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), it fused Anglican piety with athletic discipline, teamwork, and manly service. Organized games assumed civic significance: cricket’s golden age under W. G. Grace (active 1865–1908), the formal County Championship (from 1890), and set-piece fixtures such as Eton v. Harrow at Lord’s turned sport into national ritual. The vocabulary of “pluck,” “fair play,” and “captaincy” became moral categories. Hornung’s schoolrooms and playing fields register this culture: selection for elevens or fifteens, the burdens of captaincy, and decisions about cheating, loyalty, or sacrifice render sport a theatre of ethics, where character is honed and judged before peers.
Imperial anxieties and military reform also contour the background. The Second Boer War (1899–1902)—with sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking (relieved May 1900)—exposed deficiencies in British preparedness and inflamed patriotic sentiment. The Haldane Reforms (1905–1912) restructured the Army; the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act (1907) created the Territorial Force, and the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) launched in 1908 with Junior Divisions in public schools. Cadet drills, miniature rifle ranges, and parades entered school timetables, while Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908) popularized duty and self-reliance. In the novel, uniforms, martial pageantry, and talk of commissions infuse the senior forms, and masters who are veterans lend prestige to discipline, revealing how schools internalized imperial service as a rite of passage for the governing class.
Public health reform reshaped boarding-school life. Britain’s sanitation movement culminated in the Public Health Act (1875), mandating drainage, water supply, and nuisance control; yet failures were starkly visible in crises such as Uppingham School’s evacuation to Borth on Cardigan Bay in 1876–1877 after typhoid linked to local waterworks. By the 1890s, germ theory influenced school architecture—ventilated dormitories, infirmaries, and bathing routines—and medical inspections normalized oversight. Hornung’s attention to dormitory order, “lights out,” airing, and the school doctor reflects this regulatory environment. Illness scares, quarantine, and the moralized language of cleanliness and impurity become plot pressures and metaphors, suggesting that bodily discipline and sanitary vigilance were inseparable from the moral discipline the school claimed to inculcate.
State education measures altered the pipeline feeding elite schools. The Elementary Education Act (1870) established school boards; compulsion followed (1880), and the 1891 fee grant made elementary schooling effectively free. The Balfour Education Act (1902) replaced school boards with local education authorities, expanded secondary provision, and funded voluntary (often Anglican) schools—provoking Nonconformist resistance. Scholarships and exam culture enabled select lower-middle-class boys to aspire upward, while industrial and professional wealth diversified the fee-paying base. In Hornung’s world, the arrival of boys of uneven means, anxieties over outfitters’ bills, and parental negotiations with governors echo these shifts. The novel registers both the permeability and limits of class mobility, as merit, accent, and money interact within the dining hall, studies, and house tables.
Religion and moral regulation structured public-school calendars and consciences. Chapel services under Church of England auspices framed the week; sermons translated national events into moral lessons. The 1902 Act sparked Nonconformist passive resistance (1902–1906), with thousands refusing local rates to fund denominational schools and facing court summonses, illustrating the politicization of schooling. Temperance and Sabbatarian movements shaped social expectations in market towns hosting boarding schools. The novel mirrors this environment through compulsory chapel, scriptural examinations, and masters’ pastoral surveillance, alongside periodic friction between schoolboys and townsfolk—shopkeepers, innkeepers, constables—over noise, pranks, and respectability. It portrays how Anglican authority and civic norms attempted to police adolescent energies while legitimating the school’s claim to manufacture moral citizens.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the contradictions of a system that preaches character while entrenching hierarchy. It questions the prefect’s delegated power, the casual cruelties cloaked as tradition, and the idolization of games that can privilege athletic charisma over justice. The militarized pageantry and patriotic rhetoric appear compelling yet constraining, revealing how duty shades into conformity. Class boundaries—felt in fees, kit, speech, and parental status—qualify narratives of meritocracy. Sanitary vigilance, chapel routine, and surveillance promise welfare yet foster secrecy and shame. By dramatizing these tensions from inside the gate, Hornung shows how the “fathers of men” reproduced empire’s virtues and blind spots, inviting readers to weigh care against control and service against privilege.
Fathers Of Men
Chapter 1 Behind The Scenes
The two new boys in Heriot’s house had been suitably entertained at his table, and afterwards in his study with bound volumes of Punch[1]. Incidentally they had been encouraged to talk, with the result that one boy had talked too much, while the other shut a stubborn mouth tighter than before. The babbler displayed an exuberant knowledge of contemporary cricket, a more conscious sense of humour, and other little qualities which told their tale. He opened the door for Miss Heriot after dinner, and even thanked her for the evening when it came to an end. His companion, on the other hand, after brooding over Leech and Tenniel with a sombre eye, beat a boorish retreat without a word.
