Shame and Consciences
adapted by Mihangel
31. A calm choice
The Repton and Haileybury matches had been won, the All Ages cup had not left the baize shelf over the piano in the hall, and the Captain of Cricket had spent much of the rest of the last month in thought. Never in his life had he thought so long or so hard about anything. He had suppressed his first impulse to be impulsive, and was still feeling his way, still waiting for some final and decisive sign. He had nearly come to a conclusion, but not quite.
Chips, while exuberantly relieved at Jan's return to the cricket field and to the study next to his own, had somehow, at the same time, contrived to be abnormally withdrawn and even morose. Only once did he hint at the reason.
"It's infernally beastly that we're going our different ways, Jan. I wish you were coming to Cambridge too. But you're going to Australia, and you'll marry and you'll stay there. We won't see each other again. It's hard lines, to lose a bosom for ever."
He had never used that word of Jan before. In truth, he had never dared to. And Jan had very deliberately never used it of Chips. He now ventured another small step.
"And I'll miss my bosom too, Chips. But we can write. And I'm sure I'll be back some time."
But if he went, and if he did come back, would he seek out Chips? Would it not be too late? Would it not be too late if he left it beyond the end of term?
"And I won't marry," he added almost as an afterthought. "It's not my line."
Chips, casting him a quizzical look in which Jan also read relief and faint hope, gave a small sigh and dropped the subject.
On the last Sunday of term Jan listened to his last sermon in chapel. On this occasion he was far from sleep. It really was the last time he would hear, as a boy, that extraordinary old voice. And that extraordinary old voice was talking for once not about True Life but about True Love.
"First of all, love is not fancy, as our old poets call the passion of love, it is not fancy. There is no magic which seizes on the soul in True Love. There is no impulse which, in a strange wild way, overmasters all calculations and reason, in True Love. True Love is the perfection of reason. True Love is the most sober, the most real, the most enduring of all things beneath the sky; for True Love is spirit answering to spirit, thought to thought, feeling to feeling. True Love is that power implanted by God in man of first seeing, and then interpreting, and then becoming one."
Yes, that fitted, Jan thought, that fitted. It chimed with the careful steps he had been taking. He had belatedly seen, he was now interpreting, and soon ... ? He found he had lost the thread, but managed to pick it up again.
"If endless search is the condition of True Love, we must search. And search means work, and work means deliberate action; action which is in our power to do or to leave undone. Love then depends on ourselves. We are not run away with by a passion which we cannot control. We make a calm choice of lifelong work, and the control rests with us, to begin or not to begin. The soberest as well as the strongest power is True Love."
Yes, Jan had to make a calm choice. The control rested with him, to begin or not to begin.
*
The only two fellows who were leaving out of the house had been dining with the Heriots on their last night. One of them, after making polite conversation to Miss Heriot, had gone on to the Sanatorium to take leave of someone who had been ill -- much more seriously ill and for much longer than is usually the case with measles -- but was now on the mend. The other accompanied Mr Heriot into the jumble of books and papers, old oak and the paraphernalia of many hobbies, which made his study such an uncomfortable yet stimulating little room. It seemed smaller than ever when invaded by two tall and ungainly men. The younger one was already the sturdier in build, and stood six feet from his rather flat soles to the unruly crest of his straight hair. A fine figure of a man he made, and still under nineteen, yet his regular features were perhaps only redeemed from dullness by a delightfully stubborn mouth, and by the dark eyes that followed Heriot affectionately about the room.
"There's one thing we've had in common from the start," said Heriot, "and that's our infernally untidy studies! I remember Loder speaking to me once about yours. I brought him in here to discuss the point, and he went out agreeing that indifference to your surroundings doesn't necessarily spell the complete scoundrel. But it isn't a merit either, Rutter, and I expect Carpenter to embellish life more than either of us."
"So he will, sir, in all sorts of ways." Jan spoke enthusiastically.
"He'll get things into Granta for a start, the moment he gets to Cambridge. But not all his things -- his style wants purging. Smoke, Rutter?"
