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He soon settled down into the routine of school life, and plodded through the first half term, making neither friends nor enemies. No one was unkind to him; nothing ever happened; he was not even acutely miserable. "I'm getting accustomed," he thought, with dull self-contempt; a creature that could placidly go on living after such violation of body and soul seemed to him not worth hating. Probably his nerves were blunted.
Of the old wilfulness not a trace remained. From the naughtiest boy within twenty miles round, he had changed into a model of docility; yet he was as little liked by the masters as by the boys. His schoolfellows, on the whole a very fair average set of lads, had at first made friendly advances to him, and had been repulsed, not angrily, but with sullen indifference. He no longer cared at all for any sports or games; yet there was nothing studious about him; he performed the tasks set him, but made no pretence of taking any interest in them. The one thing for which he seemed to crave was sleep. He would have slept, if it had been allowed, for fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. Masters and boys alike gradually came to regard him as a dull, apathetic boor, with neither intellect enough for scholarship nor energy enough for mischief. They thought him a coward, too. Before Christmas all the boys were called up to have their teeth examined; and Jack, who had been so brave, trembled and turned white when the dentist told him that a tooth wanted filling.
His uncle had asked that arrangements should be made for him to spend the Christmas and Easter holidays at the school, and go home only for the summer vacation.
The journey, he had said in his letter, was too long to be worth taking for short holidays. Dr. Cross, though somewhat surprised at this request, in an age of cheap and easy railway travelling, had raised no objections; and so, at Christmas-time, while his schoolfellows were merry-making at their homes, Jack wandered about the deserted play-grounds, and slept alone in the big, empty dormitory. It was at this time that he began to think.
The process of thinking was to him a laborious and difficult one. His mind had never been trained to such exercise; nor had he the external familiarity with it which comes of living among thoughtful persons. Probably no member of the Vicarage household had ever thought, individually, at all; family opinions and beliefs, none the less sincere for that, were inherited, like the family plate, and profiles, and virtues. The Raymonds lived, as other Raymonds had lived before them, and never asked of Providence: "Why?" But Jack, left alone, sat down among the ruins of his shattered childhood and contemplated a tremendous question-stop.
He began to see the world as it had been a huge fish pond, where the big fish eat the little ones, only to be dragged up with a hook through their gills and eaten in their turn by a fearsome two-legged monster whose name is Death. Seeing that from this final dread there is no escape, he judged it a point of wisdom to keep the eyes turned away from that direction, and to fix them upon dangers which can be avoided.
His uncle had been bigger and stronger than he, just as Tarquin had been bigger and stronger than Lucrece; that, in itself, was sufficient explanation of all that had befallen him last summer. There was no ground for reproach, or bitterness, or anger; it was all quite natural. Like Caliban's god Setebos, the stronger creature had done as pleased him. For the weaker, one course remained: to harden his muscles and expand his chest, that when next a predatory entity should cross his path the balance of strength might not be as it had been. Thus, when his schoolfellows came back after the holidays, they found a change in Jack; he was as surly, as reserved, as passively obedient to authority as ever, but he seemed to be waking out of his sleepy apathy, and now took an interest in at least one subject: physical training.
"Boys," said Dr. Cross on the first evening, "I want you older ones to keep an eye on a new boy that's coming to-morrow, and see he doesn't get bullied. He's a little foreigner, a widow's only son, and supposed to be a bit of a musical genius. He's only eleven, and I daresay has been rather coddled up at home, especially as he's not very strong. Of course he must learn to rough it now; but let him down gently, like good fellows."
Jack shrugged his shoulders as the headmaster went out So the school was to be turned into a nursery for cry-babies and pet lap-dogs now.
The first sight of the new boy aroused in him a certain cold and secret animosity. The broken English and the violin were bad enough; but he would have managed to put up with them somehow. What he could not stand was the child's personal appearance. The seraphic little face with its yellow aureole of curls, its great, startled, solemn blue eyes, set all his teeth on edge. This child, apparently, had always had "mothers and things" to stand between him and Setebos.
Dr. Cross was popular with the boys, and his wishes were usually respected, so on the whole the "kid," as the new boy was nicknamed, suffered less persecution than might have been expected. Nevertheless, when the monitors were out of sight, a certain amount of rather ferocious teasing went on; and the child's first weeks at school were scarcely happy ones. He was evidently afraid of all the big, boisterous creatures who alternately snubbed and patronised him, and bewildered at these strange, new surroundings, so different from the esoteric world where he had grown from babyhood among shadows of his mother's endless grief and dim echoes of far-off tragedies. For a month he drifted between quicksands of practical jokes and whirlpools of ridicule, a solitary little figure, uncomplaining and very desolate, clinging tightly to his violin, and waiting for the glorious day when his mother should come to see him.
She had arranged to come once every month, this being the most she could afford. She was too poor to travel oftener, and too feeble in health to live near the school. She had a tiny cottage in Shanklin, and an income just big enough to live upon and give her child a good education. Everything that she could save out of her personal expenditure, or earn by painting fans and fire-screens, was laid aside for his future.
Qn the occasion of her first visit Jack happened to pass through the hall as she entered, and glanced round carelessly at the slim black figure. "Theo!"he heard her call; then the child rushed past him in a whirlwind of tempestuous joy, and he turned and went out, that he might not see them kiss. His heart was bitter in him against this darling of the unfair gods, dowered so richly with beauty, and talent, and a mother. "Molly's two years younger than that wax doll," he thought; "and she's got to grow up in uncle's house, with no one to take her part but Aunt Sarah."
Two days afterwards he was sitting alone in one of the playing fields, reading. Several of his schoolfellows were at play on the other side of the hedge, and their shouts and laughter sounded in his ears without arousing him. The game they had chosen was not one which develops the muscles, so for him it had no interest; he took part in games for training, not for amusement.
"I don't know what you mean!" a piteous voice cried out suddenly. "And I — I want to go and practise."
Jack looked up. At a little distance from him, by the gateway leading from one field into the other, stood a big boy named Stubbs, holding Theo by the arm. The scared face of the child roused Jack from his preoccupation. He laid down his book and sat watching. Neither of the boys had noticed his presence.
"Don't be such a little fool," he heard Stubbs say. "I don't want to hurt you..."
The remaining words were too low to hear; but Jack had understood by the expression of the big boy's face. He thought of Greaves, and Thompson, and Robert Polwheal; and looked on with cold malevolence. So much for a mother's protection! Surely the gods are just indeed, and mete out ruin with equal hands to loved and unloved alike; to this end comes i