The Gods and Mr. Perrin

Oh! he must get out into the air! His head was very had.

As he left his room, there was a vague fear, somewhere, at his heart.

The game had begun. The ropes on either side were thickly lined with a dark crowd of boys, and a long wailing shout, “Scho-o-l!” rose and fell without ceasing. Perrin, in his shabby greatcoat, watched with a superior but interested air. There was nothing in the world that excited him more, but he had never been able to play himself and so he affected to despise it.

In front of him, pressed against the rope, were three small boys of his own house, each boy holding a paper bag from which he drew fat and sticky green and brown sweets. They had not noticed him. They divided their attention between their neighbors, their sweets, and the game.

“Shut up, Huggins, you silly fool! What are you shoving for?”

“Can’t help it—Grey’s barging—Oh! I say, run it, Morton. That’s it! Pick it up—dodge him, man! Oh, hang it!”

“I say, swop one of those brown things for one of mine—Thanks! Where’s Garden, you chaps?”

“Swotting up for Old Pompous.”

“Oh! what rot! I’m blowed if I would. I thought Pompous was rather sweet on Garden.”

“So he is—but Garden can’t stand him.”

“No wonder—blithering ass, with his long words!”

“Oh! I say—they ‘ve got it! There’s Morton off again—Oh! he’s going! Well run, my word! He’s in! No, he isn’t! The back’s got him! No, he hasn’t! Hurray! Try! Good old Morton!”

Amongst the commotion that followed the happy event Perrin moved to a less crowded portion of the people. He was accustomed to hearing himself spoken of with but little respect by those who, when he was present, trembled before him. He always told himself that all the members of the staff were in the same box; but this afternoon it hurt—it hurt badly.

Little beasts! He’d punish them! As he moved along behind the ranks of boys—each boy with his friend—the familiar mantle of loneliness, that he had known so long, swept him in its somber folds. He saw Comber in the distance, turned to avoid him, and suddenly confronted Mrs. Comber and Miss Desart.

He pulled himself up with a sudden effort of one who, feeling at his very worst, has immediately to appear at his very best, and the struggle was glaring to the observer, in the nervous clutching of the buttons of his coat and his uneasy, agitated laugh.

Mrs. Comber was always at her noisiest and most affable with Mr. Perrin, because she didn’t like him, and she always tried to cover that dislike with an increased amiability. Isabel stood rather gravely by and watched the game.

“We appear to be winning,” said Perrin, glaring as he spoke at three small hoys who had looked up at the sound of his voice. “We appear—um—to be winning. Morton has secured a try.”

“Yes, I’m so glad,” gasped Mrs. Comber—she was out of breath. “Morton’s a nice boy—we had him once in our house, and I do hope the school will win, because it’s so nice for everybody’s tempers, and the boys like it—and there’s that nice Mr. Traill playing and running about most beautifully.”

Perrin started. He hadn’t noticed that Traill was playing. He looked at Isabel and saw that she was watching the game with deep attention. Traill was certainly in his element. The ball came suddenly in his direction. He had it in his hands and was off with it. There was a breathless, hushed pause; then, as he sped along, just inside the touch-line, swerved past his opposing three-quarter to the center of the field, and flew for the goal, the silence broke into a roar. Miss Desart gave a long-drawn “Oh!” Mrs. Comber a little scream, Mr. Perrin moodily stroked his mustache.

The back was outwitted, and came floundering to the ground—a very pretty try.

“Good old Traillers!”

“That’s something like!”

“Isn’t he spiffing?”—and then Miss Desart’s, “Oh! that was splendid!” beat about Mr. Perrin’s poor head, that was aching horribly.

“That nice Mr. Traill! I do like to see people run like that. Oh! it’s half-time.”

Mrs. Comber caught Mr. Perrin slowly into her vision again and prepared once more to be volubly pleasant.

But Mr. Perrin had had enough. On the opposite side of the field, on the top of the hill against the china white of the autumn sky, were three trees, gnarled, bent, gaunt, like three old men. Quite alone they stood and watched, impersonally and gravely, the game. Mr. Perrin felt suddenly as though he, too, were really one of them. Behind them sheets of white light, falling from the hidden sun, flooded the long, brown fields.

