Chapter II: 'mop Faucibus Hæsit'

Boys in the fifth form at Fernhall shared a study with one companion. Monitors of course lived in solitary splendour, with a bed which would stand on its head, and allowed itself to be shut up in a cupboard in the corner. Small boys who had not attained even to the fringe of the school aristocracy lived in herds in bare and exceedingly untidy rooms round the inner quads. Even in those days there were monitors who were worshippers of art. Some of them had curtains in their rooms of rich and varied colouring; one of them had a plate hung up which he declared was a piece of undoubted old Worcester. Tomlinson was a great authority on objects of _virtù_, and a rare connoisseur, but we changed his plate for one which we bought for sixpence at Newby's, and he never knew the difference. Then there was one fellow who had several original oil paintings. These represented farmyard scenes and were attributed indifferently to Landseer, Herring, and a number of other celebrated artists. Whoever painted them, these pictures were the objects of more desperate forays than any other property within the school limits. I remember them well as adorning the room of a certain man of muscle, to whom, of course, they belonged merely as the spoils of war. The rightful owner lived three doors off, but I don't think that he ever had the pluck to attempt to regain his own.

However, in the small boys' rooms there were none of these luxuries of an effete civilisation. There was a book-shelf full of ragged books, none of which by any chance ever bore the name of anyone in that study; there was a table, a gas-burner, a frying-pan, and a kettle. These last-named articles might have been seen in every study at Fernhall, from the study of the monitor to that of the pauper, as we called that unfortunate being who had not yet emerged from the lower school. In the long nights of winter, when the wild sea roared just beyond the limits of their quad, and the spray came flying over the sea-wall to be dashed against their study windows, all Fernhall boys had a common consolation. They called it brewing: not the brewing of beer or of any intoxicating liquor, but of that cheering cup of tea which consoles so many thousands, from the London charwoman to the pig-tailed Chinaman, from the enervated Indian to the half-frozen Russian exile in Siberia. At first the headmasters of Fernhall tried hard to put down this practice. Sergeants lurked about our passages, confiscated our kettles, carried away the frying-pans full of curly rashers from under our longing eyes, and 'lines' and flagellations were all we got in exchange. At last a new era began. A great reformer arrived, a 'Head' of liberal leanings and wide sympathy. This man frowned on coercion, and, instead of taking away our kettles, gave us a huge range of stoves on which to boil them. From a cook's point of view, no doubt, the range of stoves was a great improvement on the old gas-burner, but, in spite of the liberality of the 'Head,' small clusters of boys still stood night after night on those old study tables and patiently fried their bacon over the gas.

Unfortunately this was not the worst of their misdoings. Besides the appetising smell of the bacon and the delicious aroma of chicory or tea, there was too often a strong flavour of 'bird's-eye' or 'latakia' about the passages. Almost to a man, the school smoked. How it had crept in I don't pretend to know, but the habit had been growing in the school for years until it was almost universal. This was the one thing which our new head-master would not tolerate at any price, and it was pretty well understood throughout the school that his dealings with the first offender detected in the act would be short and severe. About the time of the Loamshire match he had taken to beating up our quarters in person, not, I think, from any desire to detect the smokers in the act, but from a hope that the fear of his coming might act as a deterrent. About a week after Snap Hales's great bowling feat, Fernhall was brewing as usual. The dusk had fairly set in; a crowd of boys were jostling one another with the cans and frying-pans at the great public stoves, and Snap and many others were breaking school-rules as usual in their own studies. Mind, I am pledged to serve up my boys _au naturel_ and not smothered in white sauce, so that if you don't like my menu you had better take warning in time. The bacon had been finished, the hot rolls from the tuckshop had been submitted to digestions which were capable of dealing even with hot rolls and butter, and now Snap Hales, Billy Winthrop, and one Simpson were desperately endeavouring to enjoy, or appear to enjoy, the forbidden pleasures of tobacco. Billy had an elaborately carved meerschaum between his teeth, while Snap lay full length on an extemporised divan, making strange noises and strange faces in his endeavours to get on terms with a 'hubble-bubble.' Billy's jaws ached with the weight of the meerschaum, and Snap was as blown with trying to make his instrument of torture draw as if he had been running the school mile. Simpson was in a corner cutting up some 'sun-dried honeydew,' which he had procured in a cake--'such,' he said, 'as the trappers of the North-West always use.' To tell the truth, he liked 'whittling' at that cake of tobacco with his knife a great deal better than smoking it, for the first two or three whiffs invariably sent a cold chill through his frame and a conviction that, like Mark Twain, he had inadvertently swallowed an earthquake.

Suddenly the boys stopped talking; there was a heavy rap at the door, preceded by a vain attempt to open it, and followed by the command, in deep tones, to 'open this door.'

