“Ah, Bruce. I am afraid I have kept you some little time. Yes?
“I couldn’t help hearing what Mr Spence was saying to you about Sheen, sir. I don’t think he knows quite what really happened.”
“You mean—?”
“Sheen went there by road. I used to take him in my motor.”
“Your—! What did you say, Bruce?”
“My motor-car, sir. That’s to say, my father’s. We used to go together every day.”
“I am glad to hear it. I am glad. Then I need say nothing to Sheen after all. I am glad….But—er—Bruce,” proceeded the headmaster after a pause.
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you—are you in the habit of driving a motor-car frequently?”
“Every day, sir. You see, I am going to take up motors when I leave school, so it’s all education.”
The headmaster was silent. To him the word “Education” meant Classics. There was a Modern side at Wrykyn, and an Engineering side, and also a Science side; but in his heart he recognised but one Education—the Classics. Nothing that he had heard, nothing that he had read in the papers and the monthly reviews had brought home to him the spirit of the age and the fact that Things were not as they used to be so clearly as this one remark of Jack Bruce’s. For here was Bruce admitting that in his spare time he drove motors. And, stranger still, that he did it not as a wild frolic but seriously, with a view to his future career.
“The old order changeth,” thought the headmaster a little sadly.
Then he brought himself back from his mental plunge into the future.
“Well, well, Bruce,” he said, “we need not discuss the merits and demerits of driving motor-cars, need we? What did you wish to see me about?”
“I came to ask if I might get off morning school tomorrow, sir. Those voters who got to the poll just in time and settled the election—I brought them down in the car. And the policeman—he’s a Radical, and voted for Pedder—Mr Pedder—has sworn—says I was exceeding the speed-limit.”
The headmaster pressed a hand to his forehead, and his mind swam into the future.
“Well, Bruce?” he said at length, in the voice of one whom nothing can surprise now.
“He says I was going twenty-eight miles an hour. And if I can get to the Court tomorrow morning I can prove that I wasn’t. I brought them to the poll in the little runabout.”
“And the—er—little runabout,” said the headmaster, “does not travel at twenty-eight miles an hour?”
“No, sir. It can’t go more than twenty at the outside.”
“Very well, Bruce, you need not come to school tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The headmaster stood thinking….The new order….
“Bruce,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell me, do I look very old?”
Bruce stared.
“Do I look three hundred years old?”
“No, sir,” said Bruce, with the stolid wariness of the boy who fears that a master is subtly chaffing him.
“I feel more, Bruce,” said the headmaster, with a smile. “I feel more. You will remember to congratulate your father for me, won’t you?”
Outside the door Jack Bruce paused in deep reflection. “Rum!” he said to himself. “Jolly rum!”
On the senior gravel he met Sheen.
“Hullo, Sheen,” he said, “what are you going to do?”
“Drummond wants me to tea with him in the infirmary.”
“It’s all right, then?”
“Yes. I got a note from him during afternoon school. You coming?”
“All right. I say, Sheen, the Old Man’s rather rum sometimes, isn’t he?”
“What’s he been doing now?”
“Oh—nothing. How do you feel after Aldershot? Tell us all about it. I’ve not heard a word yet.”
** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE WHITE FEATHER ***
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