Heriot saw the pair to the boys’ part of the house. He was filling his pipe when he returned to the medley of books, papers, photographic appliances, foxes’ masks, alpen-stocks and venerable oak, that made his study a little room in which it was difficult to sit down and impossible to lounge. His sister, perched upon a coffin-stool, was busy mounting photographs at a worm-eaten bureau.
“How I hate our rule that a man mayn’t smoke before a boy!” exclaimed Heriot, emitting a grateful cloud. “And how I wish we didn’t have the new boys on our hands a whole day before the rest!”
“I should have thought there was a good deal to be said for that,” remarked his sister, intent upon her task.
“You mean from the boys’ point of view?”
“Exactly. It must be such a plunge for them as it is, poor things.”
“It’s the greatest plunge in life,” Heriot vehemently agreed. “But here we don’t let them make it; we think it kinder to put them in an empty bath, and then turn on the cold tap—after first warming them at our own fireside! It’s always a relief to me when these evenings are over. The boys are never themselves, and I don’t think I’m much better than the boys. We begin by getting a false impression of each other.”
Heriot picked his way among his old oak things as he spoke; but at every turn he had a narrow eye upon his sister. He was a lanky man, many years her senior; his beard had grown grey, and his shoulders round, in his profession. A restless energy marked all his movements, and was traceable in the very obstacles to his present perambulations; they were the spoils of the inveterate wanderer from the beaten track, who wanders with open hand and eye. Spectacles in steel rims twinkled at each alert turn of the grizzled head; and the look through the spectacles, always quick and keen, was kindly rather than kind, and just rather than compassionate.
“I liked Carpenter,” said Miss Heriot, as she dried a dripping print between sheets of blotting-paper.
“I like all boys until I have reason to dislike them.”
“Carpenter had something to say for himself.”
“There’s far more character in Rutter.”
“He never opened his mouth.”
“It’s his mouth I go by, as much as anything.”
Miss Heriot coated the back of the print with starch, and laid it dexterously in its place. A sheet of foolscap and her handkerchief—an almost unfeminine handkerchief—did the rest. And still she said no more.
“You didn’t think much of Rutter, Milly?”
“I thought he had a bad accent and—”
“Go on.”
“Well—to be frank—worse manners!”
“Milly, you are right, and I’m not sure that I oughtn’t to be frank with you. Let the next print wait a minute. I like you to see something of the fellows in my house; it’s only right that you should know something about them first. I’ve a great mind to tell you what I don’t intend another soul in the place to know.”
Heriot had planted himself in British attitude, heels to the fender.
Miss Heriot turned round on her stool. She was as like her brother as a woman still young can be like a rather elderly man; her hair was fair, and she had not come to spectacles; but her eyes were as keen and kindly as his own, her whole countenance as sensible and shrewd.
“You can trust me, Bob,” she said.
“I know I can,” he answered, pipe in hand. “That’s why I’m going to tell you what neither boy nor man shall learn through me. What type of lad does this poor Rutter suggest to your mind?”
There was a pause.
“I hardly like to say.”
“But I want to know.”
“Well—then—I’m sure I couldn’t tell you why—but he struck me as more like a lad from the stables than anything else.”
“What on earth makes you think that?” Heriot spoke quite sharply in his plain displeasure and surprise.
“I said I couldn’t tell you, Bob. I suppose it was a general association of ideas. He had his hat on, for one thing, when I saw him first; and it was far too large for him, and crammed down almost to those dreadful ears! I never saw any boy outside a stable-yard wear his hat like that. Then your hunting was the one thing that seemed to interest him in the least. And I certainly thought he called a horse a ‘hoss’!”
“So he put you in mind of a stable-boy, did he?”
“Well, not exactly at the time, but he really does the more I think about him.”
“That’s very clever of you, Milly—because it’s just what he is.”
Heriot’s open windows were flush with the street, and passing footfalls sounded loud in his room; but at the moment there were none; and a clock ticked officiously on the chimneypiece while the man with his back to it met his sister’s eyes.
“Of course you don’t mean it literally?”
“Literally.”
“I thought his grandfather was a country parson?”
“A rural dean, my dear; but the boy’s father was a coachman, and the boy himself was brought up in the stables until six months ago.”
“The father’s dead, then?”
