Mike

A boy of Adair’s type is always a force in a school.  In a big public school of six or seven hundred, his influence is felt less; but in a small school like Sedleigh he is like a tidal wave, sweeping all before him.  There were two hundred boys at Sedleigh, and there was not one of them in all probability who had not, directly or indirectly, been influenced by Adair.  As a small boy his sphere was not large, but the effects of his work began to be apparent even then.  It is human nature to want to get something which somebody else obviously values very much; and when it was observed by members of his form that Adair was going to great trouble and inconvenience to secure a place in the form eleven or fifteen, they naturally began to think, too, that it was worth being in those teams.  The consequence was that his form always played hard.  This made other forms play hard.  And the net result was that, when Adair succeeded to the captaincy of football and cricket in the same year, Sedleigh, as Mr. Downing, Adair’s house-master and the nearest approach to a cricket-master that Sedleigh possessed, had a fondness for saying, was a keen school.  As a whole, it both worked and played with energy.

All it wanted now was opportunity.

This Adair was determined to give it.  He had that passionate fondness for his school which every boy is popularly supposed to have, but which really is implanted in about one in every thousand.  The average public-school boy likes his school.  He hopes it will lick Bedford at footer and Malvern at cricket, but he rather bets it won’t.  He is sorry to leave, and he likes going back at the end of the holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he would think it rather bad form than otherwise.  If anybody came up to him, slapped him on the back, and cried, “Come along, Jenkins, my boy!  Play up for the old school, Jenkins!  The dear old school!  The old place you love so!” he would feel seriously ill.

Adair was the exception.

To Adair, Sedleigh was almost a religion.  Both his parents were dead; his guardian, with whom he spent the holidays, was a man with neuralgia at one end of him and gout at the other; and the only really pleasant times Adair had had, as far back as he could remember, he owed to Sedleigh.  The place had grown on him, absorbed him.  Where Mike, violently transplanted from Wrykyn, saw only a wretched little hole not to be mentioned in the same breath with Wrykyn, Adair, dreaming of the future, saw a colossal establishment, a public school among public schools, a lump of human radium, shooting out Blues and Balliol Scholars year after year without ceasing.

It would not be so till long after he was gone and forgotten, but he did not mind that.  His devotion to Sedleigh was purely unselfish.  He did not want fame.  All he worked for was that the school should grow and grow, keener and better at games and more prosperous year by year, till it should take its rank among the schools, and to be an Old Sedleighan should be a badge passing its owner everywhere.

“He’s captain of cricket and footer,” said Jellicoe impressively.  “He’s in the shooting eight.  He’s won the mile and half two years running.  He would have boxed at Aldershot last term, only he sprained his wrist.  And he plays fives jolly well!”

“Sort of little tin god,” said Mike, taking a violent dislike to Adair from that moment.

Mike’s actual acquaintance with this all-round man dated from the dinner-hour that day.  Mike was walking to the house with Psmith.  Psmith was a little ruffled on account of a slight passage-of-arms he had had with his form-master during morning school.

“‘There’s a P before the Smith,’ I said to him.  ‘Ah, P. Smith, I see,’ replied the goat.  ‘Not Peasmith,’ I replied, exercising wonderful self-restraint, ‘just Psmith.’  It took me ten minutes to drive the thing into the man’s head; and when I had driven it in, he sent me out of the room for looking at him through my eye-glass.  Comrade Jackson, I fear me we have fallen among bad men.  I suspect that we are going to be much persecuted by scoundrels.”

“Both you chaps play cricket, I suppose?”

They turned.  It was Adair.  Seeing him face to face, Mike was aware of a pair of very bright blue eyes and a square jaw.  In any other place and mood he would have liked Adair at sight.  His prejudice, however, against all things Sedleighan was too much for him.  “I don’t,” he said shortly.

“Haven’t you ever played?”

“My little sister and I sometimes play with a soft ball at home.”

Adair looked sharply at him.  A temper was evidently one of his numerous qualities.

“Oh,” he said.  “Well, perhaps you wouldn’t mind turning out this afternoon and seeing what you can do with a hard ball—­if you can manage without your little sister.”

“I should think the form at this place would be about on a level with hers.  But I don’t happen to be playing cricket, as I think I told you.”

Adair’s jaw grew squarer than ever.  Mike was wearing a gloomy scowl.