Heriot was filling his own pipe. But it was one thing for a master to feel free to smoke in front of a leaving boy on the last night of the term, in defiance of Mr Thrale's despotic attitude, and quite another to offer the boy a cigarette. Jan declined the offer in almost shocked embarrassment.
"I thought a cigarette was no use to you. And yet you've never gone back to your pipe, I believe?"
"Sir!"
Heriot was smiling. But he always smiled as he took his first puff.
"You don't suppose I didn't know that you used to smoke when you first came here?"
"You never let me see that you knew, sir."
"You never let me catch you! I smelt it off you, as they say, all the same. But I shouldn't have done so if I hadn't known all those things I wasn't supposed to know."
"It was magnificent of you to hush them up as you did."
"It was a duty. But it wouldn't have been quite fair to trade on one's knowledge at the same time."
"Not every master would look at it like that."
"Perhaps I had a sneaking sympathy as well. Still, I would have caught you sooner or later if you hadn't given it up. I've often wondered why you did."
"It was all Mr Relton," said Jan after a pause. "I promised him I wouldn't smoke if I got into the Eleven."
"Relton, eh? Let me tell you something, Rutter. I've been wondering lately whether you're the fellow he thought he saw at the fair."
Jan was more taken aback than he had been about the smoking. This was the first time Heriot had mentioned the ancient escapade which had come to light with so much else a month ago. It was the one thing they had not thrashed out since the Sunday after Founder's Day, and yet on that awful Saturday night Jan felt that Heriot had twice been on the edge of the subject, and twice stopped short because he could not trust himself to discuss it calmly. Getting out of the best house in the school was an offence not to be condoned or belittled by the best house-master, even after two long years and a quarter. So Jan had felt, and even now he thought he saw severity behind the glasses.
"Did he tell you he saw somebody, sir?"
"Not in so many words. He came in and asked what I thought would happen to a fellow who got out and went to the fair. I told him what I knew would happen. Then he began to hedge a bit, and I smelt a rat before he went. But I little dreamt it was a rat from my own wainscot! However, I'm not going to ask any questions now."
Cunning old Heriot! Jan made a clean breast on the spot, feeling that the whole truth said more for Dudley Relton than Bob Heriot was the man to deny. It drew an admission which, from Heriot, meant much.
"I'm glad he took the law into his own hands, Jan. It would be a lie to pretend I'm not, at this time of day. But I'm also glad I never knew about it when he was here! What beats me is your audacity in marching out, as you say, without the least premeditation, and therefore presumably without any sort of disguise?"
Jan took his courage between his teeth.
"I not only walked out of your own door, sir, but I went and walked out in your own coat and hat!"
Heriot flushed. He could not have been the martinet he was without seeing himself as such. Then he laughed heartily, but not very long, and his laughter left him grave.
"You were an awful young fool, you know. It would have been the end of you, without the option of a licking. But you tell Dudley Relton, when you see him out there, that I'm glad to know what a debt I've owed him these last few years. I won't write to him, in case I say something I shouldn't. But Lord! I envy you both the crack you'll have in those forsaken wilds!"
Heriot perhaps pictured the flourishing port of Geelong as a bush township, celebrated only for Dudley Relton and his young barbarians. Colonial geography, unlike that of ancient Greece, was not a recognised item in the public-school curriculum. He was also having a dig at the land to which he grudged Jan Rutter even more than Dudley Relton.
"What are your sheep going to get out of your public school?" he asked. "Will you herd them any better for having floundered through the verbs in -mi? Don't you think a lot that you've learnt here will be wasted?"
"I hope not, sir." Jan did not want to talk about Australia, for he was no longer sure that he was going there after all. "I only know I'm jolly glad I came here. I wasn't once, but I am now, and have been long enough."
"But what have you gained? That's what I always want to know. A bit of Latin and a lot of cricket, no doubt. But what use are they in the big wide world? Have we taught you a single concrete thing that will come in useful out there?"
"I don't know, sir. I never was much good at work. But sometimes I think it teaches you your place, a school like this."
"It does, if you want teaching. But you --"
"I'd learnt it somewhere else. But here I had to learn it all over again."
