Chapter VI

How far too sweet for school he seemed to me;
How ripe for combat with the wits of men;
How childlike in his manhood.--_Ionica, II._

It must not be supposed that life was uniformly dark to Tim in these early days at Eton. He had sources of happiness quite distinct from his glimpses of Carol, which had certainly turned out less satisfactory than his hopes. After the dormice episode he was shyer and more constrained in the presence of his fag-master than ever. But he had found and always kept a marvellously kind understanding and tender friend in his tutor, whose manly gentle soul went forth to this forlorn little specimen of suffering humanity; he readily guessed that the path of such a baby could not but be thorny, and though he was necessarily obliged, for many reasons, to ignore much of what he knew, and the whole of what he suspected, he managed in a hundred small ways to soften the existence of the youngest and dreariest of his pupils. If I do not say much of Tim’s Eton tutor, and the large part he filled in his history, it is because, while among several thousand boys who have passed through the school in the last twenty years, to describe two or three is fairly safe, it were quite otherwise to draw anything like an accurate picture of one of the comparatively few men who have filled the post of tutor there during the same period. So I may only note in passing the fact of his untiring and thoughtful kindness, and the grateful affection it elicited in return. His study was a haven of refuge to Tim on many a rainy after-four, while the employment said by Dr. Watts to be provided for that class of member was busily occupying numerous pairs of idle hands in other parts of the house. There or on the banks of the kind old river in the shady playing-fields he spent long happy hours with Scott or Shakespeare for companion. Mr. Ebbesley was liberal in the matter of pocket-money, and as Tim’s tastes were not as a rule expensive, he was able to revel in delightful books. Had his examinations been in authors of his own selection I have no doubt he would have attained the highest honours.

Another favourite resort of his was the old chapel in the Castle at Windsor: the grand quiet of the place, with its dim, coloured light and ghostly armorial flags ranged overhead, soothed and comforted him after many a bitter childish trial; but the highest pleasure came from the pealing organ and the pure true voices of one of the best of English choirs. To Tim, whose soul was full of melody, but whose only experience of sacred music had been the not very perfect performances in the village church at home, the grand outbursts of song which the great musicians had given from their hearts to the worship of God, were as waters in the desert. The first time he heard the beautiful prayer that Mendelssohn has wedded to immortal music, the yearning for doves’ wings to fly away and be at rest, rendered by a fresh boy’s voice, the tears gathered in his eyes, and he forgot where he was, standing wrapped in an ecstasy, his soul afloat on the wings of the music. It seemed to him as if he and this other boy no older than himself were somehow one, that the pearly notes he was listening to did not come from the shiny emotionless little chorister whose mouth was moving, but from the inmost depths of his own heart.

Tim could not really sing a note, though he would dearly have liked to; but he often had this feeling afterwards, in the following winter, when he joined the musical society and used to sit silent and happy between two deep-lunged little monsters, and have all the sensation of pouring forth his being in song. Carol, who had a lusty baritone, and a fondness for music of the more robust and cheerful order, having been ordered to recruit trebles at his tutor’s, and finding the lower boys for the most part unwilling to display their accomplishments, had had recourse in despair to his fag, who was of course enchanted with the prospect.

‘I’m afraid I shan’t be much use, but I should like to come,’ he said modestly, and come he did with exemplary punctuality.

