The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's/Chapter V

“Master Greenfield, junior, is to go to the head-master’s study at half-past nine,” called out Mr. Roach, the school porter, putting his head into the dormitory, at seven o’clock next morning.

Stephen had been up an hour, making fearful and wonderful shots of answers to his awful questions, half of which he had already ticked off as done for better or worse. “If I write something down to each,” thought he to himself, “I might happen to get one thing right; it’ll be better than putting down no answer at all.”

“Half-past nine!” said he to Paul, on hearing this announcement; “ten was the time I was told.”

“Who told you?”

“The gentleman who gave me my paper.”

“What paper? you don’t have papers. It’s vivâ voce.”

“I’ve got a paper, anyhow,” said Stephen, “and a precious hard one, too, and I’ve only half done it.”

“Well, you’ll have to go at half-past nine, or you’ll catch it,” said Paul. “I say, there’s Loman calling you.”

Stephen, who, since the indignation meeting last night, had felt himself grow very rebellious against the monitors, did not choose to hear the call in question, and tried his hardest to make another shot at his paper. But he could not keep deaf when Loman himself opened the door, and pulling his ear inquired what he meant by not coming when he was told? The new boy then had to submit, and sulkily followed his lord to his study, there to toast some bread at a smoky fire, and look for about half an hour for a stud that Loman said had rolled under the chest of drawers, but which really had fallen into one of that gentleman’s boots.

By the time these labours were over, and Stephen had secured a mouthful of breakfast in his brother’s study, it was time to go down to prayers; and after prayers he had but just time to wonder what excuse he should make for only answering half his questions, when the clock pointed to the half-hour, and he had to scuttle off as hard as he could to the Doctor’s study.

Dr. Senior was a tall, bald man, with small, sharp eyes, and with a face as solemn as an owl’s. He looked up as Stephen entered.

“Come in, my man. Let me see; Greenfield? Oh, yes. You got here on Tuesday. How old are you?”

“Nearly eleven, sir,” said Stephen, with the paper burning in his pocket.

“Just so; and I dare say your brother has shown you over the school, and helped to make you feel at home. Now suppose we just run through what you have learned at home.”

Now was the time. With a sigh as deep as the pocket from which he pulled it, Stephen produced that miserable paper.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” he began, “I’ve not had time—”

“Tut, tut!” said the Doctor; “put that away, and let us get on.”

Stephen stared. “It’s the paper you gave me!” he said.

The Doctor frowned. “I hope you are not a silly boy,” he said, rather crossly.

“I’m afraid they are all wrong,” said Stephen; “the questions were—were—rather hard.”

“What questions?” exclaimed the Doctor, a trifle impatient, and a trifle puzzled.

“These you sent me,” said Stephen, humbly handing in the paper.

“Hum! some mistake; let’s see, perhaps Jellicott—ah!” and he put on his glasses and unfolded the paper.

“Question 1. Grammar!” and then a cloud of amazement fell over the Doctor’s face. He looked sharply out from under his spectacles at Stephen, who stood anxiously and nervously before him. Then he glanced again at the paper, and his mouth twitched now and then as he read the string of questions, and the boy’s desperate attempts to answer them.

“Humph!” he said, when the operation was over, “I’m afraid, Greenfield, you are not a very clever boy—”

“I know I’m not, sir,” said Stephen, quite relieved that the Doctor did not at once order him to quit Saint Dominic’s.

“Or you would have seen that this paper was a practical joke.”

Then it burst all of a sudden on Stephen. And all this about “Mr. Finis,” “Oh, ah,” and the rest of it had been a cruel hoax, and no more!

“Come, now, let us waste no more time. I’m not surprised,” said the Doctor, suppressing a smile by a very hard twitch; “I’m not surprised you found these questions hard. How far have you got in arithmetic?”

And then the Doctor launched Stephen into a vivâ voce examination, in which that young prodigy of learning acquitted himself far more favourably than could have been imagined, and at the end of which he heard that he would be placed in the fourth junior class, where it would be his duty to strain every nerve to advance, and make the best use of his time at Saint Dominic’s. Then the Doctor rang his bell.

“Tell Mr. Rastle kindly to step here,” said he to the porter.

Mr. Rastle appeared, and to his charge, after solemnly shaking hands and promising to be a paragon of industry and good conduct, Stephen was consigned by the head-master.

