Antic Hay Read Online Free Page B

sixty-three Holiday Task Papers which had fallen to his share. They lay, thick piles of them, on the floor beside his chair: sixty-three answers to ten questions about the Italian Risorgimento. The Risorgimento, of all subjects! It had been one of the Headmaster’s caprices. He had called a special masters’ meeting at the end of last term to tell them all about the Risorgimento. It was his latest discovery.
    â€˜The Risorgimento, gentlemen, is the most important event in modern European history.’ And he had banged the table; he had looked defiantly round the room in search of contradictors.
    But nobody had contradicted him. Nobody ever did; they all knew better. For the headmaster was as fierce as he was capricious. He was for ever discovering something new. Two terms ago it had been singeing; after the hair-cut and before the shampoo, there must be singeing.
    â€˜The hair, gentlemen, is a tube. If you cut it and leave the end unsealed, the water will get in and rot the tube. Hence the importance of singeing, gentlemen. Singeing seals the tube. I shall address the boys about it after chapel to-morrow morning; and I trust that all house-masters’ – and he had glared around him from under his savage eyebrows – ‘will see that their boys get themselves regularly singed after cutting.’
    For weeks afterwards every boy trailed behind him a faint and nauseating whiff of burning, as though he were fresh from hell. And now it was the Risorgimento. One of these days, Gumbril reflected, it would be birth control, or the decimal system, or rational dress.
    He picked up the nearest batch of papers. The printed questions were pinned to the topmost of them.
    â€˜Give a brief account of the character and career of Pope Pius IX,
with dates wherever possible
.’
    Gumbril leaned back in his chair and thought of his own character, with dates. 1896: the first serious and conscious and deliberate lie. Did you break that vase, Theodore? No, mother. It lay on his conscience for nearly a month, eating deeper and deeper. Then he confessed the truth. Or rather he had not confessed; that was too difficult. He led the conversation, very subtly, as he thought, round through the non-malleability of glass, through breakages in general, to this particular broken vase; he practically forced his mother to repeat her question. And then, with a burst of tears, he had answered, yes. It had always been difficult for him to say things directly, point-blank. His mother had told him, when she was dying . . . No, no; not that.
    In 1898 or 1899 – oh, these dates! – he had made a pact with his little cousin, Molly, that she should let him see her with no clothes on, if he would do the same by her. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain; but he, overwhelmed at the last moment by a passion of modesty, had broken his promise.
    Then, when he was about twelve and still at his preparatory school, in 1902 or 1903 he had done badly in his exams, on purpose; he had been frightened of Sadler, who was in the same form, and wanted to get the prize. Sadler was stronger than he was, and had a genius for persecution. He had done so badly that his mother was unhappy; and it was impossible for him to explain.
    In 1906 he had fallen in love for the first time – ah, much more violently than ever since – with a boy of his own age. Platonic it had been and profound. He had done badly that term, too; not on purpose, but because he had spent so much time helping young Vickers with his work. Vickers was really very stupid. The next term he had ‘come out’ –
Staphylococcus pyogenes
is a lover of growing adolescence – with spots and boils all over his face and neck. Gumbril’s affection ceased as suddenly as it had begun. He finished that term, he remembered, with a second prize.
    But it was time to be thinking seriously of Pio Nono. With a sigh of disgusted weariness, Gumbril looked at his