The Pandervils (32 page)

‘Latin,' whispered Hart, who shared a double desk with Nicky.
‘Amo, amas
, Stagg is an ass.'

The subject of this verse was at the moment occupied in writing on the blackboard a list of words and sentences for translation, and, pending that operation, the thirty-three boys of the Fourth Form were understood to be completing, by silent
concentration, their mastery of a set passage in Eutropius. But even those who took the lesson seriously were not silent, and their devotional murmurings provided such idlers as Nicky and Hart with ample cover for conversation, apart from the fact that in this big schoolroom, where four classes were conducted at once, there was inevitably an incessant buzz compounded of various small sounds.

‘Wonder what we shall get for being late,' said Hart.

‘Lines, I expect,' answered Nicky. ‘Or else cubes.'

‘One or the other, of course. Any donkey knows that.' Hart was genially scornful. ‘Point is, which? I hope it's a cube, don't you?'

To be ‘given a cube' meant that in expiation of his sin the sinner was required to find by simple multiplication the cube of a given number (containing four, five, or six figures, according to the degree of the sin), and to ‘prove' his answer by division. Both with masters and boys, though for different reasons, cubes were a very popular form of punishment. All the masters set them; all the more intelligent of the boys made a point of preserving these fruits of detention; so that after a term or two it was only by a stroke of unusually bad luck that a boy was set a cube of which neither he nor his friends possessed a crib. Mr Glove was the master most addicted to repeating his cubes, because his malice prompted him to severity and he could not keep away from eights and nines.
Four nines and an eight was his favourite, and it was his victims' favourite, too. They could never be sure where the eight would fall, but they soon had all five possibilities worked out and ready to hand. Both Nicky and Hart were counting confidently on Mr Glove's ill nature. Their fear was that Wim himself might set the imposition. Wim, the headmaster, was so called on account of his signature in the monthly report-books—
Wm. Beddo
.

‘Call me a donkey, would you!' said Nicky. ‘All right, Hart my child. You wait. I'll owe you one for that.' With an air of grim determination, which meant nothing but that he was enjoying his game, he took a little black notebook from his pocket and licked the point of his pencil. ‘I'll put it down in my book.'

‘I do feel frightened!' mocked Hart.

Nicky's notebook contained a list of Men to be Paid Out, their names grouped, and their offences tabulated, under the misleading heading: ‘Dr. to N. Pandervil.' A certain Richards, it appeared, had on the third day of February 1901 ‘called me a swanker'; but justice had speedily overtaken this fellow, for in the right-hand column there was the sinister remark, ‘Paid out, 4 Feb. N.P.' Against Hart there were several entries, such as ‘Kicked me in Gography', and, less specific, ‘Wouldent stop mucking about with my ink-well'. These last offences were still unpunished, as indeed were the greater number here recorded. Nicky, with no attention to spare for Latin grammar (I regret to
say that he thought it silly to have twelve different ways of saying ‘this', and no one had told him about the Romans), idly turned these private pages, in which were noted, not only these pretended grudges, a record as innocent of conscious humour as of any malice, but his scores at cricket, miscellaneous items of information concerning such things as Mount Everest, the Meridian, and Habeas Corpus, and a list of
Best Books that I have read
which included works by Ballantyne, Stevenson, Farrar, Annie S. Swan, Silas Hocking, Conan Doyle, Mrs. Craik, and Seton Merriman. They contained also a few scraps of doggerel, of which the couplet quoted by Hart was one.

Nicky during class was bounded on the left by a wall, on the right by Hart, and at his back by the chemistry cupboard, this last a piece of fine old oak in which were kept such test-tubes, beakers, and retorts as Mr Goff, the visiting science master, had not as yet broken for the entertainment of the boys, together with various substances in bottles of which he, and he only, knew the names. Nicky was not alone in believing his position to be one of exceptional security. In this corner, undetected by authority, he could talk, he could correspond with his friends, he could learn the deaf-and-dumb alphabet from Hart, he could even sing. And, in a discreet fashion, making himself audible only to his immediate neighbours, he did sing. His father privately thought him a musical genius, for no better reason than that he had a natural sense of harmony and habitually sang seconds. Richards,
whose back Nicky's pencil was at this moment prodding, could emit a rumbling noise that passed for bass; Benson who sat on Richards's right, just in front of Hart, was a master of simple melody; and these three constituted with Nicky himself ‘the Choir', an institution, self-created and to many of its beneficiaries unknown, whose function it was to enliven the tedium of lessons like Latin and Algebra and English Grammar.