“By the way,” said the Doctor, as Stephen was leaving, “will you tell the boy who gave you this paper I wish to see him?”

Stephen, who had been too much elated by the result of the real examination to recollect for the moment the trickery of the sham one, now blushed very red as he remembered what a goose he had been, and undertook to obey the Doctor’s order. And this it was very easy to do. For as he opened the study-door he saw Pembury just outside, leaning against the wall with his eyes on the clock as it struck ten.

As he caught sight of Stephen emerging from the head-master’s study, his countenance fell, and he said eagerly and half-anxiously, “Didn’t I tell you ten o’clock, Greenfield?”

“Yes, but the Doctor said half-past nine. And you are a cad to make a fool of me,” added Stephen, rising with indignation, “and—and—and—” and here he choked.

“Calm yourself, my young friend,” said Pembury. “It’s such a hard thing to make a fool of you that, you know, and—and—and—!”

“I shall not speak to you,” stammered Stephen.

“Oh, don’t apologise,” laughed Pembury. “Perhaps it would comfort you to kick me. Please choose my right leg, as the other is off the ground, eh?”

“The Doctor wants to speak to you, he says,” said Stephen.

Pembury’s face fell again. “Do you mean to say he saw the paper, and you told him?” he said, angrily.

“I showed him the paper, because I thought he had sent it; but I didn’t tell him who gave it to me.”

“Then why does he want me?”

“He wants the boy who gave me the paper, that’s all he said,” answered Stephen, walking off sulkily to his quarters, and leaving Anthony to receive the rebukes of Dr. Senior, and make his apologies for his evil deeds as best he could.

The offence after all was not a very terrible one, and Pembury got off with a mild reprimand on the evils of practical joking, at the end of which he found himself in his usual amiable frame of mind, and harbouring no malice against his innocent victim.

“Greenfield,” said he, when shortly afterwards he met Oliver, “I owe your young brother an apology.”

“What on earth for?”

“I set him an examination paper to answer, which I’m afraid caused him some labour. Never mind, it was all for the best.”

“What, did that paper he was groaning over come from you? What a shame, Tony, to take advantage of a little beggar like him!”

“I’m awfully sorry, tell him; but I say, Greenfield, it’ll make a splendid paragraph for the Dominican. By the way, are you going to let me have that poem you promised on the Guinea-pigs?”

“I can’t get on with it at all,” said Oliver. “I’m stuck for a rhyme in the second line.”

“Oh, stick down anything. How does it begin?”

“‘Oh, dwellers in the land of dim perpetual,’” began Oliver.

“Very good; let’s see: how would this do?— “‘I hate the day when first I met you all, And this I undertake to bet you all, One day I’ll into trouble get you all, And down the playground steps upset you all, And with a garden hose I’ll wet you all, And then—’”

“Oh, look here,” said Oliver, “that’ll do. You may as well finish the thing right out at that rate.”

“Not at all, my dear fellow. It was just a sudden inspiration, you know. Don’t mention it, and you may like to get off that rhyme into another. But I say, Greenfield, we shall have a stunning paper for the first one. Tom Senior has written no end of a report of the last meeting of the Sixth Form Debating Society, quite in the parliamentary style; and Bullinger is writing a history of Saint Dominic’s, ‘gathered from the earliest sources,’ as he says, in which he’s taking off most of the Sixth. Simon is writing a love-ballad, which is sure to be fun; and Ricketts is writing a review of Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon; and Wraysford is engaged on ‘The Diary of the Sixth Form Mouse.’”

“Good!” said Oliver; “and what are you writing?”

“Oh, the leading article, you know, and the personal notes, and ‘Squeaks from Guinea-pig-land and Tadpole-opolis,’ and some of the advertisements. Come up to my study, you and Wray, this evening after prayers, I say, and we’ll go through it.”

And off hobbled the editor of the Dominican, leaving Oliver greatly impressed with his literary talents, especially in the matter of finding rhymes for “perpetual.”

By the time he and Wraysford went in the evening to read over what had been sent in, the poem on the Guinea-pigs was complete.

They found Pembury busy over a huge sheet of paper, the size of his table.

“What on earth have you got there?” cried Wraysford.

“The Dominican, to be sure,” said Anthony, gravely.

“Nonsense! you are not going to get it out in that shape?”