“He died in the spring. His wife has been dead fourteen years. It’s a very old story. She ran away with the groom.”
“But her people have taken an interest in the boy?”
“Never set eyes on him till his father died.”
“Then how can he know enough to come here?”
Heriot smiled as he pulled at his pipe. He had the air of a man who has told the worst. His sister had taken it as he hoped she would; her face and voice betokened just that kind of interest in the case which he already felt strongly. It was a sympathetic interest, but that was all. There was nothing sentimental about either of the Heriots; they could discuss most things frankly on their merits; the school itself was no exception to the rule. It was wife and child to Robert Heriot—the school of his manhood—the vineyard in which he had laboured lovingly for thirty years. But still he could smile as he smoked his pipe.
“Our standard is within the reach of most,” he said; “there are those who would tell you it’s the scorn of the scholastic world. We don’t go in for making scholars. We go in for making men. Give us the raw material of a man, and we won’t reject it because it doesn’t know the Greek alphabet—no, not even if it was fifteen on its last birthday! That’s our system, and I support it through thick and thin; but it lays us open to worse types than escaped stable-boys.”
“This boy doesn’t look fifteen.”
“Nor is he—quite—much less the type I had in mind. He has a head on his shoulders, and something in it too. It appears that the vicar where he came from took an interest in the lad, and got him on as far as Cæsar and Euclid for pure love.”
“That speaks well for the lad,” put in Miss Heriot, impartially.
“I must say that it appealed to me. Then he’s had a tutor for the last six months; and neither tutor nor vicar has a serious word to say against his character. The tutor, moreover, is a friend of Arthur Drysdale’s, who was captain of this house when I took it over, and the best I ever had. That’s what brought them to me. The boy should take quite a good place. I should be very glad to have him in my own form, to see what they’ve taught him between them. I confess I’m interested in him; his mother was a lady; but you may almost say he never saw her in his life. Yet it’s the mother who counts in the being of a boy. Has the gentle blood been hopelessly poisoned by the stink of the stables, or is it going to triumph and run clean and sweet? It’s a big question, Milly, and it’s not the only one involved.”
Heriot had propounded it with waving pipe that required another match when he was done; through the mountain tan upon his face, and in the eager eyes behind the glasses, shone the zeal of the expert to whom boys are dearer than men or women. The man is rare; rarer still the woman who can even understand him; but here in this little room of books and antique lumber, you had the pair.
“I’m glad you told me,” said Miss Heriot, at length. “I fear I should have been prejudiced if you had not.”
“My one excuse for telling you,” was the grave rejoinder. “No one else shall ever know through me; not even Mr. Thrale, unless some special reason should arise. The boy shall have every chance. He doesn’t even know I know myself, and I don’t want him ever to suspect. It’s quite a problem, for I must keep an eye on him more than on most; yet I daren’t be down on him, and I daren’t stand up for him; he must sink or swim for himself.”
“I’m afraid he’ll have a bad time,” said Miss Heriot, picking a print from the water and blotting it as before. Her brother had seated himself at another bureau to write his letters.
“I don’t mind betting Carpenter has a worse,” he rejoined without looking up.
“But he’s so enthusiastic about everything?”
“That’s a quality we appreciate; boys don’t, unless there’s prowess behind it. Carpenter talks cricket like a Lillywhite, but he doesn’t look a cricketer. Rutter doesn’t talk about it, but his tutor says he’s a bit of a bowler. Carpenter beams because he’s got to his public school at last. He has illusions to lose. Rutter knows nothing about us, and probably cares less; he’s here under protest, you can see it in his face, and the chances are all in favour of his being pleasantly disappointed.”
Heriot’s quill was squeaking as he spoke, for he was a man with the faculty of doing and even thinking of more than one thing at a time; but though his sister continued mounting photographs in her album with extreme care, her mind was full of the two young boys who had come that night to live under their roof for good or ill. She wondered whether her brother was right in his ready estimate of their respective characters. She knew him for the expert that he was; these were not the first boys that she had heard him sum up as confidently on as brief an acquaintance; and though her knowledge had its obvious limitations, she had never known him wrong. He had a wonderfully fair mind. And yet the boy of action, in whom it was possible to stimulate thought, would always be nearer his heart than the thoughtful boy who might need goading into physical activity. She could not help feeling that he was prepared to take an unsympathetic view of the boy who had struck her as having more in him than most small boys; it was no less plain that his romantic history and previous disadvantages had already rendered the other newcomer an object of sympathetic interest in the house-master’s eyes. The material was new as well as raw, and so doubly welcome to the workman’s hand. Yet the workman’s sister, who had so much of his own force and fairness in her nature, felt that she could never like a sulky lout, however cruel the circumstances which had combined to make him one.