His relations with his contemporaries were still, for the most part, lacking in cordiality. He had no gift of making himself known to them, and they were not sufficiently interested in him to take trouble in getting to know him. The discovery at the beginning of the Michaelmas half that he was forbidden to play football, set the finishing touch to the contempt his house-fellows were inclined to entertain for him, and except in school or at the musical society he came in contact with no boys but such as boarded at his tutor’s. There was one youth, however, who, contrary to all likelihood, took a desultory interest in Tim, and that was Tommy Weston. The episode of the dormice had disclosed to Tommy certain things about Tim that lay outside the range of his daily observation of life and character, and being of an inquiring turn of mind, he determined to frequent this new specimen of boy, taking at first a purely analytic and microscopic view of him, with which, as the weeks went by, something of a kindlier and more human sentiment began to mingle. I don’t know what has become of Tommy Weston since, but in those days he promised to be a very remarkable man. He possessed indomitable tenacity and strength of purpose, coupled with a mercurial gaiety of temperament, endless patience, entire disregard of public opinion, immense courage, a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a composure and self-possession on which the most trying circumstances were powerless to produce any effect. To Tim he was a most marvellous outcome. At first the little boy was rather alarmed by this remarkable phenomenon, though humbly grateful for his attentions, but by degrees he came to be more at home with him, and Tommy was the only person to whom he ever confided some part of his feeling for Carol; only a very little and in moments of rare expansion, for Tommy was not sentimental, and regarded subjective conversation as more or less profitless. But the shy revelations of character made by Tim struck him, as I have said, as a ‘queer start,’ and as such were regarded by him with a wonder which that youth was glad to mistake for sympathy. ‘It is certainly not on the principle of Mary and the lamb,’ he said to himself, ‘that Skinny’s partiality can be explained, for Darley don’t “love the lamb, you know.” Fancy Skinny wandering into tutor’s upper set at private, and Villidge and all of ’em hollering out in pupil-room, “What makes the lamb love Curly so?”’ and he was so tickled by the weirdness of this notion that he accosted Tim as ‘lambkin’ next time he saw him, and chuckled to himself, remarking generally, ‘What rot nursery rhymes were,’ in a manner calculated to mystify that simple-minded young person. Indeed, he was in such high good-humour that he invited him into his room, an apartment decorated with all manner of ingenious inventions from designs of Tommy’s own; such as an elaborate apparatus in which the poker was involved for shutting the window without leaving bed, and another by which water was discharged on any assailant who might attempt to turn the sleeping inhabitant up in that piece of furniture. This last machine, which was constructed with much ingenuity out of a bandbox, a broken jug, seven yards of twine, the leg of one of his chairs (propped, in the absence of its limb, on his hat-box), and the cover of his Gradus, was subsequently destroyed by his tutor, after deluging the matron (Tommy swore accidentally), who was coming to administer medicine when he stayed out in collection-week. These and similar treasures were displayed to the wondering eyes of Skinny, as well as a cardboard box in which he kept the prime fetishes of his worship; his name, which it is hardly necessary to mention was not Tommy, and the date of his birth, written very neatly in his own blood, a sheet of broad rule completely covered with a design in concentric and intersecting circles, of which the object did not distinctly appear, and another, on which he had jotted down the numbers of all the cabs he had ever ridden in, on his rare visits to the metropolis, and reduced the added result, by some process inscrutable by the unmathematical mind, to pounds, shillings, and pence.

Now it happened one Sunday in the Lent term when the flats around Eton were swept by a relentless east wind, that Tommy had agreed with a kindred soul from another house to go with him to the Ditton woods and gather primroses; not that the ‘primrose by the river’s brim’ was anything more to either of them than the yellow primrose it was to the gentleman in the poem, but it lent an object to their walk, and a delicious flavour of the illegal in the combined facts that they would trespass, and very probably be late for lock-up, which in those days, when chapel was at three, closed the period of Sunday afternoon leisure. Whether Tommy’s friend was detected talking in chapel and made to stay at home and do his Sunday questions, or merely turned lazy and preferred to read a book by the fire, I have no means of deciding with certainty; but the fact remains that he threw Tommy over when it was too late to make other arrangements, to the no small disgust of Master Weston, who was not fond of abandoning any enterprise he had once formed. In these straits he bethought him of Tim, who was quite sure to have no engagement, and went in search of him. Tim was writing his weekly letter to his father, but consented readily to accompany him, if he would wait till he had finished; and the concluding sentences were rendered even more laborious than usual to the scribe, by the distracting behaviour of his companion, who was occupying the interval with a sort of highland fling, while he sang to a well-known Scottish air, just then familiarised to Southern ears by the base uses of a comic song, these remarkable words----

Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Oh, Jerusalem, the costermonger’s donkey.

