Chapter XIII

It was curiously unpleasant to Jim to sleep between cool linen sheets with embroidered edges and to wake to a fresh panic on the subject of Emily bitterly bringing him hot water at seven.

His night had been unrefreshed and full of dreams; it occurred to him at about four o’clock in the morning that he had better give it all up and creep out into the friendly morning, back to his barge before the skipper had time to find another boy.

Was any goal worth such tortures of humiliation and uncertainty? Then a spasm of rage shook him. Why should he be at the mercy of things that happened—why couldn’t he, with all the strength that was in him, happen to the things? What people think, matters only if you yield to them. To run away from them was like giving in to being drowned.

He dressed slowly with a kind of cautious defiance and went down to breakfast, but there was no breakfast, though it was already eight o’clock. He broke into the vexed finishings of housemaids and hurried out of a French window across the lawn.

The garden, at least, needed no preparation for the day. Nobody was doing anything to it. A slight mist hung about the trees, and the lawn was white as frost with early dew.

At half-past eight he heard the gate click, and looking up he saw Mrs. Bligh coming into the garden from the road with a curious, rapt look in her face, as if she had been reinforced from another world. She smiled when she saw him; even before Jim knew where she had been he wondered at the air she had, of fresh, spiritual intensity.

When he learned that she had been to church, he wondered still more what she had found there.

Two little girls who had not appeared before came down to breakfast.

Their hair was very long and glossy—gold with a hint of red in it; their skirts were very short and their legs very slim.

They had eyes of a serene blue which shone with all the weighty gravity of a kitten’s. Dora had a charming tip-tilted nose and Mabel had a charming straight one, and they both behaved formidably well.

They sat one on each side of their mother, and neither of them swung their legs or lifted their voices; their small hands moved with deftness and despatch; all their wants were unobtrusively supplied, and they had the ease of children confident of their own behaviour. From time to time they gravely studied the appearance of the new boy. They had been told by nurse that in some strange way he was different from the other three. He was a vulgar boy.

They suspected that the word vulgar meant something that went off with a bang when you least expected it. Something that nobody nice ever was.

Denis, with the glaring want of judgment common to his sex had stated that he liked ‘vulgar’ people. They were more fun. But then Denis liked pigs being killed and neither of his sisters did.

They made up their minds not to like Jim before they saw him, and as they equably ate their well-tapped boiled eggs, they decided with one straight look of interchanging confidence that they would keep to this decision.

Nobody, not even Jim, knew what he was going to do next with his knife.

They did not dream that they stood to Jim much as two angels off a Christmas card miraculously turned in to life.

Eliza at their age had known a great deal more than Eve. Dora and Mabel hardly had any individuality; they were like two small buds shaken by the wind against a mother rose!

All three of her children were a part of Mrs. Bligh; they flowed toward her and away from her like ripples borne on the smooth surface of a stream. She controlled them without visible effort.

When her children were with her she was like a lamp lit from within; and when they were withdrawn from her the light in her sank. It never wholly left her, but it seemed withdrawn into a secret shrine.

None of her children had even seen her angry or in a hurry, or preoccupied by her own concerns. She always spoke to them slowly, with her whole attention fixed on them, and she never changed her mind or broke her promises.

Nevertheless, if she became grave they trembled; her silent displeasure haunted their whole consciousness—they could not rest until they had obtained her forgiveness.

Mr. Bligh was merely an excitable outside element to his children—they could shut him out as you shut out a shower of rain and wind.

He was not formidable, and often if you disobeyed him he forgot; and when he said things were going to happen they didn’t. Their mother let them come to her all day long, and at night they said their prayers to her and she sat on their beds and sang to them, looking wonderfully like a fairy queen.

They hoped she was not so old that she couldn’t live till they grew up. She knew all about their fears at night, and crossed their foreheads before she kissed them, and left them with a candle and with a wonderful reinforcement of an invisible guardian angel to back it. Relentlessly and tirelessly Mrs. Bligh gave her children all they needed; except the power of doing without her.

They had hardly any initiative, and when Denis developed it he could see by his mother’s eye that he was being naughty.

But to Jim’s dazzled mind there was no flaw in a system which presented itself as all sympathy, happiness and affection. He had never seen people making each other’s happiness before, as if happiness was a pursuit. He supposed that you would have to be rather clean and well-off to do it. His mother had never thought of such a thing; it was as much as she could do to get them off to school in the morning.

Mr. Bligh was preoccupied at breakfast, and he barely threw Jim a word of explanation before he bounded off to his study to start his socialist lecture on the Holy Land.

Apparently there was no violent hurry about work. The library was indicated to Jim by a wave of the hand, and it was there that he found himself for the first time alone with the other three boys.

There was a perceptible pause as Jim came into the room. He hesitated and looked about him, wondering where he could least conspicuously go. Everything looked wonderfully handsome for a schoolroom, and as if you had to be careful about ink.

None of the boys turned as he entered, but a perceptible stiffness passed over them.

They did not set upon him as village dogs hurled themselves upon the alien Cadger; they left him alone; but it was just as much a fight.

In haughty silence they took their seats at separate tables, and, as those born out of due time, they set to work. Jim observed them each in turn; then he addressed himself to Wivvle, who looked the least inaccessible of the three, and asked him what he had better be at.

Wivvle, without turning his head, replied,—

‘Oh, can’t you find out for yourself?’

Wivvle was never able to resist being charming when there was no one present to think the worse of him for it; but he couldn’t afford to be charming now, under the condemnation of the other boys.

Their plan of ostracism had only come to them overnight, for they had been open-minded on the subject of Jim as long as he wasn’t there.