She felt a good deal more before the last print was in her album; in the first place that she would see really very little of these two boys until in years to come they rose to the Sixth Form table over which she presided in hall. Now and then they might have headaches and be sent in to keep quiet and look at the Punches; but she would never be at all in touch with them until they were big boys at the top of the house; and then they would be shy and exceedingly correct, of few words but not too few, and none too much enthusiasm, like all the other big boys. And that thought drew a sigh.
“What’s the matter?” came in an instant from the other bureau, where the quill had ceased to squeak.
“I was thinking that, after all, these two boys have more individuality than most who come to us.”
“One of them has.”
“Both, I think; and I was wondering how much will be left to either when we run them out of the mould in five years’ time!”
Heriot came to his feet like an exasperated advocate.
“I know where you get that from!” he cried with a kind of jovial asperity. “You’ve been reading some of these trashy articles that every wiseacre who never was at a public school thinks he can write about them now! That’s one of their stock charges against us, that we melt the boys down and run them all out of the same mould like bullets. We destroy individuality; we do nothing but reduplicate a type that thinks the same thoughts and speaks the same speech, and upholds the same virtues and condones the same vices. As if real character were a soluble thing! As if it altered in its essence from the nursery to the cemetery! As if we could boil away a strong will or an artistic temperament, a mean soul or a saintly spirit, even in the crucible of a public school!”
His breezy confidence was almost overwhelming; but it did not overwhelm his hearer, or sweep her with him to his conclusion. She had her own point of view; more, she had her own coigne of observation. Not every boy who had passed through the house in her time was the better for having been there. She had seen the weak go under—into depths she could not plumb—and the selfish ride serenely on the crest of the wave. She had seen an unpleasant urchin grow into a more and more displeasing youth, and inferiority go forth doubly inferior for the misleading stamp—that precious stamp—which one and all acquired. She loved the life as she saw it, perforce so superficially; it was a life that appealed peculiarly to Miss Heriot, who happened to have her own collegiate experience, an excellent degree of her own, and her own ideas on education. But from the boys in her brother’s house she held necessarily aloof; and in her detachment a clear and independent mind lay inevitably open to questionings, misgivings, intuitions, for which there was little time in his laborious days.
“But you admit it is a crucible,” she argued. “And what’s a crucible but a melting-pot?”
“A melting-pot for characteristics, but not for character!” he cried. “Take the two boys upstairs: in four or five years one will have more to say for himself, I hope, and the other will leave more unsaid; but the self that each expresses will be the same self, even though we have turned a first-rate groom into a second-rate gentleman. ‘The Child,’ remember, and not the school, ‘is father of the Man.’”
“Then the school’s his mother!” declared Miss Heriot without a moment’s hesitation.
Heriot gave the sudden happy laugh which his house was never sorry to hear, and his form found the more infectious for its comparative rarity.
“Does she deny it, Milly? Doesn’t she rub it into every one of them in Latin that even they can understand? Let’s only hope they’ll be fathers of better men for the help of this particular alma mater[2]!”
The house-master knocked out his pipe into a wooden Kaffir bowl, the gift of some exiled Old Boy, and went off to bid the two new boys good-night.
Chapter 2 Change And Chance
Rutter had been put in the small dormitory at the very top of the house. Instead of two long rows of cubicles as in the other dormitories, in one of which he had left Carpenter on the way upstairs, here under the roof was a square chamber with a dormer window in the sloping side and a cubicle in each of its four corners. Cubicle was not the school word for them, according to the matron who came up with the boys, but “partition,” or “tish” for short. They were about five feet high, contained a bed and a chair apiece, and were merely curtained at the foot. But the dormitory door opened into the one allotted to Rutter; it was large enough to hold a double wash-stand for himself and his next-door neighbour; and perhaps he was not the first occupant whom it had put in mind of a loose-box among stalls[4].
He noted everything with an eye singularly sardonic for fourteen, and as singularly alive to detail. The common dressing-table was in the dormer window. The boy had a grim look at himself in the glass. It was not a particularly pleasant face, with its sombre expression and stubborn mouth, but it looked brown and hard, and acute enough in its dogged way. It almost smiled at itself for the fraction of a second, but whether in resignation or defiance, or with a pinch of involuntary pride in his new state of life, it would have been difficult even for the boy to say. Certainly it was with a thrill that he read his own name over his partition, and then the other boys’ names over theirs. Bingley was the fellow next him. Joyce and Crabtree were the other two. What would they be like? What sort of faces would they bring back to the glass in the dormer window?
