The Gods and Mr. Perrin. Hugh Walpole
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men were under house-masters: Clinton belonged to Dormer; and Traill, the new man, to Perrin. Both houses were in the same building, but the sense of rival camps gave a pleasant spur of emulation and competition both to work and play.
“I say, Perrin, “have you made out your bath-lists? Then there are locker-names—I want.” Perrin snapped at his bread and butter. “Ah, Dormer, please—my tea first.”
“All right; only, it’s getting on to four.”
For some moments there was silence. Then there came timid raps on the door. Perrin, in his most stentorian voice, shouted, “Come in!”
The door slowly opened, and there might be seen dimly in the passage a misty cloud of white Eton collars and round, white faces. There was a shuffling of feet.
Perrin walked slowly to the door.
“Here we all are again! How pleasant! How extremely pleasant! All of us eager to come back, of course—um—yes. Well, you know you oughtn’t to come now. Two minutes past four. I ‘ll take your names then—another five minutes. It’s up on the board. Well, Sexton? Hadn’t you eyes? Don’t you know that ten minutes past four is ten minutes past four and not four o’clock?”
“Yes, sir, please, sir—but, sir—”
Perrin closed the door, and walked slowly back to the fireplace.
“Ha, ha,” he said, smiling reflectively; “had him there!”
Dormer was muttering to himself, “Wednesday, 9 o’clock, Bilto, Cummin; 10 o’clock, Sayer, Long. Thursday, 9 o’clock—”
The golden leaves blew with a whispering chatter down the path.
The door opened again, and someone came in—Traill, the new man. Perrin looked at him with curiosity and some excitement. The first impression of him, standing there in the doorway, was of someone very young and very eager to make friends. Someone young, by reason of his very dress—the dark brown Norfolk jacket, light gray flannel trousers, turned up and short, showing bright purple socks and brown brogues. His hair, parted in the middle and brushed back, was very light brown; his eyes were brown and his cheeks tanned. His figure was square, his back very broad, his legs rather short—he looked, beyond everything else, tremendously clean.
He stopped when he saw Perrin, and Dormer looked up and introduced them. Perrin was relieved that he was so young. Searle, last year, had been old enough to have an opinion of his own—several opinions of his own; he had contradicted Perrin on a great many points, and towards the end of the term they had scarcely been on speaking terms. Searle was a pig-headed ass....
But Traill evidently wanted to “know”—was quite humble about it, and sat, pulling at his pipe, whilst Perrin enlarged about lists and dormitories and marks and discipline to his hearts content. “I must say as far as order goes I ‘ve never found any trouble. It ‘s in a man if he ‘s going to do it—I’ve always managed them all right—never any trouble—hum, ha! Yes, you ‘ll find them the first few days just a little restive—seeing what you ‘re made of, you know; drop on them, drop on them.”
Traill asked about the holiday task.
“Oh, yes, Dormer set that. Ivanhoe—Scott, you know. Just got to read out the questions, and see they don’t crib. Let them go when you hear the chapel bell.”
Traill was profuse in his thanks.
“Not at all—anything you want to know.”
Perrin smiled at him.
There was, once again, the timid knock at the door. The door was opened, and a crowd of tiny boys shuffled in, headed by a larger boy who had the bold look of one who has lost all terror of masters, their ways, and their common rooms.
“Well, Sexton?” Perrin cleared his throat.
“Please, sir, you told me to bring the new boys. These are all I could find, sir—Pippin Minor is crying in the matron’s room, sir.” Sexton backed out of the room.
Perrin stared at the agitated crowd for some moments without saying anything. The boys were herded together like cattle, and were staring at him with eyes that started from their round, close-cropped heads. Perrin took their names down. Then he talked to them for three minutes about discipline, decency, and decorum; then he reminded them of their mothers, and finally said a word about serving their country.
Then he passed on to the subject of pocket-money. “It will be safer for you to hand it over to me,” he said slowly and impressively. “Then you shall have it when you want it.”
A slight shiver of apprehension passed through the crowd; then slowly, one by one, they delivered up their shining silver. One tiny boy—he had apparently no neck and no legs; he was very chubby—had only two halfcrowns. He clutched these in his hot palm until Perrin said, “Well, Rackets?”
Then, with eyes fixed devouringly upon them, the boy delivered them up.
“I don’t like to see you so fond of money, Rackets.” Perrin dropped the half-crowns slowly into his trouser pocket, one after the other. “I don’t think you will ever see these half-crowns again.” He smiled.
Rackets began to choke. His fist, which had closed again as though the money was still there, moved forward. A large, fat tear gathered slowly in his eye. He struggled to keep it back—he dug his fist into it, turned round, and fled from the room.
Perrin was amused. “Caught friend Rackets on the hip,” he said.
Then suddenly, in the distance, an iron bell began to clang. The four men put on their gowns, gathered books together, and moved to the door. Traill hung back a little. “You take the big room with me, Traill,” said Dormer. “I ‘ll give you paper and blotting-paper.”
They moved slowly out of the room, Perrin last. A door was opened. There was a sudden cessation of confused whispers—complete silence, and then Perrin’s voice: “Question one. Who were Richard I., Gurth, Wamba, Brian-de-Bois-Guilbert?.. . B,r,i,a,n—hyphen…”
The door closed.
A few papers fluttered about the table. It was growing dark outside, and a silver moon showed above the dark mass of the garden wall.
The brown leaves, now invisible, passed rustling and whispering about the path. Into the room there stole softly, from the kitchen, the smell of onions....
CHAPTER II—INTRODUCES A CONFUSING COMPANY OF PERSONS, WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON MRS. COMBER
IT would be fitting at this moment, were it possible, to give Traill’s impressions, at the end of the first week, of the place and the people. But here one is met by the outstanding and dominating difficulty that Traill himself was not given to gathering impressions at all—he felt things, but he never saw them; he recorded opinions in simple language and an abbreviated vocabulary, but it was all entirely objective; motives, the way that things hung and were interdependent one upon the other, the sense of contrast and of the incessant jostling of comedy on tragedy and of irony upon both, never hit him anywhere.
Nevertheless, he had, in a clear, clean-cut way, his opinions at the end of the first week.
There is a letter of his to a college friend that is interesting, and there are some other things in a letter to his mother; but he was engaged, quite naturally, in endeavoring to keep up with the confusing medley of “things to be done and things not to be done” that that first week must necessarily entail.
His relations to Perrin and Perrin’s relations to him are, it may be said here now, once and for all, the entire motif of this episode—it is from first to last an attempt to arrive at a decision as to the real reasons of the catastrophe that ultimately occurred; and so, that being the case, it may seem that the particulars as to the rest of the people in the place, and, indeed, the place itself, are extraneous and unnecessary; but they all helped, every one of them, in their own way and their own time, to bring about the ultimate disaster, and so they must have their place.
Traill had learnt during his three years at Cambridge that,