Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/343

 O cursed memories! Here was another, of his very first sight of the quad, his very first morning in the school. . . Well, he had lived to be cock of that walk, at any rate; on those fives-courts, moreover, with their unorthodox back wall, he was certainly leaving no superior. But how pleasant it all looked in the cool morning sun! There is a peculiar quality about Sunday sunshine, a restfulness at once real and imaginary; it was very real to Jan as he took leave of the quiet study windows down the further side, and down this one the empty garden seats shaded by the laburnum with its shrivelled blossoms, the little acacia, and the plane-tree which had been blown down once and ever since held in leash by a chain. Closer at hand, hardly out of reach, the dormitory windows stood wide open; but nobody got up in dormitory till the last five minutes on a Sunday morning, and so Jan gloated unobserved on the set-scene of so much that had happened to the house and him—of the burglar-hunt led by the egregious Spook—of Sprawson's open pranks and Shockley's wary brutalities. It was down there that Mulberry first showed his fatal nose, and Jan was christened Tiger, and it was there they all lit up a slide with candles at the end of his first winter term. Now it was the end of all terms for Jan, and in a night the old quad had changed into a place of the past.

It was better in the cells at the front of the house; it might have been quite bearable there, but for the bells. But on a Sunday the cracked bell rung by Morgan was nothing to the bells you heard on the other side of the house, if you came to listen to them as Jan did. Apparently there was early celebration in the parish church as well as in chapel; but that was the only time the rival bells rang an actual duet of sedate