Rutter was not conscious of an imagination, but somehow he pictured Joyce large and lethargic, Crabtree a humorist, and Bingley a bully of the Flashman type. He had just been reading Tom Brown by advice. He wondered would the humorist be man enough to join him in standing up to the brutes, and whether pillow-fights were still the fashion; he did not believe they were, because Master Evan had never mentioned them; but then Master Evan had only been at a preparatory school last spring, and he might have found it quite otherwise at Winchester. The new boy undressed with an absent mind. He was wondering what it would have been like if he had been sent to Winchester himself, and there encountered Master Evan on equal terms. He had never done so much wondering in his life; he found a school list in the dormitory, and took it to bed with him, and lay there doing more.
So there was an Upper Sixth and a Lower Sixth, and then a form called the Remove; and in the Remove, by the way, was friend Joyce of the corner opposite. Then came the Fifths—three of them—with Crabtree top of the Lower Fifth. Clever fellow, then, Crabtree! The bully Bingley was no doubt notoriously low in the school. The Middle Remove came next, and through each column of strange names the boy read religiously, with a fascination he could not have explained, here and there conjuring an incongruous figure from some name he knew. He had got down to the Middle Fourth when suddenly his breath was taken as by a blow.
Heriot came in to find a face paler than it had looked downstairs, but a good brown arm and hand lying out over the coverlet, and a Midsummer List[3] tightly clutched. The muscles of the arm were unusually developed for so young a boy. Heriot saw them relax under his gaze as he stood over the bed.
“Got hold of a school list, have you?”
“Yessir,” said Rutter with a slurring alacrity that certainly did not savour of the schoolroom. Heriot turned away before he could wince; but unluckily his eyes fell on the floor, strewn with the litter of the new boy’s clothes.
“I like the way you fold your clothes!” he laughed.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but where am I to put them?”
It was refreshingly polite; but, again, the begging-pardon opening was not the politeness of a schoolboy.
“On this chair,” said Heriot, suiting the action to the word. The boy would have leapt out of bed to do it himself. His shyness not only prevented him, but rendered him incapable of protest or acknowledgement; and the next moment he had something to be shy about. Mr. Heriot was holding up a broad and dirty belt, and without thinking he had cried, “What’s this?”
Rutter could not answer for shame. And Heriot had time to think.
“I can sympathise,” he said with a chuckle; “in the holidays I often wear one myself. But we mustn’t betray each other, Rutter, or we shall never hear the last of it! I’ll give you an order for a pair of braces in the morning.”
“I have them, sir, thanks.”
“That’s right.” Heriot was still handling the belt as though he really longed to buckle it about himself. Suddenly he noticed the initials, “J. R.”
“I thought your name was Ian, Rutter?”
“So it is, sir; but they used to call me Jan.”
Heriot waited for a sigh, but the mouth that appealed to him was characteristically compressed. He sat a few moments on the foot of the bed. “Well, good-night, and a fair start to you, Jan! The matron will put out the gas at ten.”
The lad mumbled something; the man looked back to nod, and saw him lying as he had found him, still clutching the list, only with his face as deep a colour as his arm.
“Have you come across any names you know?”
“One.”
“Who’s that?”
“He won’t know me.”
They were the sullen answers that had made a bad impression downstairs; but they were strangely uttered, and Rutter no longer lay still.
“He must have a name,” said Heriot, coming back into the room.
No answer.
“I’m sorry you’re ashamed of your friend,” said Heriot, laughing.
“He’s not my friend, and—”
“I think that’s very likely,” put in Heriot, as the boy shut his lips once more. “What’s in a name? The chances are that it’s only a namesake after all.”
He turned away without a sign of annoyance or of further interest in the matter. But another mumble from the bed intercepted him at the door.
“Name of Devereux,” he made out.
“Devereux, eh?”
“Do you know him, sir?”
“I should think I do!”
“He’ll not be in this house?”
Rutter was holding his breath.
“No, but he got my prize last term.”
“Do you know his other name?”
It was a tremulous mumble now.
“I’m afraid I don’t. Wait a bit! His initials are either E. P. or P. E. He only came last term.”
“He only would. But I thought he was going to Winchester!”
“That’s the fellow; he got a scholarship and came here instead, at the last moment.”