“I am, though. Look here, you fellows,” said Anthony, “I’ll show you the dodge of the thing. The different articles will either be copied or pasted into this big sheet. You see each of these columns is just the width of a sheet of school paper. Well, here’s a margin all round—do you twig?—so that when the whole thing’s made up it’ll be ready for framing.”

“Framing!” exclaimed Greenfield and his friend.

“To be sure. I’m getting a big frame, with glass, made for it, with the tide of the paper in big letters painted on the wood. So the way we shall publish it will be to hang it outside our class-room and then every one can come and read it who likes—much better than passing it round to one fellow at a time.”

“Upon my word, Tony, it’s a capital notion,” exclaimed Wraysford, clapping the lame boy on the back; “it does you credit, my boy.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Tony; “and don’t whack me like that again, or I’ll refuse to insert your ‘Diary of the Sixth Form Mouse.’”

“But, I say,” said Greenfield, “are you sure they’ll allow it to hang out there? It may get knocked about.”

“I dare say we may have a row with the monitors about it, but we must square them somehow. We shall have to keep a fag posted beside it, though, to protect it.”

“And to say ‘Move on!’ like the policeman,” added Wraysford. “Well, it’s evident you don’t want any help, Tony, so I’ll go.”

“Good-bye; don’t ask me to your study for supper, please.”

“I’m awfully sorry, I promised Bullinger. I know he has a dozen sausages in his cupboard. Come along there. Are you coming, Greenfield?”

And the worthy friends separated for a season.

Meanwhile, Stephen had made his débût in the Fourth Junior. He was put to sit at the bottom desk of the class, which happened to be next to the desk owned by Master Bramble, the inky-headed blanket-snatcher. This young gentleman, bearing in mind his double humiliation, seemed by no means gratified to find who his new neighbour was.

“Horrid young blub-baby!” was his affectionate greeting. “I don’t want you next to me.”

“I can’t help it,” said Stephen. “I was put here.”

“Oh, yes, because you’re such an ignorant young sneak; that’s why.”

“I suppose that’s why you were at the bottom before I came—oh!”

The last exclamation was uttered aloud, being evoked by a dig from the amiable Master Bramble’s inky pen into Stephen’s leg.

“Who was that?” said Mr. Rastle, looking up from his desk.

“Now then,” whispered Bramble, “sneak away—tell tales, and get me into a row—I’ll pay you!”

Stephen, feeling himself called upon, stood up.

“It was me,” he said.

“It was I, would be better grammar,” said Mr. Rastle, quietly.

Mr. Rastle was a ruddy young man, with a very good-humoured face, and a sly smile constantly playing at the corners of his mouth. He no doubt guessed the cause of the disturbance, for he asked, “Was any one pinching you?”

“Go it,” growled Bramble, in a savage whisper. “Say it was me, you sneak.”

Stephen said, No, no one had pinched him; but finished up his sentence with another “Oh!” as the gentle Bramble gave him a sharp side kick on the ankle as he stood.

Mr. Rastle’s face darkened as he perceived this last piece of by-play.

“Bramble,” said he, “oblige me by standing on the form for half an hour. I should be sorry to think you were as objectionable as your name implies. Sit down, Greenfield.”

And then the class resumed, with Master Bramble perched like a statue of the sulky deity on his form, muttering threats against Greenfield all the while, and the most scathing denunciations against all who might be even remotely connected with big brothers, and mammies, and blub-babies.

Stephen, who was beginning to feel himself much more at home at Saint Dominic’s, betrayed no visible terror at these menaces, and only once took any notice of his exalted enemy, when the latter attempted not only to stand on the form, but upon a tail of Stephen’s jacket, and a bit of the flesh of his leg at the same time. Then he gave the offending foot a knock with his fist and an admonitory push.

“Please, sir,” squeaked the lordly Bramble, “Greenfield junior is trying to knock me over.”

“I was not,” shouted Stephen, “he was squashing me with his foot, and I moved it away.”

“Really, Bramble,” said Mr. Rastle, “you are either very unfortunate or very badly behaved. Come and stand on this empty form beside my desk. There will be no danger here of squashing any one’s leg or of being knocked over. Come at once.”

So Mr. Bramble took no advantage by his last motion, and served the rest of his term of penal servitude, in the face of the entire class, under the immediate eye of Mr. Rastle.

Directly class was over, Stephen had to go and wait upon Loman for a particular purpose, which the reader must hear of in due time.