Chapter II: Breaking Up

There was uproar at Dorrincourt, disorder everywhere, confusion reigned supreme. The great old school scarcely knew itself; scholastic dignity was at an end. Abode of learning is a term almost synonymous with quietude; anything less like quietude than the precincts of Dorrincourt on that important day would be difficult to find. Study there was none, nor a pretence at study; the masters for the most part kept themselves well out of sight; they felt upon an occasion such as this the tutorial presence was not to be desired. The boys had it their own way; it was their day, practically given up entirely to them.

And good use they made of it--good use, that is to say, from their peculiar point of view. There was bustle everywhere, running to and fro, rushing here and there--rushing was the only term which could be applied to their style of locomotion--walking was a thing they did not dream of; helter-skelter they passed from place to place, from room to room. Was it necessary for one to pass to another portion of the building, though it might be to the adjoining room, he never thought of adopting a pace natural to an ordinary human being, but as though every moment were a precious quantity, away he flew at fullest speed. It was well if he did not verify the old teaching, more haste worse speed,--well if, in full career, he did not cannon into a colleague coming at equal speed from another quarter; for, if such was his ill-fortune, dire was the disaster. More than probable each would be laden with belongings of a more or less fragile nature, and more or less dear to their several owners. It was fortunate if, overcome by the unexpected shock, both parties did not go headlong to the ground, their treasures, shattered into fragments, finding a resting-place beside their owners on the floor. In such a case, calmness and common sense alike were cast aside, and neither would allow that he was in any sense responsible for the catastrophe; with more vigour than discretion, each would lay the blame upon the other's shoulders, and it was strange if what was beyond all sort of doubt purely an accident was not made upon the spot _casus belli_.

Such an affair was in full progress when first we come upon the scene. Two young gentlemen, Willie Giffard and Stoneham, senior, each being laden with precious possessions, such as cages for mice, writing-desks, balls, stamp books, _et hoc genus omne_, tearing post-haste through the corridor outside the fourth room, had been ignorant of each other's neighbourhood until each, quite accidentally, had knocked the other down. It was an ugly fall, no doubt; indeed an oaken floor is not the softest place on which to tumble; nor was the matter mended by the fact that desks, cages, books, were not improved by such a meeting. Still, since it was an accident, and neither could be said chiefly to be in fault, ordinary logic would have suggested that it would have been better for each to pick himself and his belongings up and go, with as much philosophy as he could muster, quietly upon his way. Such a thing did not, however, occur to them, for, in a pretty passion, no sooner did they find themselves upon the ground, than Giffard seized Stoneham by the collar of his coat, and strove with might and main to bump his head against the floor, while Stoneham, with an equal desire for vengeance, caught Gifford by the hair, and began to pommel him wherever he could plant a blow. One of the monitors, however, Lewis Thelton, chancing to be passing by, thinking these proceedings somewhat too erratic, separated the combatants and insisted on their rising to their feet.

"A pretty pair you are!" said Thelton, when they had resumed their perpendicular. "Is that the sort of thing which you call decent, clawing each other about like a couple of wild animals? What's the meaning of it all?"

"What's he mean by it, that's what I want to know?" cried Giffard, who looked none the better for the encounter. "What's he mean by knocking a fellow down and smashing all his things for nothing at all? If he or anybody else thinks I'm going to stand that sort of thing, they're very much mistaken, and so I'll show them pretty quick."

"What do you mean?" retorted Master Stoneham. "You wait a bit, and then we'll see. He knocks me down, and then tries to make out it's me!" Master Stoneham was too heated to consider nominatives.

"Knock you down! He comes lumbering along like a great cart-horse."

"Who are you calling a cart-horse?"

"Never mind!" And this interesting couple were at each other's throats before you could say Jack Robinson. By this time a select number of their friends were gathered round, in the lively anticipation of something worth the looking at. But Thelton interfered; with scant ceremony he took each by the shoulder, and by a mere exertion of bodily strength dragged the two apart.