Cold pale blue was reflected against the gray stodgy clouds. Mr. Perrin went back slowly to his room. The dusty untidiness of it closed about him. He sat down to his pile of English essays on “Town and Country—Which is the best to live in?” with a confused sense of running men, lights across the hills, the china red and black man on the mantelpiece, and Miss Desart’s shining eyes.

At five o’clock, with a heavy scowl, Garden Minimus presented “The Patriot” neatly written fifty times.

II

It was about this time that Archie Traill accepted an invitation to a dance at Sir Henry Trojan’s. It was to be only a small dance, and it was to be over by twelve. “Do let us,” Lady Trojan wrote, “put you up. You will be able to see more of Robin, who is coming down for the night from London. He will want to see you so badly.” Traill wrote back, accepting the dance, but explaining that he must return on the same evening, quoting as his imperative necessity early morning preparation.

It was Clinton’s evening on duty, and therefore there was no very obvious necessity to say anything more about it; but Traill, in order to free himself from any further danger, thought that he would go and receive definite permission from Moy-Thompson. He had not as yet been to a single dinner or evening party outside the school, and he had noticed that the rest of the staff never went out at all, nor had apparently any intention of doing so. He went round at twelve o’clock after morning school to Moy-Thompson’s study, knocked on the door, and entered. He was conscious at once of trouble in the air. He saw that White, the nervous man who took the Classical Fifth, was standing by Thompson’s table. He moved back as though he would leave the room; but the headmaster called to him, “Ah! Traill, don’t go. I shall be ready in a moment.”

Then Traill noticed several things. He noticed, first, that Moy-Thompson’s garden beyond the window was colored a brilliant brown in the sun; he noticed that Moy-Thompson’s study was dark and black, like a prison; he noticed that White’s long hatchet-face was yellow in the half-light; he noticed that both White’s hands, hanging straight at his side, were tightly clenched, and that his thin legs, spread widely apart, were drawn tight beneath his trousers so that the cloth flapped a little against his thin calves; he noticed that Moy-Thompson’s long gray beard swept the table and that his fingers tapped the wood every now and again with the sound of peas rattling on a plate; he noticed that Moy-Thompson was smiling.

Moy-Thompson said, “But I think I told you that Maurice was on no account to have an exeat.”

White’s voice came from a far, hesitating distance: “Yes, I know. But his father was only to be in London for an hour, and he has not seen his son for a year, and I thought that under the circumstances—”

“That does not alter the fact that I had expressed a wish that he should not have an exeat.”

“No—but I thought that if you knew all the circumstances of the case, you would not object.”

“What is your position here? Are you here to consider my wishes? What are you paid to do?”

White made no answer.

“Of course if you are dissatisfied with the condition of things here, you have only to say so. It would be doubtless possible to fill your place.”

“No,”—White’s voice was very low—“I have no complaint. I am sorry if—”

“You must remember your position here. I have yet to discover any paid position that enables you to indulge your own particular fancies when you please. Doubtless you are better informed.”

Traill could endure it no longer. He was so angry that the blood had rushed to his head, and his face was scarlet. White had flung one glance at him, as though to beseech him to go away, and he moved to the door; but again Moy-Thompson said, “Just a moment, Traill.”

He was so angry that, on the impulse of the moment, he had almost stepped across the room and flung in his resignation. White’s long haggard figure was torture; it was cruelty, devilish cruelty, laughing with them there in the room.

The man at the table was playing with them as a cat does with a mouse, shaming one of them before the younger man, as though he had stripped him naked and driven him so into the playing-fields outside, forcing the other to listen, brutally, intolerably, against his will.

The room seemed full of pain—it seemed to cross and recross in waves. White’s head bent down.... At last he passed with lowered eyes out through the door.

Traill could not speak; without another word, he turned and followed him. Outside the door in the darkened passage he suddenly held out his hand and caught White’s. White held his for an instant; suddenly, with a frightened, startled look, he stepped away.

III

When the evening of the dance arrived, Traill noticed that he was glad to get away. Term had now lasted for six weeks, and in another week it would be half-term. He was a little tired; he found it more difficult to get up in the morning. Little things mattered a great deal—he now emphatically disliked Perrin more than he had ever disliked anyone in his life before; there was even annoyance in the mere sight of his long, lean, untidy figure, in the sound of his assured, supercilious voice, in the sense of his arrogance.