'Nix! by Jove!' whispered Simpson, whiter now than ever with fright.

'Rot!' replied Snap unceremoniously. 'It's only that fool Lane, up to some of his jokes. Go to Bath, Legs,' he added at the top of his voice.

'Open this door at once,' thundered someone on the other side, while lock and hinge rattled beneath the besieger's hands.

'Don't you wish you may get it, old chap,' 'Shove away, and be hanged to you,' 'Try your skull against the panel, blockhead,' and several similar remarks, were now hurled at the enemy by those in the study. Meanwhile, preparations for repelling an assault were rapidly being made.

'Boys, open this door, don't you know who is speaking to you?' said the voice once more.

'Oh yes, we know,' laughed Snap, 'and we are getting ready to receive you, sir.'

'Deuced well old Legs imitates the Head, doesn't he?' whispered Billy Winthrop.

'Not badly,' answered Snap in the same tone. 'Have you got everything ready?' he added.

'Yes,' said Billy; 'but let me try my fire-arm first,' and, dipping the nose of a large squirt into the inkpot, he filled it, and then discharged it at a venture through the key-hole. The result was satisfactory. From the sounds of anger and hasty retreat in the passages the boys guessed that the shot had told, and indulged in a burst of triumphant laughter in consequence. But the enemy was back again in a minute wrenching furiously at the door, which now began to give.

'Let us die in the breach,' cried Snap, catching up a large mop, which he had used earlier in the day to clean his study floor, and emptying over it the remains of the cold coffee. 'Billy, stand by with your blunderbuss. Simpson, at the next shove let the door go!' he whispered, and the boys took up their places--Snap with his mop in rest opposite the entrance, Simpson with his hand on the key, and Billy's deadly weapon peeping over his leader's shoulder. At the next assault Simpson let the door go, and Hales rushed headlong out to meet the foe, getting the whole of Billy's charge down the back of his neck as he went. Someone knocked up the mop, so that it cannoned from him to another of the attacking party, whom it took fairly in the face, plastering him up against the opposite wall, a full-length portrait of 'the Head!'

For once Snap's spirits deserted him. The mop fell from his nerveless hand. He even forgot to say that he did not do it. It was too gross a sin even for a schoolboy to find excuses for. Nor had 'the Head' much to say--partly, perhaps, because 'mops and coffee' was not a favourite dish with him, and he had had rather more of it at his first essay than he cared to swallow, and partly, no doubt, because (diplomat though he was) for the life of him he could not remember what was the dignified thing to do under such unusual circumstances. The Sergeant recovered himself first.

'They've all been smoking, Sir!' he asserted maliciously. 'I suppose I'd better take their pipes.'

'Yes, Sergeant, and their names,' replied the Head.

'No need of that,' muttered our implacable foe. 'I know this here study better nor ever a one in Fernhall.'

'Hales, and you, Winthrop minor, report yourselves to me in my library after morning school to-morrow,' said the Head, and, slowly turning, the great man went, his mortar-board somewhat on one side, while down the long cassock which he wore the streams of coffee ran.

Two minutes after his departure, No. 19, the scene of the fray, was full of friends and of sympathisers.

'You'll get sacked, of course,' remarked one of these, 'but,' he added, 'I don't see that there is anything worse than that which Old Petticoats can do.'

'You don't think he could hang us, for instance, eh, Legs?' asked Snap sarcastically. 'Well, you are a nice, cheerful chap, you are!' he added.

'Never mind, old fellow,' urged another, 'they will give you a good enough character for Sandhurst, and what do you want more?'

'You want a good deal for Sandhurst now, Viper!' replied Snap; 'they'd rather have a blind mathematician than a giant who didn't know what nine times nine is.'

In spite of their comforters our friends felt for at least five minutes that there was something in their world amiss. Then suddenly Snap began to laugh, quite softly and to himself at first, but the laugh was infectious, so that in half a minute every boy in the passage was holding his sides, and laughing until the tears ran down his cheeks. By-and-by inquiries were made for Simpson, who had not been seen since the opening of the door. In answer to the shouts addressed to him, a sepulchral voice replied, and after some search the unfortunate wretch was produced from behind the door, white with fear and tobacco-smoke, flat as a cake of his own beloved honeydew, his knees trembling, and his hair on end with terror. Luckily for him, he had drawn the door back upon himself, and had remained unnoticed behind it ever since.

In spite of the tragedy with which it had begun, the remainder of the evening was spent in adding one more to the works of art which adorn Boot Hall Row, to wit, one life-size portrait of the Very Reverend the Head-master of Fernhall, drawn upon the wall against which he had so recently been flattened, in charcoal, by one Snap Hales; while underneath was written, to instruct future generations:

IN MEMORIAM, JUNE 22, 1874.
'MOP FAUCIBUS HÆSIT'