"This won't do," he said, "if it's the same to you." Apparently it was not, but they had to make the best of it. "If you want to have a row, you'll have to wait till next term to settle it; there must be nothing of that sort to-day. Pick up the things which are yours, Stoneham, and come with me. As for you, Giffard, you take yours and march off pretty quick. It seems to me you're a couple of young simpletons; but that's no affair of mine,--it's my business to see that you don't make simpletons of yourselves to-day."

In anything but graceful fashion the two young gentlemen did the senior's bidding, grumbling to themselves the while, and quarrelling every time they chanced to cross each other's path. But Thelton paid no heed. No sooner had Stoneham regained possession of his property, than without ado, wholly disregarding his indignant mutterings, Thelton marched him on in front of him to the matron's quarters, in which direction he had been originally bound.

But the state of excitement under which all, big and little, seemed to labour, was to some degree excusable when it is borne in mind that before evening, in all probability, the whole host of youngsters would have bade farewell to Dorrincourt; for it was the last day of the Christmas term; the school was breaking up, and what boy ever could be calm on such a memorable occasion? Calmness, generally speaking, is not the normal state of boyhood. Boys, like little pots, soon boil over, and it is but a single step from their ordinary condition to what, in people of an older growth, would be termed a state of maddening excitement. It is very well for a staider nature to philosophise; but he is a skilful teacher who keeps his pupils in a state even approaching to restraint when a great school is breaking up. Visions of home, the anticipation of the pleasures so near at hand, the bursting of the bonds by which they have hitherto been so closely bound, even the mere prospect of the railway journey--for all boys are fond of travelling--all these things together are too much for youth's philosophy, and seem to turn lads' heads almost completely round.

As witness this group of lads from the far west, from county Cornwall. There are eight or nine of them, and they are all clustered in one room. Some are packing up their treasures; some are superintending, as volunteers, the operations of the others; all are making discord with their voices. The noisiest, if it is possible so to distinguish one, is a tall lad, slightly built, with jet black hair, and great black eyes, which, at the present moment, blazed with excitement. He was standing in the centre of the group; his hands were in his pockets, but, as was not seldom, when his excitement became too much for him, out came his hands from his pockets, and he commenced pacing to and fro, using his arms, as does an orator, to illustrate his arguments. This was Noel Penharden, from over near St. Ives, between that borough and St. Erth, as wild a youth as you would wish to see. "Vesuvius" they called him, or, shorter, "Su" or "Suvi;" for he was always either in a state of eruption, or bordering on that state. He was an enthusiast, full of notions; he would take up one and push it to its bitter length, until he had driven it to death, when he would take another in its place. Peter the Hermit, Ignatius Loyola, St. Simon Stylites, the dauntless warriors of Thermopylæ, were the heroes of his creed. It was his ambition to take up some impossible theory, some impossible position, and die defending it. Death was to him the victor's crown; to try to destroy a stone wall with one's head, and to dash out one's brains in doing so, was with him to act a hero's part. To call such a proceeding lunacy was to fill his soul with indignation.

"Why," said he, while the fire flashed from his eyes, "what is a man if he dare not dare to dare? What is a man if he stays to count the cost? Is any price too great to pay for peril? No; fortunate is he who will sacrifice his body as the payment of his fame!" And he would look at you with such fervour in his glance that you were forced to own that he had the germ of a righteous gospel in him somewhere, if his ideas were not too well arranged.