Richards, in response to the prodding, looked stealthily round. ‘What's up?'

‘Choir practice,' said Nicky, ‘will now begin.'

‘Cave!'
whispered Hart. ‘Stagg's looking.'

The four noses of the Choir were plunged into Eutropius. But in a moment or two Mr Stagg turned back to his blackboard, and Nicky tried again.

‘No,' said Richards. ‘ ‘Snot safe with Stagg. Wait till Chemistry.'

‘Come on, Rich!' whispered Nicky urgently. ‘I say, don't be a beastly rotter!' Richards, however, insisted on being a beastly rotter. He indulged his corrupt nature by repeating his refusal and then taking refuge in a silence from which no amount of prodding could dislodge him. ‘All right,' said Nicky. ‘I'll jolly well owe you one for that, Rich.'

He entered this new debt in his little book and was soon happy again. The Latin hour wore pleasantly away. The day had started well, and the afternoon held promise of the chemistry lesson, an orgy of delight and disorder that was the most
eagerly anticipated event of the week. Mr Goff was a shabby little man who wore a large square beard instead of a necktie. His frock coat was green with age; his cuffs were soiled; at the point of his thin nose there hung, in cold weather, a glistening pearl; his eyes, magnified by strong lenses, were big with childish surprise. His precarious dignity made him the more comical in the eyes of these young barbarians, who, being snobs by instinct and training, had neither pity nor respect for him. Where on earth did Wim Beddo pick the old man up? And how came such an obvious tramp to know anything about chemistry? No one knew. But if the boys were surprised at his learning, he was apparently no less so. Surprise, not unmixed with bewilderment, was his normal state. He was surprised when his experiments failed; and, with more cause, he was surprised when they succeeded. When by adding hydrogen to oxygen he produced water, his pleasure was— or to an adult spectator would have been—pathetic. When something unexpectedly exploded and the world became full of flying glass, his astonishment would have made angels weep for him. It did not make schoolboys weep. Indeed, the cruelty of schoolboys caused him most surprise of all. So noisy they were, so thoughtless, so rude—he could not understand such behaviour. He was like a child in a bear-pit. But the best of Mr Goff, from Nicky's point of view, was that, being for the most part absorbed in these distresses, he left Nicky and his circle to their musical and epistolary devices.
A quiet concert, a busy exchange of notes, the consumption of toffee (four ounces a penny at Ball's in the High Street), cutting a railway system on the desk-lid, and sketching faces in the back pages of an exercise book: these were, for Nicky, the delights associated with science.

‘Give that notebook to me, Pandervil!'

It was Mr Stagg's voice, and Nicky, brutally roused from reverie, was aware of Mr Stagg in person standing within two yards of him. A slight sickness seized him. He burned with confusion and could utter no word.

And now the notebook was in Mr Stagg's hand, and Mr Stagg was turning its pages.

‘Pandervil! Is this how we learn our Eutropius? Is this how we qualify for the battle of life? Is it, Pandervil?'

‘No, sir!'

‘How then?' inquired Mr Stagg. ‘Is it rather in detention, when our little friends are released from school? Is it, Pandervil? I think so. I think so … But what's this? A modicum of Latin after all! Well, well, well!' Nicky's fear became suffocating. What he had most dreaded was about to happen. Mr Stagg read out relentlessly:
‘Amo, amas
, Stagg is an ass.
Amas, amat
, my old tomcat … And what comes next, Pandervil?'

What came next, in Nicky's imagination, was that he would be reported to Wim Beddo and publicly caned. He said nothing. He stared, speechless and helpless, at the lid of his desk. But Mr Stagg repeated his question. ‘What comes
next? What comes after
amo, amas, amat
, Pandervil?'

‘Amamus, amatis …'

‘Precisely!' said Mr Stagg.
‘Amo, amas
, Stagg is an ass.
Amas, amat
, my old tom-cat. Yours is a zoological muse, Pandervil.
Amat, amamus
, you can't blame us.
Amamus, amatis
, how bald his pate is! … How will that do, Pandervil?'

He glared at Nicky with grim friendliness. Nicky wanted to cry. He could not join, as yet, in the general laughter with which the class acknowledged Mr Stagg's little joke, a joke only half against himself, for Mr Stagg's hair, though grey, was plentiful. He had a crooked nose and a cleft chin; he presented an odd appearance by reason of his fierce eyebrows and the excessive height of his collar; but he was not bald, and the class therefore felt safe in laughing.

‘To-night, Pandervil, in detention, I shall finish your verses for you. And you shall learn your Eutropius. I think so. I think so.'

