Shame and Consciences

adapted by Mihangel

2. Change and chance

Rutter had been put in the small dormitory at the very top of the house. The other dormitories, in one of which he had left Carpenter on the way upstairs, consisted of two long rows of cubicles. But here under the roof was a square room with a dormer window in the sloping side, a communal dressing table beneath it, a double wash-stand at each end, and a cubicle in each of the four corners. Cubicle was not the school word for them, according to the matron who came up with the boys, but "partition," or "tish" for short. They were about five feet high, contained a bed and a chair apiece, and were merely curtained at the foot. They reminded Rutter of stalls in a stable.

He noted everything with an eye that was unusually sardonic for fourteen, and unusually alive to detail. He took a grim look at himself in the mirror. It was not a particularly pleasing face, with its sombre expression and stubborn mouth, but it looked brown and hard, and acute in a dogged way. For a second it almost smiled at itself, but whether in resignation or defiance or with a touch of involuntary pride in his new circumstances, even he could hardly say. It was certainly with a thrill that he read his own name over his tish, and then the other boys' names over theirs. Bingley was next to him, Joyce and Crabtree were the other two. What would they be like? What sort of faces would they bring back to the mirror on the dressing table? Rutter was not conscious of an imagination, but somehow he pictured Joyce as large and lethargic, Crabtree as a humorist, and Bingley as a bully of the Flashman type. He had just been reading Tom Brown's Schooldays, and wondered if the humorist would be man enough to join him in standing up to the brutes, and whether pillow-fights were still the fashion. Probably not, because Master Evan had never mentioned them. But then Master Evan, when he last had seen him, had still been at preparatory school. Now he had gone on to public school, and there at Winchester he might have found things quite different.

The new boy undressed with an absent mind. He was wondering what it would have been like if he had been sent to Winchester himself, and there encountered Master Evan on equal terms. He had never done so much wondering in his life. He found a copy of last term's school list in the dormitory and took it to bed with him, and lay there wondering more.

It started with the masters. So most of them were Reverends, were they? He grimaced to himself. Then came the boys, listed by form from the top downwards. First was the Upper Sixth, then the Lower Sixth, then one curiously called the Remove, and in the Remove was friend Joyce of the corner opposite. Next came the Fifths -- three of them -- with Crabtree top of the Lower Fifth. Clever fellow, then! The bully Bingley was no doubt notoriously low in the school. The Middle Remove came next, and through each column of strange names he read religiously, with a fascination he could not have explained. He had got down, by way of the Upper Fourth, to the Middle Fourth when a familiar name took his breath away.

Heriot came in to find a face paler than it had looked downstairs, but a good brown arm and hand lying out over the coverlet and clutching a Midsummer List. The muscles of the arm were unusually developed for so young a boy. Heriot saw them relax under his gaze as he stood over the bed.

"Got hold of a school list, have you?"

"Yessir," said Rutter with a slurring promptness that did not savour of the schoolroom. Heriot turned away before he could wince, but unluckily his eyes fell on the floor, strewn with the litter of the new boy's clothes.

"I like the way you fold your clothes!"

"I beg your pardon, sir, but where am I to put them?"

It was refreshingly polite. But, again, the beg-pardon opening was not the politeness of the schoolboy.

"On this chair," said Heriot, picking them up. The boy would have leapt out of bed to do it himself, but he was too shy, and too shy to protest or even to thank. Next moment he had good reason to be bashful. Mr Heriot was holding up a broad and dirty belt, and without thinking had cried, "What's this?"

Rutter could not answer for shame, and Heriot had time to think.

"I can sympathise," he said with a chuckle. "In the holidays I wear one myself. But we mustn't betray each other, Rutter, or we'll neither of us hear the last of it! I'll sign you an order for a pair of braces in the morning."

"I have them, sir, thanks."

"That's all right, then." Heriot was still handling the belt as if he longed to buckle it round his own waist. Suddenly he noticed the initials "J. R."

"I thought your name was Ian, Rutter?"

"So it is, sir. But they used to call me Jan."

Heriot waited for a sigh, but the boy's mouth, typically, was tight shut. "Well, good night, Jan, and a fair start to you! The matron will put out the gas at ten."