At present he was enlarging on a very curious theme indeed--curious, that is to say, considering who the speaker was, for it was none other than the glory and majesty of work. As a rule, it was proverbial that Penharden scorned what he termed the dull routine of daily labour, in which, by the way, he was by no means singular. On principle he declined to waste his time in slavery; men, and by deduction boys as well, were born to higher destinies than that; genius, valour, a lofty soul, rose above such earthy trammels, and, like the bird of which the legend tells, mounted at once straight up to heaven. That there was no royal path to learning he utterly denied. The highest learning is instinctive in the highest natures. What is the highest learning he declined in particular to say; in fact, details were beneath his dignity. Conclusions were for him; the processes by which he arrived at them he declined to mention. In short, in general, for an idler young gentleman than Penharden you would look in vain. Therefore this new mood of his took his listeners aback.

"Holidays!" he cried; "the name alone sticks in one's throat! Is it the highest aim of man to spend his life in holidays? You libel him in saying so; and yet to listen to you fellows one would suppose that to be the happiest moment of his existence in which he looks forward to the dry rot of laziness. Life means toil, continual achievement, and he who lets the hours idly pass him by ceases to live, and is content to vegetate; the higher nature never is quiescent, but is always moving on."

"Hear, hear! bravo!" exclaimed George Trevena, short, and broad, and muscular, banging a book upon the desk in appreciation of his comrade's eloquence. "The higher nature's always moving on, and that's exactly what we're going to do; we're going to move on home, so we're the higher nature."

"There's a grandeur about your language, sir," said Hardy Greyland,--a studious lad was Hardy, with grave and earnest face and quiet eyes, which always seemed as though their owner was deep in contemplation,--"which I am not quite sure is equally applicable to your thoughts, and which certainly is not at all suited to your actions. If you think life means toil and continuous achievement, why don't you make it so? I'm not aware that I've heard that opinion expressed by you before."

"I'm not responsible to you for what you may or may not have heard," retorted Noel. "I'm responsible to myself alone. Nor should a man be continually blurting out his deepest feelings; because they are so deep they cannot be superficially expressed. As for your sneer, a great man has said that sneering is the emptying of rubbish from a rubbish heap"----

"What great man?" asked Hardy; for it was notorious that Penharden had a habit of quoting as the wisdom of "a great man" impromptu observations of his own.

"What great man?" struck in Ralph Eva. "Quicksilver Ralph" they might not improperly have called him, for he was never at rest even for a moment. Unlike the western folk in general, he was extremely fair; his hair was almost white, and though he cut it never so short, would persist in curling all over his head. His cheeks were fat and soft, and round and rosy as any child's of a more northern clime. His lips were singularly red, and his eyes, as his friends put it, were blue as any girl's. He was the incarnation of good-humour; indeed, as those same friends had it in their kindly way, to look at him was enough to make one laugh. "Behold a genius!" He left his place, pointing with a ruler in his hand at Noel. "This, gentlemen, is a specimen of the class remarkable; he is a remarkably great man. Observe his head, it is big as a baboon's; his eyes, they are like two burning coals; his brow, he has water on the brain; his nose, it is broken at the bridge; his mouth, he could eat an elephant; his teeth, they are like tusks."

"There is no clearer sign of a want of intellectual power than a tendency to indulge in low buffoonery," struck in Noel, regarding his critic with lofty scorn.

"Is that said by a great man?" inquired Ralph.

"It is spoken to an idiot," returned his friend. "It is unfortunate that one cannot talk common sense in certain company without being made a target of by nincompoops." And thrusting his hands to the very bottom of his trousers' pockets, he subsided into himself.

"Half-past nine, another two hours to wait," said Eddie Mason, the youngest and smallest of the party, after an interval of something like quietude. "How slowly the time does go, to be sure! I thought it was half-past ten at least."

"Time always does go slowly in such a hole as this," said Chandos Effingham, a young gentleman of a misanthropic turn of mind, who made it a rule to grumble at whatever place he might happen to be in, while praising to the skies such other places as he might happen to be absent from. "What else can you expect? Disgusting prison-house! Talk of the Bastille!--if all the talk about freedom and the rest of it weren't such nonsense, they wouldn't have left one stone of it upon another years and years ago."

The speaker sat upon a desk, his feet upon a form, his head deep down between his shoulders in an attitude of complete dejection.