The new boy in the top dormitory made no remark when the matron put out the gas. He was lying on his back with his eyes wide open, and his lips compressed out of sight, just as Heriot had left him. It was almost a comfort to him to know the worst for certain; and now that he did know it, beyond all possibility of doubt, he was beginning to wonder whether it need necessarily be the worst after all. It might easily prove the best. He had always liked Master Evan; that was as much as this boy would admit even in his heart. The fact would have borne a warmer recognition. Best or worst, however, he knew it as well as though Evan Devereux had already come back with the rest of the school, and either cut him dead or grasped his hand. The one thing not to be suspected for an instant was that the lean oldish man, with the kind word and the abrupt manner, could possibly know the secret of a new boy’s heart, and have entered already into his hopes and fears.
It was very quiet in the top dormitory. Rutter wondered what it would be like when all the boys came back. Carpenter’s dormitory was downstairs, but they were all within earshot of each other. He wondered what it would have been like if Master Evan had been in that house, in that little dormitory, in the partition next his own. Master Evan! Yet he had never thought of him as anything else, much less addressed him by any other name. What if it slipped out at school! It easily might; indeed, far more easily and naturally than “Devereux.” That would sound very like profanity, in his ears, and on his lips.
The new boy grinned involuntarily in the dark. It was all too absurd. He had enjoyed ample opportunity of picking up the phraseology of the class to which he had been lately elevated: “too absurd” would certainly have been their expression for the situation in which he found himself. He tried to see it from that point of view. He was not without a wry humour of his own. He must take care not to magnify a matter which nobody else might think twice about. A public school was a little world, in which two boys in different houses, even two of an age, might seldom or never meet; days might elapse before Evan as much as recognised him in the throng. But then he might refuse to have anything to do with him. But then—but then—he might tell the whole school why!
“He was our coachman’s son at home!”
The coachman’s son heard the incredible statement as though it had been shouted in his ear. He felt a thousand eyes on his devoted face. He knew that he lay blushing in the dark. It took all his will to calm him by degrees.
“If he does,” he decided, “I’m off. That’s all.”
But why should he? Why should a young gentleman betray a poor boy’s secret? Rutter was the stable-boy again in spirit; he might have been back in his trucklebed in the coachman’s cottage at Mr. Devereux’s. The transition of standpoint at any rate was complete. He had always liked Master Evan; they had been very good friends all their lives. Incidents of the friendship came back in shoals. Evan had been the youngest of a large family, and that after a gap; in one sense he had been literally the only child. Often he had needed a boy to play with him, and not seldom Jan Rutter had been scrubbed and brushed and oiled to the scalp in order to fill the proud position of that boy. He must have known how to behave himself as a little kid, though he remembered as he grew older that the admonition with which he was always dispatched from the stables used to make it more difficult; there were so many things to “think on” not to do, and somehow it was harder not to do them when you had always to keep “thinking on.” Still, he distinctly remembered hearing complimentary remarks passed upon him by the ladies and gentlemen, together with whispered explanations of his manners. It was as easy to supply as to understand those explanations now; but it was sad to feel that the manners had long ago been lost.
And, boy as he was, and dimly as may be, he did feel this: that in the beginning there had been very little to choose between Evan and himself, but that afterwards the gulf had been at one time very wide. He could recall with shame a phase in which Master Evan had been forbidden, and not without reason, to have anything to do with Jan Rutter. There was even a cruel thrashing which he had received for language learnt from the executioner’s own lips; and it was characteristic of Jan that he had never quite forgiven his father for that, though he was dead, and had been a kind father on the whole. Later, the boy about the stables had acquired more sense; the eccentric vicar had taken him in hand, and spoken up for him; and nothing was said if he bowled to Master Evan after his tea, or played a makeshift kind of racquets with him in the stable-yard, so long as he kept his tongue and his harness clean. So the gulf had narrowed again of late years; but it had never again been shallow.
It was spanned, however, by quite a network of mutual offices. In the beginning Evan used to take all his broken toys to Jan, who was a fine hand at rigging ships and soldering headless horsemen. Jan’s reward was the reversion of anything broken beyond repair, or otherwise without further value to its original owner. Jan was also an adept at roasting chestnuts and potatoes on the potting-shed fire, a daring manipulator of molten lead, a comic artist with a piece of putty, and the pioneer of smoking in the loft. Those were the days when Evan was suddenly forbidden the back premises, and Jan set definitely to work in the stables when he was not at the village school. Years elapsed before the cricket stage that drew the children together again as biggish boys; in the interim Jan had imbibed wisdom of more kinds than one. On discovering himself to be a rude natural left-hand bowler, who could spoil the afternoon at any moment by the premature dismissal of his opponent, he was sagacious enough to lose the art at times in the most sudden and mysterious manner, and only to recover it by fits and starts when Evan had made all the runs he wanted. And as Jan had but little idea of batting, there was seldom any bad blood over the game. But in all their relations Jan took care of that, for he had developed a real devotion to Evan, who could be perfectly delightful to one companion at a time, when everything was going well.
