A Voice Like Velvet. Martin Edwards

adaptable, like an old cat, and he grew very fond of her. She was always there all through his prep school days at Harrogate, and his public school days, and whenever he came back for holidays she looked after his clothes and tried hard to take the place of a mother or an aunt. She was a beady-eyed old thing with a witchlike chin, and he still remembered her frequent position, peeping at keyholes in his interest, to see how the latest silence was getting on within. Ernest got through unbelievable silences, usually with Havelock Ellis propped up against the water-jug, and now and again a spot of Meredith. It had long since dawned on him that life wasn’t playing fair by him. What was the use of being taught the public school notion that you must always be a sportsman and a gentleman, if life didn’t keep to the same rules? He was still at his public school when it occurred to him he might have to take the matter into his own hands sooner or later, but before he was quite ready to do so a schoolboyish incident set a strange train of thought seeping through his young mind. He was dared to climb through the Headmaster’s study window one wintry night and steal his birch. His reaction to this challenge startled even himself. He at once accepted the challenge and with an outward air of complete calm proceeded to accomplish the unnerving feat. He still remembered the intensity of his feelings in the darkness of that awe-inspiring study; the speaking furniture and the distant footsteps in the quadrangle outside: his noiseless return, with the birch prized out of the locked cupboard with a bit of wire. Moreover, on a second challenge, he calmly took it back again. And he remembered being asked: ‘But I say, man, weren’t you dead scared of being caught? It would have meant six of the best!’

      ‘I knew I wouldn’t be caught,’ he had answered, modestly but firmly.

      ‘Burglars always get caught!’

      ‘No! You only hear about the ones who get caught!’

      He was still sure of this and applied it to every crime. He was quite satisfied that an intelligent person could go all through life and not be caught—providing he wasn’t a fool and used his brains. He believed in the power of circumstances, and Fate, but not in this one direction. He believed a man could achieve anything he really wanted to achieve, if his mind was constantly applied to it. There was no question of getting caught. Yet this did not detract from the thrill—for he had no proof of his belief until life was over.

      Arriving home with these newly forming beliefs after his last term at school, he decided it was time to take his life in his hands so far as his father was concerned. Ever inclined to be impulsive, he took it into his hands after a singularly long silence at breakfast, by hurling Havelock Ellis across the room. It landed with a report like a revolver shot up against the buff wall. Mr Bisham Senior, however, carefully counted four minutes by his gold watch before looking up and saying, economically:

      ‘Well?’

      It was rather bad luck on Ernest to achieve such a discouraging start, especially when he had planned it all so carefully through many agonized nights. But having launched his attack, so to speak, he made a brave attempt to push ahead with it, despite enemy resistance at once hardening. He pleaded, simply, that as his school days were now at an end, he felt he would now like to take his life into his own care and keeping. What he also meant was that he would like a bit of income to do it with, but his nerve went before he could get this out. Deeds didn’t unnerve him, words did. His father looked gaunt, distinguished, eminently successful—and completely unlovable. Ernest knew what he himself must look like in contrast: a pale, scraggy and overgrown youth full of the usual inhibitions and frustrations, and yet at the same time an up-to-date edition of the very man he detested.

      He failed, however, to achieve a bridgehead.

      At any rate, he achieved one ambition that morning: he made his father speak! And it was amusing to remember now that his father told him scathingly—in answer to a remark about refusing to go to college or to any Ministry either: ‘I should have thought you would have wanted the name of Bisham to be a household word! I know I did, when I was your age!’ How queerly prophetic! It was a household word now all right: it went into every room, in cottage and castle; it even went into that very dining-room, likely as not, in that sinister house in Putney! Life, then, had the pleasing habit of righting itself, and apologizing for what it had done before. Did it stay right, and penitent? That was the next intriguing wonder. But in the days of the Putney house, life had seemed, as it often did to worried youth, most unlikely ever to right itself. In a burst of rage and daring he walked out of the house. Rather, he ran out of it. It was brave to think that he had walked out without any money at all, even though he had only gone along to Mrs Clarkson’s peculiarly smelly house off Hammersmith Broadway. He wasn’t the first person to have taken such a risk, and he wouldn’t be the last; but at the time he thought he was, which was the important thing. Mrs Clarkson’s house had green plastered walls, oddly like the walls of his study at school. And, so great was man’s desire for a sense of safety and familiarity, that he pinned up one of his study pictures. It was called Dad’s Girl, a rather out-of-date blonde sucking orangeade through a straw. The picture had often been used for target practice by the cads, and it had dart, boot, and kiss marks on it.

      He hadn’t taken to the idea of a public school, and rather regretted leaving the smaller pond of a preparatory school. He supposed he was rather feeble about it, and not a little ungrateful, yet somehow when the prospectus arrived from the Bursar that morning, he was far more aware of his silent father’s antics with toast and butter and marmalade, than he was of the contents of the illustrated brochure. There were tough-looking boys swinging on ropes, and there was a large matron standing grinning threateningly in a brown doorway. A huge swimming bath looked singularly cold, and deep, and there was an immensely high diving board.

      There was an unnerving picture of the Headmaster, with bull-like features and bulging eyes, with both ears torn to shreds through hearty games of rugger. He seemed to be riddled with learning. Staff: Headmaster (since 1908)—P. H. Quantam, MA, Late Scholar of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; VIth Form Master at Worcester College, Oxford; late Exhibitioner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

      There followed an imposing list of Assistant Masters to the Senior School, only slightly less riddled with learning, and a list of the Assistant Masters to the Junior School, ‘for boys under fourteen’. In small print at the top, The Visitors were mentioned, and they appeared to be Vice-Chancellors, Presidents and Wardens and Chairmen of Governors. Wardens? A mental picture of Dartmoor came, a little mistily. The pater’s scrunching echoed sharply while he was thinking of Mr Quantam’s birch rod, which he would be sure to have, because here it said: ‘… Any boy failing to take part in school games without special permission in advance from the Headmaster, thus spoiling the game for his fellows, is liable to corporal punishment.’ And it said the playing field was the finest in the whole South of England!

      He spent all that morning staring glassily at the prospectus, and accusing himself of being dreadfully ungrateful and feeble, and not like other boys. Yet he felt queerly pleased to be ‘different’.

      He felt he already knew the school inside out, and it was as chill inside as it was out.

      It was also vast. There were five hundred boys.

      There were four Houses, called North, South, East and West. He was to go to West House, under Mr and Mrs Deem. The pater had evidently already seen them, and he thought Mr Deem ‘a fine man’, and Mrs Deem ‘extremely sensible’.

      There was an OTC, and several vigorous sergeant-majors; there were various quite incomprehensible things printed here and there in Latin, and not only in Latin, but in Roman figures as well; there was a Chapel covered in ivy, lists of places which were out of bounds (penalty—a flogging), lists of Distinguished Old Boys, which appeared to be very broadminded, including abbots, airmen and actors. Nearly all seemed to have been shot in some war or other.

      There was a picture of ‘a lecture room’, and ‘the new laboratory’, and ‘a classroom’, and ‘the cloisters leading to Big School (fifteenth century)’.

      He felt unsettled and uneasy.

      But he liked things to be gentle and settled, he liked reading by the fire better than charging about with heavyweights in the bitter wind. He had never been flogged, and dreaded even meeting Mr Quantam,