There was silence again—a silence now of incredulity and amazement. But there was nothing to be done; if any one claimed a fight, by all the rules and traditions of Dawson's he must have it. But that Westcott, a new boy and in the bottom form should challenge Comber! Slowly, and as it were against their will, hearts beat a little faster, faces brightened. Of course Westcott would be most hopelessly beaten, but might not this prove the beginning of the end of their tyrant?
Meanwhile, Comber between his teeth: “All right, you young devil, I'll give you such a hiding as you damned well won't forget. Then we'll treat you properly afterwards.”
A ring was made, and there was silence, so that the prefects might not be attracted, because fighting in the Lower School was forbidden. Coats were taken off and Peter faced Comber with the sensation of attacking a mountain. Peter knew nothing about fighting at all, but Comber had long subsisted on an easy reputation and he was a coward at heart. There swung into Peter's brain the picture of The Bending Mule, the crowding faces, the swinging lamp, Stephen with the sledge-hammer blow … it was the first time for weeks that he had thought of Treliss.
He was indifferent—he did not care; things could not be worse, and he did not mind what happened to him, and Comber minded very much indeed, and he had not been hit in the face for a long time. His arms went round like windmills, and the things that he would like to have done were to pull Peter's hair from its roots and to bite him on the arm. As the fight proceeded and he knew that his face was bleeding and that the end of his nose had no sensation in it at all he kicked with his feet and was conscious of cries that he was not playing the game. Infuriated that his recent supporters should so easily desert him, he now flung himself upon Peter, who at once gave way beneath the bigger boy's weight. Comber then began to bite and tear and scratch, uttering shrill screams of rage and kicking on the floor with his feet. He was at once pulled away, assured by those dearest friends who had so recently and merrily assisted him in his “rags” that he was not playing the game and was no sportsman. He was moreover a ludicrous sight, his trousers being torn, one blue-black eye staring from a confused outline of dust and blood, his hair amazingly on end.
There were also many cries of “Shame, Comber,” “Dirty game,” and even “Well played young Westcott!”
He knew as he wept bitter tears into his blood-stained hands that his reign was at an end.
There were indeed, for the time at any rate, no more “rags,” and Peter might, an he would, have reigned magnificently over the Lower School. But he was as silent and aloof as ever, and was considered “a sidey devil, but jolly plucky, by Gad.”
And for himself he got at any rate the more continued companionship of Cards, who languidly, and, perhaps a younger Sir Willoughby Patterne “with a leg,” admired his muscle.
IV
Finally, towards the end of the term, Peter and Bobby Galleon may be seen sitting on a high hill. It is a Sunday afternoon in spring, and far away there is a thin line of faintly blue hills. Nearer to view there are grey heights more sharply outlined and rough, like drawing paper—painted with a green wood, a red-roofed farm, a black church spire, and a brown ploughed field. Immediately below them a green hedge hanging over a running stream that has caught the blue of the sky. Above them vast swollen clouds flooding slowly with the faint yellow of the coming sunset, hanging stationary above the stream and seeming to have flung to earth some patches of their colour in the first primroses below the hedge. A rabbit watches, his head out of his hole.
The boys' voices cut the air.
“I say, Bobby, don't you ever wonder about things—you never seem to want to ask questions.”
“No, I don't suppose I do. I'm awfully stupid. Father says so.”
“It's funny your being stupid when your father's so clever.”
“Do you mind my being stupid?”
“No—only I'd like you to want to know things—things like what people are like inside—their thinking part I mean, not their real insides. People like Mother Gill and old Binns and Prester Ma: and then what one's going to do when one's grown up—you never want to know that.”
“No, it'll just come I suppose. Of course, I shan't be clever like the governor.”
“No, I don't think you will.”
Once again: “Do you mind my being so stupid, Peter?”
“No—I'm awfully stupid too. But I like to wonder about things. There was once a man I met at home with rings and things who lived in London. …” Peter stops, Galleon wouldn't be interested in that.
“Anyhow, you know, you've got Cards—he's an awfully clever chap.”
“Yes, he's wonderful,” Peter sighs, “and he's seen such a lot of things.”
“Yes, but you know I don't think Cards really cares for you as much as I do.” This is an approach to sentiment, and Peter brushes it hastily aside:
“I like you both awfully. But I say, won't it be splendid to be grown up in London?”
“I don't know—lots of fellows don't like it.”
“That's nothing,” Peter says slowly, “to do with its not being splendid!”
And the rabbit, tired of listening to such tiresome stuff, thinks that they must be very young boys indeed.
CHAPTER VI
A LOOKING-GLASS, A SILVER MATCH-BOX, A GLASS OF WHISKY, AND—VOX POPULI
I
Peter, thirteen to sixteen!—and left, so it appears, very much the same, as far as actual possessions go, at the end of it as at the poverty-struck commencement. Friendship, Honour, Glory—how these things came and went with him during these years might have a book to themselves were it not that our business is with a wider stage and more lasting issues—and there is but little room for a full-fledged chronicle. Though Dawson's—and to take the history of Miss Gill only—of her love affair with the curate, of her final desperate appeal to him and of his ultimate confession that he was married already—provides a story quite sufficient for three excellent volumes. Or there is the history of Benbow, that bucolic gentleman into whose study we led Peter a chapter or two ago, Head for this year or two of Dawson's—soon to be head of nothing but the dung-heap and there to crow only dismally—with a childlike Mrs. Benbow, led unwittingly to Dawson's as a lamb to the slaughter-house—later to flee, crying, back to her hearth and home, her life smashed to