"You always have to -- each time you get your step -- that's one of the points about promotion. You may have been schoolmastering for fifteen years, but you've got to learn your place even in your own house when you get one."
That touch put Jan more at his ease.
"And you may have been in the Eleven two or three years," he put in, "but you've got a new job to tackle when you're captain. They say there's room at the top, but there isn't room to sit down!"
"That was worth learning!" cried Heriot. "I'm not sure it wasn't worth coming here to pick up that alone. Can you think of anything else?"
"Well, yes. Something I got from Mr Haigh, too! Possunt quia posse videntur -- you can because you think you can. I've often said that to myself when there was a good man in -- and sometimes I've got him!" He repeated it to himself, with a different slant which was not for Heriot's ears.
Heriot found himself loving the boy, and they fell to talking for the last time (and almost the first) of old Thrale's sermon on the Sunday after the Old Boys' Match, and the curious fact that he had meant Jan to be in chapel to hear it. Heriot himself had come to fetch him, and Jan had hidden behind the door, little dreaming that Evan had owned up to everything on learning what had happened.
"I might have known he would!" said Jan. "You say he didn't hesitate an instant? He wouldn't! But thank goodness he didn't go and make bad worse like I did for him. It would have killed him to get expelled. He says it was the bare thought that very nearly did, as it was."
Heriot, meanwhile, was knocking his pipe out into the Kaffir bowl, which reminded Jan of something he had forgotten.
"Will you excuse me a moment, sir? I've something for you in my study."
Back he went to the boys' side, to his little den which was now stripped of his personal possessions, all except a mountain of waste paper and, more time-worn than ever, Shockley's old green table-cloth. On it lay the small package, already wrapped, that he was after.
But on it there also lay a larger package which had not been there when he left. It was addressed, in Chips's writing, to Jan. He tore off the wrapping. Inside was a book bound in white silk and edged with the almost royal blue of the Eleven trimmings. Amazed, he opened it.
The title page read
George Herbert
THE TEMPLE
Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations
reprinted from the first edition of 1633
Jan sat down heavily on the one remaining chair, the book on his knee. Half of his mind smiled broadly in fond recognition of the clever and subtly-coded reminder of important steps in Chips's career in which Jan had played a part. The other half of his mind shrivelled in anticipation. Did the gift carry somewhere a deeper message? The fly-leaf was uninscribed. But the book contained a leather book-mark, and tremblingly he opened it at the page. The heading said "Sin." Holding his breath, he forced himself to read the poem underneath.
Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears:
Without, our shame ; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
Jan let out his breath, and for several minutes he sat without moving. Then he closed the book and put it back in its wrapping, knowing at last what he had to do. The fence of shame and consciences, of hopes and fears, had fallen before the wind.
He marched back to Heriot, the smaller package in his hand.
"I'm sorry to have been so long, sir. Something -- delayed me. But this is for you. I wasn't going to tell you why, but now I can. That night I went to the fair, I didn't only borrow your coat and hat. I also borrowed your pipe. This is by way of -- well -- rent."
Heriot, intrigued, unwrapped the package to reveal a meerschaum pipe, its bowl carved into the head of a cricketer in a cap. This time he laughed loud and long.
"Thank you, Jan. Thank you very much. What a splendid souvenir! Every time I smoke this I shall think of you, puffing yours among the sheep in the Antipodes!"
"There's something else, sir. I'm not going to the Antipodes. Not now."
It was the rarest of rare achievements to make old Bob Heriot gape in astonishment.
"But -- but what are you going to do, then?"
"I still haven't turned down my place at Varsity, sir. I'm going to Cambridge after all."
"My dear fellow! Then I'm overjoyed to hear it! But why this change of heart?"
"Because I have to be with Chips." Jan looked at his mother's little gold watch. "It's nine o'clock, sir. He'll just be leaving the Sanatorium. May I go and meet him? I have to tell him."
Heriot nodded, without words but with the light of understanding in his eyes; and Jan strode out through the dusk of his former life into the dawn of his new.
THE END
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