The lad mumbled something. The man looked back to nod, and saw him lying as he had found him, still clutching the list, but with his face now as deep a colour as his arm.

"Have you come across any names you know?"

"One."

"Who's that?"

"He won't know me."

They were the sullen answers that had made so bad an impression downstairs, but they were strangely uttered, and Rutter no longer lay still.

"He must have a name," said Heriot, coming back into the room.

No answer.

"I'm sorry you're ashamed of your friend," he said, laughing.

"He's not my friend, and --" The boy shut his mouth again.

"I think that's very likely. What's in a name? The chances are it's only a namesake after all."

He turned away with no sign of annoyance or further interest, but was stopped by another mumble from the bed.

"Name of Devereux," he made out.

"Devereux, eh?"

"Do you know him, sir?"

"I should think I do!"

"He'll not be in this house?" Rutter was holding his breath.

"No, but he got my form prize last term."

"Do you know his other name?" It was a tremulous mumble now.

"I'm afraid I don't. No, wait a bit! His initials are either E. P. or P. E. He only came last term."

"He only would. But I thought he was going to Winchester!"

"That's the fellow. He got a scholarship and came here instead, at the last moment."

The new boy said nothing when the matron put out the gas. He was lying on his back, eyes wide open and lips compressed, just as Heriot had left him. It was almost a comfort to know the worst. And now that he knew it, beyond possibility of doubt, he was wondering whether it need be the worst after all. It might prove the best. He had always liked Master Evan. That was as much as he dared admit right now, though he should have put it more warmly. But, whether Evan Devereux should cut him dead or shake his hand, he now knew the best or the worst. And what a good thing that this lean old man, with his kind word and his abrupt manner, could not possibly know his secret or be aware of his hopes and fears.

It was very quiet in the top dormitory, but sleep did not come easily. Rutter wondered what it would be like when all the boys came back. He wondered what it would have been like if Master Evan had been in that house, in that little dormitory, in the tish next to his own. Master Evan! He had never thought of him as anything else, much less addressed him by any other name. What if it slipped out at school? It easily might, far more easily and naturally than "Devereux." After all, "Devereux" would sound like profanity, in his own ears and from his own lips.

He grinned involuntarily in the dark. It was all too absurd. He had had plenty of opportunity to pick up the language of the class to which he had just been elevated. "Too absurd" would certainly be their way of describing his situation now. He tried to see it from that point of view, for he had a wry humour of his own. He must not magnify something which nobody else might think twice about. A public school was a little world in which two boys in different houses, even if of the same age, might seldom or never meet. Days might pass before Evan as much as recognised him in the throng. Once he did, he might refuse to have anything to do with him. But then -- but then -- he might tell the whole school why.

"He was our coachman's son at home!"

The coachman's son heard that betrayal as though it had been shouted out loud. He felt a thousand eyes on his face. He knew that he lay blushing in the dark. It took all his will to calm himself by degrees.

"If he does," he decided, "I'm off. That's all."

But why should a young gentleman betray a poor boy's secret? Rutter was the stable-boy again in spirit. He might have been back in his truckle bed in the coachman's cottage at Mr Devereux's. Yes, he had always liked Master Evan. Events of a lifetime's friendship came back to mind, in shoals. Evan had been the youngest of a large family, and that after a gap, so that in one sense he was an only child. Often he had needed a boy to play with, and often Jan Rutter had been scrubbed and brushed and oiled to the scalp in order to fill the proud position of that boy. He remembered the instructions with which he was sent off from the stables. "Mind not to do this, mind not to say that." It was difficult not to do or say them when you had always to keep minding. Still, he also remembered hearing the ladies and gentlemen passing complimentary remarks on him, together with whispered explanations of his manners.

In the beginning, he was dimly aware, there had been little to choose between Evan and himself, but later, for a time, the gulf became very wide. He recalled with shame a phase when Master Evan had been forbidden, and not without reason, to have anything to do with Jan Rutter. There was even a cruel thrashing from his father for using language learnt from the executioner's own lips. Characteristically, Jan had never quite forgiven him for that, though he had been a kind father on the whole. Later, the boy about the stables had acquired more sense. The eccentric vicar of the local church had taken him in hand and spoken up for him, and nothing was said if Jan bowled to Master Evan after his tea, or played a makeshift game of racquets with him in the stable yard, so long as he kept his tongue and his harness clean. So, in recent years, the gulf had narrowed again.

