Knight Without Armour

It was nearing the time of house-matches and detentions were more than usually tiresome. A.J. soon found his enemies active, and even his friends inclined to be cool. After the third detention he was, in fact, rather disgracefully bullied, and after the fourth he gave in and confessed. He had expected Smalljohn to be very stern, and was far more terrified to find him good-humoured. “Pangs of conscience, eh, Fothergill?” he queried, and A.J. replied: “No, sir.”

“No? That sounds rather defiant, doesn’t it?”

A.J. did not answer, and Smalljohn, instead of getting into a temper, positively beamed. “My dear Fothergill, I quite understand. You think my system’s unfair, don’t you?—I have heard mysterious rumours to that effect, anyhow. Well, my boy, I daresay you’re right. It is unfair. It makes you see how impossible it is for you to be a sneak and a coward—it brings out your better self—that better self which, for some perverse reason, you were endeavouring to stifle. To a boy who is really not half the bad fellow he tries to make out, my system is perhaps the unfairest thing in the world…Well, you have been punished, I doubt not—for apart from the still small voice, your comrades, I understand, have somewhat cogently expressed their disapproval. In the circumstances, then, I shall not punish you any further. And now stay and have some cocoa with me.”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” answered A.J. not very coherently, “I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got a letter ’to finish—”

“Oh, very well, then—some other evening. Goodnight.”

And the next morning Smalljohn, whose worst crime was that he thought he understood boys, recounted in the common-room how magnanimity had melted young Fothergill almost to tears—how with shaking voice the boy had declined the cocoa invitation and had asked to be allowed to go.

It had been A.J.’s first fight, and he fully realised that he had lost. What troubled him most was not Smalljohn’s victory but the attitude of his fellows; if they, had only stood with him, Smalljohn could have been defeated. Yet they called him a coward because in Rugby football, which he was compelled to play although he disliked it, he sometimes showed that he didn’t consider it worth while to get hurt. At the end of his third year the headmaster’s report summed him up, not too unreasonably, as: “A thoughtful boy, with many good qualities, but apt to be obstinate and self- opinionated. Is hardly getting out of Barrowhurst all he should.”

A.J. had two adventures at Barrowhurst altogether; the first was the Smalljohn affair, which was no more than a nine days’ wonder and certainly did not add to his popularity; but the second was in a different class: it established his fame on a suddenly Olympian basis, and passed, indeed, into the very stuff of Barrowhurst tradition. Two miles away from the school is the tunnel that carries the Scotch expresses under the Pennines. It is over three miles long, boring under the ridge from one watershed to another. A.J. walked through it one school half-holiday. Platelayers met him staggering out, half-deafened and half-suffocated, with eyes inflamed, soot-blackened face, and hands bleeding where he had groped his way along the tunnel wall. He was taken to the school in a cab, and had to spend a week in bed; after which he was thrashed by the headmaster. He gave no explanation of his escapade beyond the fact that he had wanted to discover what it would be like. He agreed that the experience had been thoroughly unpleasant.

A.J.’s fourth year was less troubled. He was in the sixth form by then, preparing for Cambridge, and was left to do pretty much as he liked. The tunnel affair had given him prestige of an intangible kind both with boys and masters, and he spent much of his time reading odd books on all kinds of subjects that form no part of a public-school curriculum. He cycled miles about the moorland countryside, picking up fossils and making rubbings of old brasses in churches; he also (and somehow quite incidentally) achieved an official Barrowhurst record by a long jump of twenty feet. His sixth-form status carried prefecture with it, and rather to everyone’s surprise he made an excellent prefect—straightforward, firm, and tolerant.