The Hill.

by Horace Annesley Vach.e.l.l.

To GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL

I dedicate this Romance of Friendship to you with the sincerest pleasure and affection. You were the first to suggest that I should write a book about contemporary life at Harrow; you gave me the princ.i.p.al idea; you have furnished me with notes innumerable; you have revised every page of the ma.n.u.script; and you are a peculiarly keen Harrovian.

In making this public declaration of my obligations to you, I take the opportunity of stating that the characters in "The Hill," whether masters or boys, are not portraits, although they may be called, truthfully enough, composite photographs; and that the episodes of Drinking and Gambling are founded on isolated incidents, not on habitual practices. Moreover, in attempting to reproduce the curious admixture of "strenuousness and sentiment"--your own phrase--which animates so vitally Harrow life, I have been obliged to select the less common types of Harrovian. Only the elect are capable of such friendship as John Verney entertained for Henry Desmond; and few boys, happily, are possessed of such powers as Scaife is shown to exercise. But that there are such boys as Verney and Scaife, n.o.body knows better than yourself.

Believe me, Yours most gratefully, HORACE ANNESLEY VACh.e.l.l

CHAPTER I

_The Manor_

"Five hundred faces, and all so strange!

Life in front of me--home behind, I felt like a waif before the wind Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.

"_Chorus._ Yet the time may come, as the years go by, When your heart will thrill At the thought of the Hill, And the day that you came so strange and shy."

The train slid slowly out of Harrow station.

Five minutes before, a man and a boy had been walking up and down the long platform. The boy wondered why the man, his uncle, was so strangely silent. Then, suddenly, the elder John Verney had placed his hands upon the shoulders of the younger John, looking down into eyes as grey and as steady as his own.

"You'll find plenty of fellows abusing Harrow," he said quietly; "but take it from me, that the fault lies not in Harrow, but in them. Such boys, as a rule, do not come out of the top drawer. Don't look so solemn. You're about to take a header into a big river. In it are rocks and rapids; but you know how to swim, and after the first plunge you'll enjoy it, as I did, amazingly."

"Ra--ther," said John.

In the New Forest, where John had spent most of his life at his uncle's place of Verney Boscobel, this uncle, his dead father's only brother, was worshipped as a hero. Indeed he filled so large a s.p.a.ce in the boy's imagination, that others were cramped for room. John Verney in India, in Burmah, in Africa (he took continents in his stride), moved colossal.

And when uncle and nephew met, behold, the great traveller stood not much taller than John himself! That first moment, the instant shattering of a precious delusion, held anguish. But now, as the train whirled away the silent, thin, little man, he began to expand again. John saw him scaling heights, cutting a path through impenetrable forests, wading across dismal swamps, an ever-moving figure, seeking the hitherto unknowable and irreclaimable, introducing order where chaos reigned supreme, a world-famous pioneer.

How good to think that John Verney was _his_ uncle, blood of his blood, his, his, his--for all time!

And, long ago, John, senior, had come to Harrow; had felt what John, junior, felt to the core--the dull, grinding wrench of separation, the sense, not yet to be a.n.a.lysed by a boy, of standing alone upon the edge of a river, indeed, into which he must plunge headlong in a few minutes.

Well, Uncle John had taken his "header" with a stout heart--who dared to doubt that? Surely he had not waited, shivering and hesitating, at the jumping-off place.

The train was now out of sight. John slipped the uncle's tip into his purse, and walked out of the station and on to the road beyond, the road which led to the top of the Hill.

_The Hill._

Presently, the boy reached some iron palings and a wicket-gate. His uncle had pointed out this gate and the steep path beyond which led to the top of the Hill, to the churchyard, to the Peachey tomb on which Byron dreamed,[1] to the High Street--and to the Manor. It was pleasant to remember that he was going to board at the Manor, with its traditions, its triumphs, its record. In his uncle's day the Manor ranked first among the boarding-houses. Not a doubt disturbed John's conviction that it ranked first still.

The boy stared upwards with a keen gaze. Had the mother seen her son at that moment, she might have discerned a subtle likeness between uncle and nephew, not the likeness of the flesh, but of the spirit.

September rains, followed by a day of warm sunshine, had lured from the earth a soft haze which obscured the big fields at the foot of the Hill.

John could make out fences, poplars, elms, Scotch firs, and spectral houses. But, above, everything was clear. The school-buildings, such as he could see, stood out boldly against a cloudless sky, and above these soared the spire of Harrow Church, pointing an inexorable finger upwards.

Afterwards this spot became dear to John Verney, because here, where mists were chill and blinding, he had been impelled to leave the broad high-road and take a path which led into a shadowy future. In obedience to an impulse stronger than himself he had taken the short cut to what awaited him.