‘Oh! please, Tommy, don’t make that dreadful noise,’ said poor Tim. ‘How can I get done?’

‘Dreadful noise, indeed! it’s a Sabbath hymn, you profane little wretch,’ retorted the irrepressible, at the same time pulling Tim’s inky pen upwards through his fingers, to teach him, as he said, proper respect to his elders.

At length the epistle was concluded, and when Tommy had stuck the stamps on wrong side up in the bottom left-hand corner (which called forth a severe little lecture on slovenly ways in Tim’s next letter from home) they started on their walk. Through the College and playing-fields all went well, but once in the open fields beyond, their progress was considerably retarded by various skirmishes with the class magnificently lumped together by the boys, in their sublime innocent snobbishness, as ‘cads,’ and including the sons of all tradesmen, farmers, and the labouring classes generally, who happened to inhabit the neighbourhood. There was not a ‘cad’ within miles with whom Tommy was not on intimate terms; he knew the Christian names, pursuits, and family history of every old man or woman who drove into Eton for purposes of trade and barter, the commodities in which they dealt, and the days when they might be expected. There was one elderly lady whom he addressed as Sarah, and to whom he invariably offered marriage, regardless of the fact that she was a matron of many years’ standing; and an old man in a red waistcoat, who had business relations with some one in the town, would hang about for hours watching for an opportunity to slip unnoticed past the window from which this awful boy had a torrent of ever-varying chaff and nicknames ready to pour out upon him on all occasions. With the rising generation of cad-dom, the lads of his own age or a little older, his relations were, however, by no means so friendly. He had fought with nearly all, and licked most; and on the few Herculean youths who had succeeded in forcing him to beat a retreat his vengeance had subsequently descended, when their evil stars led them to pass his dwelling, in the form of coals, sugar, earth from his flower-box, or the inside round of paper off the tops of raspberry jam; sometimes the pot itself, if nearly empty of its succulent contents, would startle the echoes of a dark night as it crashed to ruin against the palings of the opposite house, while a muttered curse succeeded the jaunty whistling of the passing victim.

The two boys were crossing a ploughed field where the ridges on which they stepped crumbled beneath their feet, dry and powdery under the March wind, when they encountered a detachment of small boys of the class described above, headed by a youth a few years older than the rest, who wore his hat on one side in a raffish manner, calculated to provoke remark. Tommy inquired politely if it was stuck on with glue, or how otherwise it retained its position.

‘Just you ‘old _your_ row, young Weston,’ retorted the insulted party; ‘I knows you’; thus implying some mysterious secret hold over Tommy, which that youth was hasty to repudiate.

‘Take care not to come too close,’ he replied with studied moderation, ‘or I _may_ hurt you.’

‘What, _you_? You’re too young and too small; ‘it one o’ your own size,’ said the champion, and all the satellites applauded.

Tommy, feeling the moment for decisive action had arrived, made a threatening advance, whereupon the small fry scattered and fled; and their leader, seeing himself abandoned by his myrmidons, also retired, but in good order, and still hurling taunts, which increased in bitterness in proportion as the chances of pursuit seemed to grow less. Tim, I need not say, was made very unhappy by this sort of encounter; and what with these numerous delays and the fact that they had started late for their walk, the brief afternoon was already far spent when they arrived at the paling they must climb to enter the Park. Tim pulled out his watch and looked at it doubtfully.

‘We haven’t _more_ than time to get home before lock-up,’ he said.

‘Well?’ inquired Tommy, who was already astride upon the paling, as though Tim had started some question entirely foreign to the matter in hand.