And then things had happened so thick and fast that it was difficult to recall them in their chronological order; but the salient points were that Rutter the elder, that fine figure on a box, with his bushy whiskers and his bold black eyes, had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia after a bout of night-work in the month of February, and that the son of an ironmaster’s coachman by a northern town awoke to find himself the grandson of an East Anglian clergyman whose ancient name he had never heard before, but who sent for the lad in hot haste, to make a gentleman of him if it was not too late.
The change from the raw red outworks of an excessively modern and utilitarian town, to the most venerable of English rectories, in a countryside which has scarcely altered since the Conquest, was not appreciated as it might have been by Jan Rutter. He had nothing against the fussy architecture and the highly artificial garden of his late environment; on the contrary, he heartily preferred those familiar immaturities to the general air of complacent antiquity which pervaded his new home. That was the novelty to Jan, and there was a prejudice against it in his veins. It was the very atmosphere which had driven his mother before him to desperation. Her blood in him rebelled again; nor did he feel the effect the less because he was too young to trace the cause. He only knew that he had been happier in a saddle-room [1q]that still smelt of varnish than he was ever likely to be under mellow tiles and mediæval trees. The tutor and the strenuous training for a public school came to some extent as a relief; but the queer lad took quite a pride in showing no pride at all in his altered conditions and prospects. The new school and the new home were all one to him. He had not been consulted about either. He recognised an authority which he was powerless to resist, but there the recognition ended. There could be no question of gratitude for offices performed out of a cold sense of duty, by beings of his own blood who never so much as mentioned his father’s death, or even breathed his mother’s name. There was a tincture of their own pride even in him.
He had heard of public schools from Evan, and even envied that gilded child his coming time at one; but, when his own time came so unexpectedly, Jan had hardened his heart, and faced the inevitable as callously as any criminal. And then at its hardest his heart had melted within him: an arbitrary and unkind fate held out the hope of amends by restoring to his ken the one creature he really wished to see again. It was true that Jan had heard nothing of Evan since the end of the Christmas holidays; but then the boys had never exchanged a written word in their lives. And the more he thought of it, the less Jan feared the worst that might accrue from their meeting on the morrow or the day after. Not that he counted on the best: not that his young blood had warmed incontinently to the prospect which had chilled it hitherto. Master Evan as an equal was still an inconceivable figure; and the whole prospect remained grey and grim; but at least there was a glint of excitement in it now, a vision of depths and heights.
So the night passed, his first at a public school. The only sounds were those that marked its passage: the muffled ticking of his one treasure, the little watch under his pillow, and the harsh chimes of an outside clock which happened to have struck ten as he opened the Midsummer List. It had since struck eleven; he even heard it strike twelve. But life was more exciting, when he fell asleep soon after midnight, than Jan Rutter had dreamt of finding it when he went to bed.
Chapter 3 Very Raw Material
It was all but a summer morning when Jan got back into the trousers without pockets and the black jacket and tie ordained by the school authorities. Peculiarly oppressive to Jan was the rule about trouser pockets; those in his jacket were so full in consequence that there was barely room for his incriminating belt, which he rolled up as small as it would go, and made into a parcel to be hidden away in his study when he had one. This was his last act before leaving the dormitory and marching downstairs at an hour when most of the household were presumably still in bed and asleep; but Jan was naturally an early riser, and he had none of the scruples of conventionality[2q] on the score of an essentially harmless act. He was curious to see something of his new surroundings, and there was nothing like seeing for oneself.
At the foot of the lead-lined stairs, worn bright as silver at the edges, there was a short tiled passage with a green baize door[5] at one end and what was evidently the boys’ hall at the other. The baize door communicated with the master’s side of the house, for the new boys had come through it on their way up to dormitory. The hall was a good size, with one very long table under the windows and two shorter ones on either side of the fireplace. On the walls hung portraits of the great composers, which Jan afterwards found to be house prizes in part-singing competitions discontinued before his time; at the moment, however, he took no kind of interest in them, and but very little in the two challenge cups under the clock. What did attract him was the line of open windows, looking like solid blocks of sunlight and fresh air. On the sill of one a figure in print was busy with her wash-leather, and she accosted Jan cheerily.