That gulf, moreover, had always been spanned by quite an array of bridges. In the beginning Evan used to take his broken toys to Jan, who was a fine hand at rigging ships and soldering headless horsemen. In return -- he now recalled those condescending payments with a twisted smile -- Jan was given anything without value or broken beyond repair. Jan was also an adept at roasting chestnuts and potatoes on the potting-shed fire, a daring manipulator of molten lead, a comic artist with putty, and the pioneer of smoking in the hayloft. Those were the days when Evan was suddenly forbidden the back premises, and Jan was set to work in the stables when he was not at the local school.

Years elapsed before cricket drew the boys together again, by which time Jan had imbibed some wisdom. Finding himself to be a natural left-hand bowler who could spoil an afternoon by dismissing his opponent too soon, he was sensible enough to lose the knack at times, only to recover it when Evan had made all the runs he wanted. As Jan was not much of a batsman, there was seldom any bad blood. Indeed Jan always saw to that, in whatever they did together, for he had developed a devotion to Evan, who could be perfectly delightful to one companion at a time, and when everything was going well. Jan was a lone wolf of limited experience, and from his lowly vantage point the only young gentleman he knew, even if a slightly flawed specimen of the species, easily became a paragon and a hero. From there he had become the object, the necessarily distant object, of physical yearning. Jan was ready to admit it, now, and wondered if this mysterious feeling was what people called love.

And then things had happened so thick and fast that it was hard to remember them in order. The central fact was that, last February, Rutter the elder, that fine figure on the coach box with his bushy whiskers and his bold black eyes, had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia after a bout of night-work. The son of an ironmaster's coachman in Middlesbrough awoke to find himself the grandson of an East Anglian clergyman whose ancient name he had never heard before, but who sent for the lad in hot haste, to make a gentleman of him if it was not too late.

That move, from the raw red suburbs of a raw upstart industrial town to the most venerable of English rectories in a countryside almost unchanged since the Conquest, Jan Rutter did not appreciate. He preferred the fashionably fussy architecture of his former surroundings to the complacent antiquity of his new home. Here he was prejudiced. This was the very atmosphere which had driven his mother to desperation. Her blood in him rebelled again, though he was too young to trace the reason. He only knew that he had been happier in a modern saddle-room than he would ever be under mellow tiles and mediaeval trees.

In the midst of this unhappiness, the tutor and the strenuous training for a public school came as some relief. But the odd lad took a pride in showing no pride at all in his new status. The new school and the new home were all one to him. He had not been consulted about either. He recognised that he was under an authority he was powerless to resist. But he could not be grateful to those who took him in from a sense of cold duty, who never so much as mentioned his father's death or breathed his mother's name. He had inherited something of his parents' pride.

He had heard of public schools from Evan, and even envied him his coming time at one. But when his own time came so unexpectedly, Jan had hardened his heart and faced the inevitable as callously as any criminal. But now, equally unexpectedly, he was about to see again the one human being he really wished to see again. True, Jan had heard nothing from Evan since the end of the Christmas holidays; but then they had never written to each other in their lives. And the more he thought about it, the less Jan feared the worst from their meeting tomorrow or the day after. Not that he counted on the best, not that a prospect recently unwelcome had suddenly become welcome. Master Evan as an equal was still an inconceivable and inaccessible figure, and the whole future remained grey and grim. But at least there was a glint of excitement in it now, a vision of depths and heights.

On this his first night at a public school, his thoughts swooped, now up, now down. It did not even cross his mind, full of images of Evan though it was, to try the recipe for sleep that he had discovered a year or so back. The only sounds were the muffled ticking of his one treasure, the little watch under his pillow, and the harsh chimes of the church clock. He heard it strike eleven, then twelve. But life was more exciting, when he finally did drop off, than Jan Rutter had dreamt of finding it when he went to bed.