This was the beginning of something that caused, in Hart and others, a good deal of perplexity and some indignation: Nicky's devotion, not merely to Mr Stagg—that could be forgiven, Mr Stagg being admittedly a decent old buffer—but even to Latin. And two years later he struggled desperately into the Sixth.

Egg Pandervil was now sixty-seven. Nicky was
his Benjamin. His three other children had never been to him what Nicky was—a consolation prize. Mabel and Bob were both married and had children of their own; and Harold, who after a bad beginning had become a great help in the shop, was understood to be courting one of the several young women who occupied his leisure evenings. These three were unimportant facts in Egg's life; the important ones were Nicky, whom he loved, and Carrie, whom he endured. He had ceased to think of his marriage as a disaster because he had ceased to think of his marriage; on Carrie he spent nowadays as little thought as, after a lifetime of endurance, a crippled man will spend on his deformity. Ten years before, and less, he had regarded her with incessant compassion and had suffered many a pang of unreasoned and undeserved self-reproach. But now such emotions stirred in him only when he remembered that she was still, whatever she might seem, a human creature and the object of his habitual affection. It stood to reason that a woman suffering from as many serious disorders as the doctor diagnosed in Carrie must be frequently in pain; yet it was certain that the reality came short of her pretensions. But was it certain? Was anything certain? Ah, there was the difficulty! All he knew was that he must do his best for her, and, every day, by the mercy of heaven, contrive to forget her for a quiet hour or so. In both endeavours he was loyally aided by Selina the Elp.

And if Egg, instinctively avoiding the subject,
thought seldom of his wife as a human being, Nicky seldom thought of his mother at all. A familiar part of life, yet a being monstrously unlike ordinary people, she was at once too near and too remote to engage even his curiosity. Of her mind he knew and guessed nothing. He did not know, for example, that by loving his father he had crushingly defeated the prime if unconscious purpose of her everlasting anger. In the far-off days before she had become permanently bedridden he had learned to avoid her, and he nowadays paid her in her bedroom only such duty visits as she demanded or his father enjoined. His brothers, too, were little more than acquaintances. Bob was tremendously old and had a moustache and a wife; and Harold, a man of twenty-four or so, spent very little time at home. As for Mrs Bob, of whom people whispered behind her back that she had once been a skivvy (like Sleena, thought Nicky), she was such a lady, so well dressed and polite, that it seemed a piece of cheek to be calling her Kitty, even though she was one's sister-in-law. And Mabel, his real sister, was merely a middle-aged woman who insisted on kissing him whenever she came or went. Home, for Nicky, meant Dad and Sleena, with Ma as a calamitous background. It meant, in addition to these, all friends and activities that were not either of the school or of the chapel. Sunday, a day spent in chapel and Sunday School, with a midday interval for the consumption of beef and Yorkshire pudding, constituted a category in itself, a curious
break in the continuity of ordinary existence. It had not escaped Nicky's attention that there were worlds within his world. Home was different from school, school was different from Sunday; these were three of many circles contained within the larger circle of his consciousness, and he alone, it seemed, possessed the mysterious power of stepping out of one and into another. Other boys experienced Sunday, perhaps, but not his Sunday— a notion, this, quite independent of the accident that not one of his schoolfellows happened to be of the Ebenezerite persuasion. And if in fact these worlds did sometimes chance to impinge one upon the other, the effect, to Nicky's perception, was so queerly incongruous as only to emphasise their essential separateness. It was as if the characters of one story had strayed into another, as if bits of R. M. Ballantyne had become absurdly entangled with John Halifax Gentleman. This confusion seldom occurred, because in fact things could not, try as they might, sustain their reality for Nicky in more than one of his worlds; the failure was exemplified in Ralph Tooley, who, being a near neighbour, a domestic friend, became something quite different when he was within the precincts of the school, something at best a stranger, at worst a mere hypothesis. If this proved anything, it proved, not that there was but one world, but that there were two Tooleys, a school Tooley and a home Tooley. I do not pretend that Nicky got so far in fantasy as this, or that his mind intellectualized its sensations. But it did, wittingly or unwittingly, make idle
pictures of them, and sometimes, half dreaming, he played with the pretence that there were three Nickies, or more, one for each of these worlds that he inhabited. He told, and could have told, such fancies to no one. Though recurrent, they were the most transitory, the most elusive wisps of sensation; never concrete enough for thought, too light and brief to leave legible mark on the mind that from time to time entertained them, they were secrets not only from others but from himself.