Wivvle had been distinctly sympathetic, and Ainley had said the whole thing, if well worked, might prove rather a lark; only Pritchard had obstinately shaken his head from the first, and said, ‘Poor people ought to be kept in their places’; but even he seemed to think you might be nice to them if they stayed there. What had changed their attitude was that Jim wasn’t ridiculous enough.

In spite of his accent, his grammar, and his incredible clumsiness, he was not a joke. For one thing he was a great deal more grown up than they were; if he hadn’t shaved, however badly, he would have had a beard; and he was independent. Not with the well-bred independence that knows its way about and can’t make social mistakes, but with that rough-and-ready independence which can stand on its own feet in a rough-and-ready world. Independence is never funny; it is not submissive enough to be readily played with, and it is not at the mercy of other people’s ideas.

They had recognised instantly, when they saw Jim, that it mattered less what they thought of him than they had expected. With all their enormous advantages they were not nearly so tough.

Instinctively it roused their antagonism to feel that they might not be able to take the stuffing out of a barge-boy.

They were not in the least consciously cruel; they were all three a little lazy, a little selfish, a little corrupt; but, on the whole, they were quite normal boys of eighteen. They had the usual possibilities in them of heroism and generosity, but they were unmade and spiritually raw. What they were capable of was as uncertain as which way the cat jumps; and the boy before them was already made.

Accidents could cripple or mutilate him, but they couldn’t deflect him by a hair’s breadth from the iron mould into which destiny and his own will had formed his character. For good or evil he would, in twenty years’ time, be the same kind of person as the man who stood before them now; and in twenty years’ time they would be what the path of least resistance had made them.

Jim waited for a moment after receiving Wivvle’s rebuff. He looked at each of them in turn. Wivvle flinched and fiddled with a fountain pen. Pritchard, with unnatural concentration, turned over the leaves of a Greek history. Ainley stuck a single eyeglass in his eye and contemplated with an appearance of detachment a rose-spray tapping against the window.

Pritchard disliked Jim as a class; Wivvle didn’t dislike him at all; Ainley disliked him as an individual; and his position was therefore the strongest. Jim’s eyes fell on him last with a kind of dumb, deliberate meaning. This was the one who ought to have had more sense; but he hadn’t.

It was odd that these admirably equipped boys should resent Jim. They had all the things he hadn’t; they were well-bred, and as easy with life as if it were an old shoe. Everything was open to them; most things were obtainable.

They could afford to be ill and go away to the seaside afterward; they lived like the lilies of the field, without resorting to any kind of mechanical work to supply their glory, and yet Jim did not feel any resentment against them. They were welcome to all their advantages. Of course they knew a lot of things he didn’t, but he was going to learn, and he wouldn’t take anything away from them by learning; he was only going to see what was in his head.

He fixed his eyes on Ainley with that curious lack of diffidence which they had already noticed.

‘Look a-here,’ he demanded brusquely, ‘what’s the matter wiv me anyway?’

It was the point at issue.

Wivvle jerked his pen so sharply that a drop of ink fell on his immaculate shirt-cuff. Ainley’s eyeglass—he was only just learning how to carry it—popped out of his eye like an over-ripe gooseberry. Pritchard breathed heavily into his Grecian history.

Jim’s question was barbaric and unexpected; it struck at the root of the matter, and no one likes being asked questions which strike at roots.

Ainley was the first to pull himself together. He reinserted his eyeglass with care and spoke in a studied drawl.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you really want to know, you aren’t particularly the kind of person with whom we are accustomed to associate.’

Wivvle gave a curious sigh of relief, as if his mind had found shelter behind a screen of words.

‘Wot of it?’ asked Jim. ‘It ain’t my fault, is it? I’d just as lief know you as not!’

Wivvle smiled, and then bit his lip and frowned.

‘That isn’t exactly my meaning,’ Ainley replied, preserving his air of exaggerated courtesy. ‘It is very kind of you to say you have no objection to making our acquaintance, but you see unfortunately the objection lies on our side, and, I regret to say, I fear it is insuperable. We don’t like having to associate with you.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Jim casually; ‘there don’t seem much sense in it as seemingly we’ve all got ter. But if that’s the way it is—I don’t mind keeping myself to myself to oblige you. I did fink as ’ow Mr. Bligh said we was all man to man like, but I reckon you none of yer ain’t men yet—and happen he only meant himself and me.’

The outrageousness of this assertion dashed even Ainley, but it brought Wivvle most astoundingly out upon the other side. He leaned forward suddenly with his charming smile.

‘You’ve never been to a public school, have you?’ he asked Jim. ‘No—I thought not. If you had been, you’d understand that a newcomer has to learn to stand on his own feet. You mustn’t think we’re your natural enemies—but on the other hand we aren’t particularly naturally your friends. If I were you, I’d go slow and look about me.

‘I think you asked me about your work just now, and I’m afraid I answered you a little shortly. We all work on our own lines here, but Mr. Bligh said last night that you’d find books in the drawer on your right. You’d better have a look at them, perhaps.’

Afterward Wivvle explained that he couldn’t do anything else. He was awfully sorry to have upset their plan and gone back on Ainley, but Jim had made him feel such a damned snob he couldn’t stand it.

Pritchard accepted this explanation; he had a great respect for Wivvle, not only because his father was a baronet and his first cousin an earl, but because everything about him—including his tennis rackets and his ties—was so perfectly all right.

Of course a man in his position couldn’t afford for an instant to feel like a snob. Even Ainley, though he was naturally more annoyed, bore Wivvle no grudge. Curiously enough, it was Jim who most resented Wivvle’s sudden change of front.

‘’E didn’t oughter ’ave done that,’ he said to himself. ‘’E oughter ’ave stuck by the uvvers.’

But Jim was not aware that a man like Wivvle can die, or betray, or even kill, rather than appear at a social disadvantage.