John was violently unhappy. It was not altogether the new school that made him so, not by any means. It was affairs at home. His father was drunk five nights out of seven, and that was the least of his troubles. Most times Mr. Marble’s drunkenness did not disturb the rest of the family as much as might be expected, for on those occasions he kept himself very strictly to himself—shut up in the drawing-room gazing out over the backyard. Only twice had John to interfere actively between his mother and his father, fearing that he would do her an injury, but John knew in his soul that there was a far worse trouble than drunkenness in his house. His mother was looking pinched and thin, and he guessed repeatedly that she had been crying during the day. His father’s unaccountable moroseness probably caused that, combined with the fatigue resulting from his unreasonable refusal to allow her to have any help about the house. Yet John could not find any definite beginning to this moroseness and cross-grainedness, for Mr. Marble had drunk more than was good for him and had neglected his wife long before James Medland had made his solitary visit to 53 Malcolm Road. John looked upon the unpleasing traits in his father’s character as plants of slow growth and poisonous flowering.
All John knew was that there was trouble in the family, terrible trouble, too, and he guessed, childlike, at his father’s hatred for him and resented it with a hatred equally bitter. The gifts that his father had showered on him so profusely lately he had accepted because there was hardly any other course open to him; and he had offered no thanks, because he had seen that what Mr. Marble desired more than anything was to dazzle him with his profusion, and—somewhere—there was a lurking suspicion that these gifts were a sort of bribe, offered to keep him in a good temper.
But at fifteen—nearly sixteen—John had not thought out all these things in the clear-cut fashion of print. He still thought child fashion, all instinct and intuition, but that did not make him any the less unhappy. In fact, it tended rather in the contrary direction.
It was hardly surprising that during that term John found himself very much to himself, and that his already well-developed taste for being solitary increased under stress of circumstances. At school he was that most uncomfortable of beings, the old new boy. The thirteen-year-old at a new school enters a low form, where he finds others of his kind with whom to congregate; he is not expected to know the little points of etiquette that are so vastly important; friends come to him automatically. But John found himself in the Remove, only one form below the Sixth. The others in his form had long ago formed their own particular sets and cliques, and not one of them had room for John. They had been at no pains to conceal their amusement at the one or two blunders into which he unwittingly fell, and, if the truth must be told, their opinion of him was not increased by the knowledge that he had come from the secondary school a mile away for which they had an unreasoning contempt. John resented their attitude towards him, resented it bitterly, and was unwise enough to show it. That raised the baiting of “young Marble” in the eyes of his schoolfellows from the level of a pastime to that of a duty. His very name, of course, gave them endless opportunities for being witty. It ended, as was inevitable, in John’s flinging away from them in disgust, thanking God he was a day boy, and only coming into contact with his fellows when the elastic rules of compulsory games compelled him to.
But unhappily it was just as bad with the fellows with whom he had been friendly at the other school. He went to some pains to look them up and to keep in touch with them, but he was soon conscious of how far they had fallen apart. There was just a trace of suspicion in their attitude towards him—they were always ready to note, and resent, any hint of condescension on his part. Their holidays were different now, for the secondary school had all day on Saturday free, while John was at school in the morning, receiving Wednesday afternoon instead, and the long excursions they were in the habit of making could not be cut down by half to allow him to join them. Besides, did he not have a motor-bicycle, so that he would see no point in sweating with them on a push-bike? And in honest truth John soon found that the savour had gone out of pedal-cycling now that he knew the joys of forty miles an hour on the Giant Twin. Once or twice, at John’s urgent invitation, they had come to 53 Malcolm Road, but John had found himself regretting the invitation as soon as it had been accepted. Those rooms full of gaudy furniture did not make them feel at home. Mr. Marble had been barely civil to them, and had made obvious the fact that he was not entirely sober; John, desperately sensitive, had suspected them of finding much to joke about among themselves at the Marble ménage, and had hated himself for his disloyalty at
