“It may interest you,” he said, “to know that I was not sacked from Clifton.”
Gethryn with some difficulty refrained from thanking him for the information.
“I never stop at a school long,” said Farnie. “If I don’t get sacked my father takes me away after a couple of terms. I went to four private schools before I started on the public schools. My pater took me away from the first two because he thought the drains were bad, the third because they wouldn’t teach me shorthand, and the fourth because he didn’t like the headmaster’s face. I worked off those schools in a year and a half.” Having finished this piece of autobiography, he relapsed into silence, leaving Gethryn to recollect various tales he had heard of his grandfather’s eccentricity. The silence lasted until the College was reached, when the matron took charge of Farnie, and Gethryn went off to tell Marriott of these strange happenings.
Marriott was amused, nor did he attempt to conceal the fact. When he had finished laughing, which was not for some time, he favoured the Bishop with a very sound piece of advice. “If I were you,” he said, “I should try and hush this affair up. It’s all fearfully funny, but I think you’d enjoy life more if nobody knew this kid was your uncle. To see the head of the House going about with a juvenile uncle in his wake might amuse the chaps rather, and you might find it harder to keep order; I won’t let it out, and nobody else knows apparently. Go and square the kid. Oh, I say though, what’s his name? If it’s Gethryn, you’re done. Unless you like to swear he’s a cousin.”
“No; his name’s Farnie, thank goodness.”
“That’s all right then. Go and talk to him.”
Gethryn went to the junior study. Farnie was holding forth to a knot of fags at one end of the room. His audience appeared to be amused at something.
“I say, Farnie,” said the Bishop, “half a second.”
Farnie came out, and Gethryn proceeded to inform him that, all things considered, and proud as he was of the relationship, it was not absolutely essential that he should tell everybody that he was his uncle. In fact, it would be rather better on the whole if he did not. Did he follow?
Farnie begged to observe that he did follow, but that, to his sorrow, the warning came too late.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, “I hadn’t the least idea you wanted the thing kept dark. How was I to know? I’ve just been telling it to some of the chaps in there. Awfully decent chaps. They seemed to think it rather funny. Anyhow, I’m not ashamed of the relationship. Not yet, at any rate.”
For a moment Gethryn seemed about to speak. He looked fixedly at his uncle as he stood framed in the doorway, a cheerful column of cool, calm, concentrated cheek. Then, as if realizing that no words that he knew could do justice to the situation, he raised his foot in silence, and “booted” his own flesh and blood with marked emphasis. After which ceremony he went, still without a word, upstairs again.
As for Farnie, he returned to the junior day-room whistling “Down South” in a soft but cheerful key, and solidified his growing popularity with doles of food from a hamper which he had brought with him. Finally, on retiring to bed and being pressed by the rest of his dormitory for a story, he embarked upon the history of a certain Pollock and an individual referred to throughout as the Porroh Man, the former of whom caused the latter to be decapitated, and was ever afterwards haunted by his head, which appeared to him all day and every day (not excepting Sundays and Bank Holidays) in an upside-down position and wearing a horrible grin. In the end Pollock very sensibly committed suicide (with ghastly details), and the dormitory thanked Farnie in a subdued and chastened manner, and tried, with small success, to go to sleep. In short, Farnie’s first evening at Beckford had been quite a triumph.
IV
Pringle Makes a Sporting Offer
Estimating it roughly, it takes a new boy at a public school about a week to find his legs and shed his skin of newness. The period is, of course, longer in the case of some and shorter in the case of others. Both Farnie and Wilson had made themselves at home immediately. In the case of the latter, directly the Skinner episode had been noised abroad, and it was discovered in addition that he was a promising bat, public opinion recognized that here was a youth out of the common run of new boys, and the Lower Fourth—the form in which he had been placed on arrival—took him to its bosom as an equal. Farnie’s case was exceptional. A career at Harrow, Clifton, and Wellington, however short and abruptly terminated, gives one some sort of grip on the way public school life is conducted. At an early date, moreover, he gave signs of what almost amounted to genius in the Indoor Game department. Now, success in the field is a good thing, and undoubtedly makes for popularity. But if you desire to command the respect and admiration of your fellow-beings to a degree stretched almost to the point of idolatry, make yourself proficient in the art of whiling away the hours of afternoon school. Before Farnie’s arrival, his form, the Upper Fourth, with the best intentions in the world, had not been skilful “raggers.” They had ragged in an intermittent, once-a-week sort of way. When, however, he came on the scene, he introduced a welcome element of science into the sport. As witness the following. Mr. Strudwick, the regular master of the form, happened on one occasion to be away for a couple of days,