"I wonder if it's going to snow," said Trevena, moving to the window and looking out. "I hope it will. I hate Christmases without snow; it seems a sort of make-believe; and not a bit of ice for skating! If this is the sort of thing we may look forward to all through the holidays, a pretty time we'll have of it. What's a fellow to do in winter-time if there's no proper winter?"

"There's sure to be no proper winter; there never will be any more," prophesied Chandos in his consolatory way. "Things are going to the dogs all round; the times are out of joint, and everything's in a big muddle. Mopey sort of days are what we may look forward to from now to never."

"I don't know what you call mopey sort of days," said Greyland, going to Trevena at the window; "but if bets were in my line, I wouldn't mind giving you short odds that it snows before evening."

"But as bets aren't in your line, of course you won't," retorted Effingham with a cheerful sort of growl. "You'd lose your money if you did. Snow! not it; at least, not if you want it to. If you want it to be fine, it will snow then fast enough--or rain--for a month right clean away."

"What's this about Tregowan?" asked Eddie Mason. "Why isn't he coming home with us? It's hard lines, you know. I can't make it out a bit."

"It's a breeze, my boy, that's what it is; in fact, a jolly pretty storm." It was Eva spoke, and as he did so he was trying to lock a desk which was crammed to overflowing. "The Doctor means to call him to account, and give him something nice to think of in the holidays; talk him blue, no doubt, and perhaps give him a good long imposition to occupy his time into the bargain. Duke's been going it rather hot this term, and the Doctor means to try and see if he can't improve the occasion while there's time."

"If I were Duke, I wouldn't stand it," struck in a lad who had not spoken hitherto, a handsome lad, with well-knit figure, and a look upon his clever face which it was difficult to understand. This was Lionel Pollyon, of whom the boys were wont with one accord to say they could not make him out. "Of course it is his affair, not mine; but were I in his place, I should say distinctly that I declined to be treated as a child. Yesterday school was at an end, to-day we are our own masters, and no one has a right to make us stay if we prefer to go. The Doctor has had all the term in which to speak; why should he choose the day for going home? If I were Duke, I would tell him, if he had any communication to make, it might be made by letter."

"And a pretty fellow you'd be for your pains!" said Greyland, standing by the window still. "What would be the use of doing that? It would only make the matter worse. Besides, it's all nonsense about our being our own masters; it will be many a day before we're that; while we're at Dorrincourt, the Doctor's responsible for us, and we to him. If the Doctor told him to stay, Duke's not so mad as to refuse."

"You call that madness, do you? Well, we differ. Duke had arranged to go by a certain train, as the Doctor knew quite well, the same as all the rest of us, and for no good reason at all which I can see, at the very last moment in steps the Doctor and says, 'You will do nothing of the kind, but stop and talk to me.'"

"It's tyranny, that's what it is--rank tyranny. He is a craven who yields to tyrants. If I were Duke, I'd have run away last night rather than stay behind this morning." Thus Penharden, breaking from his silence to indulge in the frank expression of his own peculiar views.

"I daresay you would," observed Greyland. "I should think you quite capable of anything. All I can say is, that I credit Tregowan with having more sense than you."

"Look here, Greyland," replied Penharden, rising in his place with proper dignity. "Just understand me once for all. I will stand no insults of any kind from you. I have stood them long enough. I'm not a man"----

"Hear! hear! He's not a man!" interpolated Eva.

"Of many words," continued Noel, surveying the speaker with crushing scorn. "You know me well."

"We do; too well--too well!" went on the unrepentant Ralph.

"I'll punch your head in half a minute," burst out Noel, casting dignity aside upon a sudden. "If you think I'm going to stand your cheek, young Eva, you're very much mistaken, and so I'll let you know. You're an impudent young beggar, and the sooner you are taught your place the better it will be."