They never spoke to each other if they could help it; meals were extremely disagreeable.

He found, too, that love did not mingle properly with school work. He was always going into day-dreams when he should have been teaching his form. He tried to keep the sea and the wood and the funny man that he had met there and Isabel apart from his work; but they came skipping in—and at night he dreamt—he was almost sure that she loved him.... Whenever they met now they were very silent.

He escaped whilst they were all in chapel. He lit his bicycle-lamp, wrapped a long, thin coat about him, and escaped. It had been a cold, fine day. The sun was just setting over the sea as he spun down the hard, white road.

As he flew between the dark, sweet-scented hedges, as he felt the wind in his ears and about his face, as the smell, salt and sharp, of the sea came to him, it was strange to find how the cares and troubles of those brown buildings on the hill fled away from him. He was already his old self; he sang to himself.

A faint red glow hovered over the dark, heaving water; the trees stood black on the horizon, and the long, low lines of shadow, white and gray, stole about the road as the evening sky slowly settled, with a little sighing of the wind, into the colors that it would bear during the night. The lights of the little village behind him made a red cluster against the dark shoulder of the Brown Hill.

He sang aloud.

It was a most enjoyable dance; he had never enjoyed a dance so much before. He realized that he, was looking on the past six weeks as imprisonment; he also noticed that when he told his partners that he was a schoolmaster they stared at him a little apprehensively. It was delightful to see Robin Trojan again. They walked into the garden and strolled about the paths together; he was much improved since the Cambridge days, Traill thought—less self-assured and with wider interests. And then Sir Henry Trojan always gave Traill a broader feeling of life—sanity and health and strength—and lie had an admirable sense of humor.

And then it was over, and Traill was speeding back over the hill again. He thought of Isabel all the way back. He fancied that she was with him in the dark. The night was so black that he could only see the little round white circle that his lamp flung on the road in front of him. The hedges, like black, bulging pillows, closed him in.

He seemed to be back in no time. He heard the school clock strike one. He took the Yale key and fitted it into the door; it would not move; he tugged, pulled it out, forced it in again, and pushed it. With a click it broke in half.

He looked at the big, black, silent buildings in despair—supposing he had to stay out all night. He would die rather than ring.

He went round to the other side of the building and looked up. Then he saw that the dining-room windows were not very high and that he might climb. He caught on to a buttress and pulled himself up; then another hand on the window-sill drew him level.

He found to his delight that the window was not latched. He pushed it up, and then, with one hasty look into the dark cavern beneath him, jumped. He was saluted on his descent with a noise as though all the crockery in the world had fallen about his ears. The sharp collapse of it seemed to go rushing through the silent house for hours; he knew that he had cut his hand and had bruised his knee.

For a moment he was stunned; then slowly he realized what he had done: the tables were laid for the next morning’s breakfast, and he had jumped down straight amongst the cups and plates.

He sat up on the floor and began, with his head aching, to staunch the blood that came from the cut. He saw, as in a dream, the door open. Someone was standing there, in a nightshirt, holding a candle; it was Perrin.

“Who’s there? What’s that?” Perrin held a poker in his other hand.

Traill got up slowly from the floor. “It is I—Traill,” he stammered. He was still feeling stunned.

Perrin held the candle a little closer. “Oh, is it you, Traill?”

“Yes, I have been out. I fell on to the plates and things. I am sorry.”

“You made a great noise.” Perrin was speaking very slowly. “You woke me up.”

“Yes; I am most awfully sorry.”

Traill moved towards the door. Perrin still stood there, holding his candle, his nightshirt flapping about his legs. He did not seem inclined to move.

“You made a great noise. It is one o’clock.” He said it as though he were Robespierre condemning Louis XVI to execution.

“Yes, I know. I’m dreadfully sorry. I broke my key.”

Still Perrin did not move. “What are you doing out so late?” he said at last, slowly.

What the devil had it to do with Perrin!

“I did n’t know that this was a girls’ school,” Traill said at last, sarcastically. His head was aching, his knee hurt, he was tired, and in a very bad temper.

