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Jack went into the gymnasium, silent and very subdued. Helen Mirska and the things that she had told him belonged to a world of which he knew nothing. He understood only that she had talked to him, and gone away, and left him miserable. She, meanwhile, waiting at the station for her train, asked herself again and again: What is that child brooding over to be so unhappy? She had seen him for ten minutes, and had talked of her own affairs merely; and she read him as those with whom he had lived all his life had never been able to read.
In the gymnasium he went through his dumbbell exercises as conscientiously as ever; but for once he was not interested in them. Theo, standing in a corner, looked on, with wide-eyed admiration at the feats his idol could perform. As Jack swung his arms backwards, clashing the dumbbells together behind his back, the collar button of his gymnasium shirt snapped off under the strain; and when he stepped back for a moment's rest, letting his arms fall by his sides, the shirt slipped down a little from the left shoulder.
"What a queer mark you've got on your shoulder, Raymond," said the boy behind him. "Is it a burn?"
He put out a hand to draw the shirt lower, but sprang back with a cry. Jack had turned on him, white to the lips with rage, the heavy dumbbell lifted above his head.
"I'll kill you if you touch me!"
All the boys stopped in their exercises and stared, speechless with amazement Then the master's grave voice broke in: "Why, Raymond! Raymond!"
Some one took the dumbbells out of Jack's hands. He surrendered them passively, stumbled to the nearest form, and sat down. That horrible dizziness again, and the flashing lights and roaring noises...
"Oh, I can't help it!" he said.
When the lesson was over the gymnasium master went to Dr. Cross, and told him what had happened. Jack, summoned to the headmaster's study, went in, scowling, sullen, prepared for the worst.
"Raymond, my lad, Mirski's mother tells me you have undertaken to look after him and keep him out of mischief," said Dr. Cross. "I told her I was sure the little chap couldn't be in better hands. You've done him a lot of good already; I've just been talking about it with the monitors. You're a good fellow, if you could control your temper. By the way, if you should happen to have any little differences with the others, nobody will mind your settling them with your fists in the old-fashioned ma
"Very well, sir," said Jack submissively.
In the corridor a little hand stole into his.
"Jack," Theo whispered, looking up with soft eyes like his mother's, "is anything wrong with you? You're all shaking."
Jack stood still, feeling the small consoling fingers curl round his. Presently he pulled his hand roughly away.
"What should be wrong with me? There'd be nothing wrong, if people would only let me alone."
He shoved past the child and went about for the rest of the day with a hard face, surly and defiant. But late into the night, when masters and boys were asleep, he lay and brooded silently, hopelessly, for hours. He had thought he was growing accustomed and begi
It was some little time before the pallor of sleepless nights began to show through Jack's swarthy skin. He was so superbly healthy, so strong and sturdy, that even if he had fallen bodily ill he would have shown it less than most boys. But he was not ill; there was nothing the matter with him but sheer misery. Only as the weeks dragged by he grew more colourless and haggard, and the look that he had worn last August came slowly back into his eyes. At last the headmaster began to get anxious, and took him to a doctor, who looked at him in a keen, puzzled way, and presently asked: "Have you been upset about anything?"
"No, sir," said Jack, with his stolid face.
The doctor finally declared him to be "a little below par," and prescribed a tonic, which of course did no good. "I wonder what's the matter with that boy Raymond," said Dr. Cross to the mathematical master. "Do you think he's moping?"
"Hardly; he seems too stolid a creature to mope much. But one never can tell; perhaps he's a bit homesick."
Jack, meanwhile, trod nightly dumb and barefoot through hell-fire.
The days were not so bad; there were always lessons and games, and the presence of his schoolfellows. He took no interest in any of these distractions; but they filled up time and space and kept other things away. Yet sometimes, even in the middle of cricket or football, the thought of the coming night would strike at his heart. At evening, when the boys trooped up to the dormitory, he would tumble into bed with a wooden face and a sullen "good-night," and lie breathing evenly with the counterpane drawn up over his head, while the others undressed. It seemed to him that he must go mad if he should see the white, smooth, unscarred shoulders of all these happy creatures. They used to call him "The dormouse"; it had become a standing joke among them that he was always the first to sleep and the last to wake. Then, when the lights were out and the whispering between the beds had stopped, he would sit up alone, and fight with demons in the dark, helpless against a ghostly army, and crush the sheet over his mouth, and learn to sob quietly, that the others might not hear.
It struck upon him at times with a sense of amazement that misery could wear so many faces, and that one could know them all, and yet not die. There were nights of fear, when the furies sat beside his bed. He would fall asleep quietly, like every one else, to wake, quivering, from nightmares of Porthcarrick, his teeth knocking together and damp skin drawn up beneath the roots of his hair. There were nights of rage, when he would clench his hands and grit his teeth with hatred of the God, Whoever He might be, Who had made the world so unjust and the people in it so wretched. There were nights of despair, when he could only sob and sob for very desolation, till his head ached and his eyes burned and the struggle to breathe seemed to tear his throat in pieces. There were nights of loathing and horror, when hideous imaginations pursued him and the photographs glared out of the darkness whichever way he turned. But the worst were the nights of shame.
Of all torments the keenest was to see his schoolfellows asleep. By day he now envied, now despised them; by night he was ashamed before them. He would sit on the edge of his bed, watching the long still rows of placid figures, listening to the sound of their breathing. Sometimes one would turn over with a sigh, or another would fling a bare arm out upon the coverlet; and to the desolate onlooker the sight was as the stab of a knife. They seemed to him so beautiful, so intolerably white and clean; what place had he among them? They had no evil dreams, no secret horrors, no shameful scars to hide; they had not been dragged through the byways of hell or polluted with the knowledge of a man's damnation... Then he would lie down and hide his face against the pillow, and tell himself that he must get accustomed; that what is done is done; that his body had been utterly defiled; that he should never be clean again.
The Easter holidays were close at hand, and a flutter of excitement had begun in the school. To Jack the prospect of solitude and silence was now a relief, now an added terror. Suddenly it flashed upon him that only four months remained till the long summer vacation; and that then he should have to go home. Somehow, he had never thought of that before.