"That's right," said Greyland. "Pitch into Eva; knock him about; punch his head for him. And that's your idea of freedom, is it? Well, as Pollyon says, we differ."

"Children must be taught their places," was the advocate of freedom's prompt reply. "And if it can be done no other way, it must be done by thrashing them."

And he moved to Eva to put his threat into execution; but Ralph, well used to such encounters, was too quick for him. Away he darted, on the desk and over it, so that it stood between him and his foe. Penharden made haste to follow, but it was vain; Ralph had the start, and kept it too, over the desks and under, round and round the room, knocking forms down in his headlong flight, dexterously upsetting them right in his pursuer's way, so that more than once Penharden found it difficult to save himself from coming head foremost to the ground. The hubbub was delightful, to the spectators; they cheered the chase, and were not slow upon occasion to facilitate the younger lad's escape, but were not so agile when Penharden chanced to come their way. Only one was annoyed by the confusion, and he Pollyon; he had an open book upon the desk in front of him, and not impossibly he found the tumult did not make reading easier.

"What a wretched din!" he cried. "Why can't you two keep still? Leave him alone, Penharden. What do you want bothering after him? You'll get him when you want him, sure enough. Look here! I've made up my mind about one thing, and it is this: I mean to stand by Tregowan in whatever scrape he may be. If he is forced to stay, then so will I. It doesn't matter much by what train I get home; and if the Doctor means to keep him back, then he can't very well object to my staying to keep him company. It will be awfully lonely going home alone, so I shall stop and go with him."

"Ay," said Noel, wiping his brow, for his exertions, which had been futile after all, had made him warm; "well, yes, I daresay it would be kind. I don't know what my folks will say if I'm not up to time, and they expect me by this train; but I can send my luggage on, and follow by the next. I suppose he'll be going then. I daresay it won't matter much. I should think the Doctor doesn't mean to keep him overnight; if I were sure of that, I'd stop as well."

"Oh, that's safe enough; he'll never try to keep him here to-night; he'll let him go to-day, you may be sure of that."

"If you think so, I'll stop," said Noel, though his tones were scarcely enthusiastic; "but I should be in an awful hole if after all he didn't let him go; my people would come posting after me to see if I were dead. And suppose the Doctor found that we were stopping, what should we say if he asked us what we meant by it?"

"Oh, if you've any scruples, why, go at once; no one asked you to stay behind. You can please yourself; I can do very well without you, thanks; but you talk so very big about all sorts of things, that I didn't know you were afraid of what the Doctor might take it into his head to say."

"Afraid! who says I am afraid? He who keeps company with fear"---- And Noel was going off into a flight of eloquence again, but Pollyon interrupted him.

"Oh, stop that arrant bosh!" he cried, with considerable irreverence. "I never heard such stuff as you can spout. Are you going to stop, or are you not?"

"Yes," said Noel rather flushed, and not too gracefully, "I am."

"And much good may you get by it," said Greyland, who had been listening to the argument. "To my mind it's just stupidity. What good do you suppose you'll do to any one by stopping? If the Doctor hears of it, he'll be annoyed, and no wonder; it'll look uncommonly like defying him. It'll serve you right, since you so sympathise with Duke, if he gives you both an imposition to keep him company."

"Thank you! We did not ask good Master Greyland for his opinion; we all know what a good boy he is," said Pollyon sneeringly; and Noel laughed, though rather awkwardly, as if in doubt whether or not his friend had said a witty thing.

But an exclamation of Eddie Mason's at the window directed general attention to other things, and the question as to whether Pollyon and his friend were right or wrong in choosing to remain and give Marmaduke Tregowan the benefit of their society was left unsettled. Cried Eddie at the window--

"Hurrah! it's beginning to snow!" and there was a rush to see if his words were true. There was no doubt of that. Hardy Greyland's prediction was already verified; the heavy yellow clouds were beginning to yield their substance, and large fleecy flakes of snow were already drifting through the air.