Perrin moved from the door. “It’s struck one—coming in like this!”

The candle flung a most ridiculous shadow of him on the wall—a huge, gigantic head with hair sticking out of it like spears.

Because he was tired and rather hysterical, this suddenly amused Traill enormously. He hurst into a peal of laughter.

“I can’t help it,” he said, shaking; “you look so funny, so frightfully odd!”

Perrin said nothing. He looked at him for a moment. He had been disturbed in his sleep; he had every reason to be very angry. But he said nothing at all. He moved slowly down the passage.

Traill followed him in silence; he was suddenly frightened.

CHAPTER VI—SÆVA INDIGNATIO

I

TO Perrin, in his sleep that night there came, accompanied with roaring wind and crashing sea, a dream of the little man in red and black china that lived on the mantelpiece. He came tip-tap across the floor to him and bent over the bed and whispered in his ear. He had grown in his transit and was large in the leg and trailed behind him a long black gown, and he troubled Mr. Perrin by buzzing like a wasp.

He was urging Perrin to do something, but it was hard to distinguish the words because of the booming of the sea. The cold light of early morning and, an hour later, the harsh clang of the bell down the stone passages, restored the china gentleman once more to the mantelpiece; but the discovery that there had been a storm in the night only seemed to confirm the gentleman’s appearance. Besides, he was no new thing—he had climbed down from his perch on other occasions.

Perrin and Traill exchanged no word during breakfast.

II

Garden Minimus played his small part in the whole affair by being sulky and obstinate during the whole of first hour. It was a game that he was perfectly accustomed to playing, and he knew every move from the opening gambit of “saying things under your breath that looked bad, but couldn’t possibly be heard,” to the triumphant checkmate of a studied, sarcastic politeness that was most unusual and hinted at danger.

Perrin had slept, as we have seen, exceedingly badly, and the old hallucination that twenty boys were in reality five hundred crept over him. They sat in stupid, irritated rows at hard wooden desks soiled with ink. Beyond the drab windows the wind howled, and the dry leaves blew against the panes.

His temper rose as the hour advanced. The fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid was scarcely calculated to show dull boys at their brightest and best, and Perrin found that, by changing the letters of the figure on the board, the form knew nothing about it at all.

He proceeded, as was his way, to secure the dullest, fattest, and heaviest boy (a youngster with spectacles and a protruding chin, called Somerset-Walpole) and to make merry at his expense. Somerset-Walpole—his fingers exuded ink, his coat whitewash, and his hair dust—stood with his mouth open and his brow wrinkled, and a vague wonder as to why, when he ought to be thinking about Euclid, his mind would invariably wander to the bristly hairs at the back of Mr. Perrin’s neck and the silly leaves dancing about outside.

Mr. Perrin played heavily with him for about quarter of an hour (the form laughing nervously at his ironical sallies), and then sent the youngster back, crying, to his seat; the boy spent the rest of the hour in drawing hideous people with noses like pens and tiny legs, and then smudging them out with his fingers.

Then Perrin had Garden Minimus in his hands. The boy’s sulking, frowning face drove him to fury. He suddenly felt (as though it had leapt wildly from some dark corner on to his shoulder) the Cat of Cruelty purring at his ear. It was an animal whose whispers he heard, as a rule, only when the term was well advanced; now it was upon him. He knew, suddenly, that he would like to take Garden Minimus’s ears in his hands and twist them back further and further until they cracked. He would like to take his little fat arms and close his fingers about them and pinch them until they were blue. He would like to take the sharp, white knuckles and beat them with a ruler. Garden had chubby cheeks and bright blue eyes. Perrin began to pull, very gently, his hair. Garden wriggled a little.

“Take the triangle A B C,” he began, and stopped. Perrin began to pinch the back of his neck.

“You have said that six times now, Garden. Say it again, because I am sure the rest of the form are immensely interested. Really, I grieve to think of the amount of time that you must have spent over your preparation last night. You ‘ll be overdoing it if you go on like this, you know—you will, really. You mustn’t work so hard. Meanwhile write it out thirty times, and say it to me to-night after tea.”

But he did not let him go. He passed his hand down the boy’s arm.... He saw the form watching him with white faces; his own was white; he was shaking with rage.