‘If we go on, we shall be late,’ persisted Tim.

‘Oh! is _that_ all?’ said Tommy, who had a sublime contempt for law when it interfered in any way with what he proposed to himself to do. As I have said, the primroses were less than nothing to him, but having started to pick primroses, primroses he would pick, and a lion in the path would not have deterred him for a moment. Now Tim had, on the contrary, profound respect for law and order, and if he unwittingly transgressed the most formal of little school-rules, felt unhappy and criminal for days afterwards.

‘I think I shall go back,’ he said after a pause.

‘You may do as you please,’ said his companion; ‘_I_’m going to get primroses,’ and therewith he slid down on the other side of the paling and was lost to view. ‘Are you coming?’ he shouted back.

Tim still stood irresolute: he was alone. Tommy having vanished, it seemed easier to withstand his influence than when under that cold eye from the top of the fence. He was cold; he did not want to be out late; he did not want to get a pœna; above all, he did not want to shirk fagging.

‘I shall go back,’ he persisted, and he went.

‘Give my love to tutor,’ Tommy called from within, ‘and tell him not to worry about me; I shall most likely be back for early school to-morrow.’

Tim had a dreary walk homewards; the wind, which had before been with them, was now in his face, and he had to butt at it, head down, and hands deep in his trouser-pockets. Discomforts became prominent which had before only made a scarcely noticed background to Tommy’s enlivening conversation, and the somewhat perilous excitement of his passages of wit with the passers-by. Tim began to wonder vaguely, not without terror, whether he would fall into any of the wasps’ nests that his companion had so successfully stirred up as they came along. Visions of angry cads, still smarting with a sense of unavenged insults, flitted through his uneasy mind, and caused him to hug the hedgerows rather than launch across the bare fields, where his figure would be a more conspicuous object. He tried to determine on a course of action in case of attack. Tommy, he had observed, advanced boldly in such cases, assumed the aggressive attitude, and the assailants fled; it seemed to him a fresh proof of the unsatisfactoriness with which matters were arranged in this world, that the people who seemed to possess the knack of coming scot-free out of awkward situations were precisely those to whom it was of least importance to do so. Something told him that it would be in vain for _him_ to attempt the same line as Tommy; some irresolution or faltering at the last minute would be sure to betray him, and his assumed boldness would only make his position the less pleasant. The conviction was forced in upon him that to make your antagonist unwilling to fight, _you_ must be genuinely anxious to do so. ‘And in _that_ case,’ reasoned he, ‘there would be no pleasure, but the reverse, in seeing the other fellow sheer off.’ All of which seemed to him mysterious and unkind. ‘It would surely have been as easy to settle human nature on a plan that should enable each individual to obtain what he wanted.’ Nor were his apprehensions altogether groundless.

As he passed along one of the leafless hedges a hard object whizzed by him, and rattled on the frozen turf beside him; there was little or no doubt it was a stone. Through the hedge, which was thick and tangled, though the leaves were off, he could dimly detect moving forms and smothered laughter. He tried to persuade himself that the thrower had only aimed at something in the hedge, and that if he kept quiet they would pass on without noticing him; so he crouched down as close to the bank as possible, and kept very still.

I am compelled as a truthful biographer to admit that physical courage was not a characteristic of my hero, and as he held his breath in the undignified attitude he had assumed, he could hear his heart beat loud with apprehension. There was a pause, and then a muttered conference, and presently another stone followed the first. Placed as he was, Tim was pretty safe, and two or three succeeding missiles passed innocently over him. Then came another pause; the attacking party were surprised that no attempt was made to return fire, and they feared an ambush.