For a few minutes he stood outside the palings, trying to choke down an abominable lump in his throat. This was not his first visit to Harrow.

At the end of the previous term, he had ascended the Hill to pa.s.s the entrance examination. A master from his preparatory school accompanied him, an Etonian, who had stared rather superciliously--so John thought--at buildings less venerable than those which Henry VI raised near Windsor. John, who had perceptions, was elusively conscious that his companion, too much of a gentleman to give his thoughts words, might be contrasting a yeoman's work with a king's; and when the Etonian, gazing across the plains below to where Windsor lay, a soft shadow upon the horizon, said abruptly, "I wish Eton had been built upon a hill,"

John replied effusively: "Oh, sir, it _is_ decent of you to say that."

The examination, however, distracted his attention from all things save the papers. To his delight he found these easy, and, as soon as he left the examination-room, he was popped into a cab and taken back to town.

Coming down the flight of steps, he had seen a few boys hurrying up or down the road. At these the Etonian c.o.c.ked a twinkling eye.

"Queer kit you Harrow boys wear," he said.

John, inordinately grateful at this recognition of himself as an Harrovian, forgave the gibe. It had struck him, also, that the shallow straw hat, the swallow-tail coat, did look queer, but he regarded them reverently as the uniform of a crack corps.

To-day, standing by the iron palings, John reviewed the events of the last hour. The view was blurred by unshed tears. His uncle and he had driven together to the Manor. Here, the explorer had exercised his peculiar personal magnetism upon the house-master, a tall, burly man of truculent aspect and speech. John realized proudly that his uncle was the bigger of the two, and the giant acknowledged, perhaps grudgingly, the dwarf's superiority. The talk, short enough, had wandered into Darkest Africa. His uncle, as usual, said little, replying almost in monosyllables to the questions of his host; but John junior told himself exultantly that it was not necessary for Uncle John to talk; the wide world knew what he had done.

Then his house-master, Rutford, had told John where to buy his first straw hat.

"You can get one without an order at the beginning of each term," said he, in a thick, rasping voice. "But you must ask me for an order if you want a second."

Then he had shown John his room, to be shared with two other boys, and had told him the hour of lock-up. And then, after tea, came the walk down the hill, the tip, the firm grasp of the sinewy hand, and a final--"G.o.d bless you."

Coming to the end of these reflections, confronted by the inexorable future, and the necessity, no less inexorable, of stepping into it, John pa.s.sed through the gate. His heart fluttered furiously, and the lump in the throat swelled inconveniently. John, however, had provided himself with a "cure-all." Plunging his hand into his pocket, he pulled out a cartridge, an unused twenty-bore gun cartridge. Looking at this, John smiled. When he smiled he became good-looking. The face, too long, plain, but full of sense and humour, rounded itself into the gracious curves of youth; the serious grey eyes sparkled; the lips, too firmly compressed, parted, revealing admirable teeth, small and squarely set; into the cheeks, brown rather than pink, flowed a warm stream of colour.

The cartridge stood for so much. Only a week before, Uncle John, on his arrival from Manchuria, had handed his nephew a small leather case and a key. The case held a double-barrelled, hammerless, ejector, twenty-bore gun, with a great name upon its polished blue barrels.

The sight of the cartridge justified John's expectations. He put it back into his pocket, and strode forward and upward.

Close to the School Chapel, John remarked a curly-headed young gentleman of wonderfully prepossessing appearance, from whom emanated an air, an atmosphere, of genial enjoyment which diffused itself. The bricks of the school-buildings seemed redder and warmer, as if they were basking in this sunny smile. The youth was smiling now, smiling--at John. For several hours John had been miserably aware that surprises awaited him, but not smiles. He knew no Harrovians; at his school, a small one, his fellows were labelled Winchester, Eton, Wellington; none, curiously enough, Harrow. And already he had pa.s.sed half a dozen boys, the first-comers, some strangers, like himself, and in each face he had read indifference. Not one had taken the trouble to say, "Hullo! Who are you?" after the rough and ready fashion of the private school.

And now this smiling, fascinating person was actually about to address him, and in the old familiar style----

"Hullo!"

"Hullo!"

"I met your governor the other day."

"Did you?" John replied. His father had died when John was seven.

Obviously, a blunder in ident.i.ty had created this genial smile. John wished that his father had not died.

"Yes," pursued the smiling one, "I met him--partridge-shooting at home--and he asked me to be on the look-out for you. It's queer you should turn up at once, isn't it?"

"Yes," said John.

"Your governor looked awfully fit."