“Go back to your seat,” he said in a whisper, and he gave him a push. He sent the form back to learn the work again, and he sat for the rest of the hour with his head between his hands. Then, when the bell had rung and most of the form had filed out, he called Garden to him. “I think fifteen times will be enough,” and he touched the boy’s sleeve with his hand. But Garden went out of the room in silence, infinite contempt in his eyes.

Then, the hoys gone, Mr. Perrin’s mind went back to the incident of the preceding night. It was his custom to go and talk for a little to Moy-Thompson once a week. They disliked each other, of course; but they could be of mutual advantage, and they both found that hints dropped and accepted during these little talks were of great value during the days that followed. Perrin had never any deliberate intention of harming anyone in these little conversations. But, every man’s hand being against him, it seemed to him only fair that he should use such opportunities of retaliation as were given him. At the same time these little confidential talks flattered his sense of power. Dormer was the senior master at the Lower School, but Perrin knew that Dormer did not have these little talks; it did not occur to him that the reason might be that Dormer was too honorable to care about them. Moreover, as far as Traill was concerned, Perrin really felt that it did not do to have masters leaping through windows at any hour of the night. The accidental fact that he disliked Traill intensely had, he persuaded himself, nothing whatever to do with it; he would have felt it just as strongly his duty to speak about it had the offender been his dearest friend.

The accumulative irritations of the morning, succeeding a disturbed and broken night, only stirred him to further zeal for the school’s good. The only consoling fact in a dark world was that Miss Desart had, in chapel, last evening, looked at him with eyes that seemed to him on fire with devotion. He intended, in a day or two, to ask her to come for a walk with him… and then another walk… and then another… and then....

And so he went to see Moy-Thompson. You can, if the simile is not too terribly old, imagine Moy-Thompson as a spider and his study as his web; it was certainly dusty enough, with faded busts of Romans and Greeks on the top shelves of the book-cases, and gloomy photographs of gloomy places on the walls. The two men seemed to suit the place well enough, and its depression really brightened Mr. Perrin up. But it must be remarked once more that it was not from any anticipation of doing Traill damage that he embraced and cuddled his little piece of news so eagerly, but only because it helped his sense of importance. He was already wishing that he had told Garden Minimus to write his Euclid thirty times instead of fifteen, so cheered and inspired did he feel.

The two men understood one another perfectly, and had a mutual respect for each other ‘s strong qualities. No time was wasted in preliminaries, and it was a curious coincidence that Moy-Thompson’s first question should be: “What do you think of Traill? How’s he doing?”

Moy-Thompson is not a pleasant person to contemplate, alone, amongst the people of that place, there is nothing whatever to be said for him, and it is my intention to pass over him as quickly as may be. Perrin knew from the sound of his voice that he had some reason for disliking Traill.

“Oh, I think, well enough,” he answered, looking out of the window. “The boys like him.”

“Oh, they like him; do they?”

“Yes. I think he indulges them rather. I’m not quite sure that he sticks to his work as he should do.”

“Why! What does he do?”

“I found him jumping through the Lower School dining-room window at one o’clock this morning.”

“Oh, did you!” Moy-Thompson smiled. “Where had he been?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Perrin pulled his gown about him. A sudden distaste for the whole business had seized him; after another word or two he went away, back to his own rooms.

III

Meanwhile Traill was tired and cross and out of temper with the world. He found that there was more to be said for the stay-at-home tastes of the rest of the staff than he had suspected. You couldn’t, if you went gaily dancing the evening before, embrace early morning preparations with the eagerness and even the attention that it properly demanded. His mind was heavy, drowsy; he had forgotten his anger with Perrin and was only rather amused by the whole affair of the night before; but, instead of correcting Latin exercises, he sat, with his eyes gazing dreamily out of the window, his thoughts on Isabel.

He found first hour tiresome and irritating. He lost his temper for the first time that term, and went, at the end of the second hour, into the Upper School common room with a cloudy brow and dragging feet.

Anything drearier than this place it would be impossible to conceive. There was a long, red-clothed table, a black, yawning grate, a dozen stiff wooden chairs and, scattered about the room, the whole of the staff waiting for the bell to ring for third hour. This was the most irritating quarter of an hour of the day.