The fact was that he of the hat had joined forces with some other lads of his own size, discarding the crew of weaklings who had deserted him in his hour of need, and they had taken up a position in which to waylay Tommy on his return to Eton, and seize an unique opportunity of wiping off old scores by humiliating their enemy without doing him any great injury. It is only fair to them to state that there is no good ground for supposing that they deliberately attacked Tim knowing him to be alone; they probably thought his warlike friend was with him, and the stones were only meant to open the affair, and force Tommy to disclose himself. Having debated among themselves, they could think of no better plan than to fire another volley, which they accordingly did, and Tim had closed his eyes and given himself up for lost when he heard unmistakable signs of terror and confusion behind the hedge, and then the sound of a general stampede of hastily retreating footsteps.

The next minute some one cleared the hedge and alighted close to him, and a well-known voice exclaimed, ‘The brutes! they were rocking a little fellow; I wish to goodness I’d caught one of them. Hullo! Ebbesley, is that you? Why, how the deuce did _you_ get into this sort of row?’

Tim hardly yet realised that it was Carol who had dropped, as it were, out of the gray sky for his deliverance, and who now stood before him, with cheeks flushed by wind and running, holding out large kind hands to pull him on to his feet again. He felt relieved and grateful, and yet somewhat ashamed of the position in which he had been discovered, and began hastily to explain--

‘I had gone to walk with Weston, and he said something to that fellow, and he didn’t like it, and Weston went after him, and he ran away; and then we separated, because I wanted to get back----’

‘And our friend meanwhile conceived the brilliant plan of lying in wait for you, and shying stones at you from behind a hedge. What distinguished bravery!’ interrupted Villidge minor, who had been with Carol, and who now joined the party through an adjacent gap.

‘What an infernal coward!’ cried Darley, whose eyes flashed with martial ardour.

‘He is, luckily for him, beyond the reach of chastisement for the present,’ rejoined the more phlegmatic Villidge; ‘though I flatter myself that a well-directed pebble was not altogether without effect on the calf of his leg. You’d better cut home, Ebbesley, if you want to be in time for lock-up, and thank your stars Darley and I happened to come along when we did.’ Tim would have liked to thank them, but found no words, so trotted off as fast as his legs would carry him.

‘It’s just as I thought, Curly,’ continued Villidge, as he and Carol followed at a more leisurely pace; ‘it’s that little monster Weston who has brought your unhappy fag into the scrape in which we found him. I saw them together the other day, and reflected that collapse must sooner or later be the fate of such a frail little vessel in the same stream with such an iron pot as Master Tommy.’

But Carol did not at once answer; he was watching the queer little figure scudding along in front of them, and the sight of that small form buffeted by the bitter weather somehow suggested to him how unfit such a creature must be to fight his way through the rough places of lower-boy life.

‘Do you remember,’ Villidge continued, also looking at Tim, ‘how much exercised you were when Ebbesley first came as to what you could do for him, in the way of looking after him, and that sort of thing? I’m thinking that this piece of knight-errantry of yours in his behalf comes most happily to solve the difficulty; you could hardly have done him a better turn, or looked after him to more purpose than by snatching him from the fate of the first martyr.’

‘There’s not much knight-what’s-his-name in having a lot of lubberly beasts run away when you look at ’em,’ replied Carol modestly. ‘Seriously though, it had just occurred to me that perhaps I hadn’t done all I might have to make that poor little fellow’s life easy to him.’

‘I can’t see that it is incumbent on you to act dry-nurse to all my tutor’s scugs; you might keep a piece of pumice-stone in your room to take the ink off their grimy little hands, or save up the rough copies of your verses to stuff your young friend’s hat, and keep it a hair’s-breadth or two higher above his ears, but I really don’t see what else you could do for him.’

‘Don’t you think such a boy as that must be rather bullied among the small fellows?’

‘Oh! I daresay not a bit more than is good for him; and besides, if Tommy’s taken him up he’ll be all right; for though he’ll probably land him in rows with the beaks, he’s an oracle among the lower boys, and if he says he’s a good sort, they’ll all discover they always said so. So don’t make yourself unhappy about him.’

And as Carol was not fond of making himself unhappy, he took the advice.