“You are down early, sir!”
“I always am,” remarked Jan, looking for a door into the open air.
“You’re not like most of the gentlemen, then,” the maid returned, in her cheerful Cockney voice. “They leaves it to the last moment, and then they ‘as to fly. You should ‘ear ‘em come down them stairs!”
“Is there no way out?” inquired Jan.
“You mean into the quad?”
“That’s the quad, is it? Then I do.”
“Well, there’s the door, just outside this door; but Morgan, ‘e keeps the key o’ that, and I don’t think ‘e’s come yet.”
“Then I’m going through that window,” announced the new boy, calmly; and carried out his intention without a moment’s hesitation.
Had his object been to run away on his very first morning, before his house-master was astir, as the maid seemed to fear by the way she leant out of her window to watch him, the next step would have taxed all Jan’s resources.
Heriot’s quad was a gravel plot very distinctively enclosed, on the left by the walls of buildings otherwise unconnected with the house, on the right by the boys’ studies. At the further extremity were twin gables over gothic arches which left the two interiors underneath open at one end to all the elements; never in his life had Jan beheld such structures; but he had picked up enough from his tutor to guess that they were fives-courts[6], and he went up to have a look into them. To the right of the fives-courts was an alley ending at a formidable spiked gate which was yet the only obvious way of escape, had Jan been minded to make his. But nothing was further from his thoughts; indeed, there was a certain dull gleam in his eyes, and a sallow flush upon his face, which had not been there the previous evening. At all events he looked wider awake.
The studies interested him most. There was a double row of little lattice windows, piercing a very wall of ivy, like port-holes in a vessel’s side. Not only were the little windows deep-set in ivy, but each had its little window-box, and in some of these still drooped the withered remnant of a brave display. Jan was not interested in flowers, or for that matter in anything that made for the mere beauty of life; but he peered with interest into one or two of the ground-floor studies. There was little to be seen beyond his own reflection broken to bits in the diamond panes. Between him and the windows was a border of shrubs, behind iron palings bent by the bodies and feet of generations, and painted green like the garden seats under the alien walls opposite. On the whole, and in the misty sunlight of the fine September morning, Jan liked Heriot’s quad.
“You’re up early, sir!”
It was not the maid this time, but a bearded man-servant whom the boy had seen the previous night. Jan made the same reply as before, and no sort of secret of the way in which he had got out into the quad. He added that he should like to have a look at the studies; and Morgan, with a stare and a smile quite lost on Jan, showed him round.
They were absurdly, deliciously, inconceivably tiny, the studies at Heriot’s; each was considerably smaller than a dormitory “tish,” and the saddle-room of Jan’s old days would have made three or four of them. But they were undeniably cosy and attractive, as compact as a captain’s cabin, as private as friar’s cell, and far more comfortable than either. Or so they might well have seemed to the normal boy about to possess a study of his own, with a table and two chairs, a square of carpet as big as a bath-sheet, a book-shelf and pictures, and photographs and ornaments to taste, fretwork and plush to heart’s content, a flower-box for the summer term, hot-water pipes for the other two, and above all a door of his own to shut at will against the world! But Jan Rutter had not the instincts of a normal schoolboy, nor the temperament favourable to their rapid growth. He had been brought up too uncomfortably to know the value of comfort, and too much in the open air to appreciate the merits of indoor sanctuary. Artistic impulse he had none; and the rudimentary signs of that form of grace, to be seen in nearly all the studies he was shown, left him thoroughly unimpressed.
“Is it true,” he asked, “that every boy in the school has one of these holes?”
“Quite true,” replied Morgan, staring. “You didn’t say ‘holes,’ sir?”
“I did,” declared Jan, enjoying his accidental hit.
“You’d better not let Mr. Heriot hear you, sir, or any of the gentlemen either!”
“I don’t care who hears me,” retorted Jan, boastfully; but it must not be forgotten that he had come to school against his will, and that this was his first opportunity of airing a not unnatural antagonism.
“You wait till you’ve got one of your own,” said the well-meaning man, “with a nice new carpet and table-cloth, and your own family portraits and sportin’ picters!”
“At any rate I should know a horse from a cow,” returned Jan, examining something in the nature of a sporting print, “and not hang up rot like that!”
“You let Mr. Shockley hear you!” cried Morgan, with a laugh. “You’ll catch it!”
“I’ve no doubt I shall do that,” said Jan, grimly. He followed Morgan into an empty study, and asked if it was likely to be his.
