Papers Past | Books | A poor scholar : a tale of progress

Page images
Text
Research info
Title and Usage info

Find previous result Find next result

This eBook is a reproduction produced by the National Library of New Zealand from source material that we believe has no known copyright. Additional physical and digital editions are available from the National Library of New Zealand.

EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908327-67-6

PDF ISBN: 978-0-908330-63-8

The original publication details are as follows:

Title: A poor scholar: a tale of progress

Author: Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards)

Published: A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

A POOR SCHOLAR

A TALE OF PROGRESS

OTAGO BOYS’ HIGH SCHOOL, DUNEDIN where the “ Poor Scholar,”—known to his friends as “Ponto,” but later to become Sir Frederick Lawrence spent some of his boyhood years.

A POOR SCHOLAR A TALE OF PROGRESS

BY C. R. ALLEN

. When boys and youths, the growth

Of ragged villages and crazy huts. Forsook their homes, and, errant in the quest Of Patron, famous school or friendly nook, Where, pensioned, they in shelter might sit down, From town to town and through wide scattered realms Journeyed with ponderous folios in their hands ; And, often starting from some covert place, Saluted the chance comer on the road. Crying “ An obolus, a penny give. To a poor scholar.”

—Wordsworth : Prelude, Book 111

Published by A. H. and A. W. REED, 33 Jetty Street, DUNEDIN, and 182 Wakefield Street, WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND.

PRINTED IN NEW ZEALAND

FIRST PUBLISHED 1 936

COULLS SOMERVILLE WILKIE LIMITED PRINTERS

DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND

FOREWORD

From quiet homes and small beginning

Out to the undiscovered ends

There’s nothing worth the wear of winning

But laughter and the love of friends.

Hilaire Belloc.

THE writer of this fragmentary work started out with the idea of tracing in imagination

just such a career as New Zealand democracy, coupled with the Rhodes bequest, would make possible. His hero has had no actual prototype, but numbered among those who have gone to Oxford from New Zealand as beneficiaries of the Rhodes bequest, there may have been one or two, whose beginning was no more propitious than that of Frederick Lawrence. What is written here is but the prelude to a life story. It is pleasanter to write of promise rather than fulfilment, and moreover, Oxford is a ground that has been well covered by the novelists of every decade. It is possible that there will be readers who will find first-hand impressions of life in a New Zealand town more interesting than second-hand impressions of life at Oxford. It might have been possible to carry out the larger scheme, aided by reading and the recollections of a sojourn at the sister University, but it is wiser for the writer to recognize his limitations, and in the present case they are manifest.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAP.

I —UNCLE HERBERT TALKS THINGS OVER 9

II —THE“CALLY” 18

III — COME, BUY ! 27

IV — THE YELLOW CHARIOT 41

V —NOEL! 48

VI —“ THE GEORDY ” 56

VII —COBBERS 67

VIII —DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS 73

IX —THE GOLDEN PIRATE 84

X —TRANSITION 91

XI —A MAN AND HIS MAKERS 98

XII —A YEAR OF GRACE 107

XIII — THROUGH THE RED GATE 112

XIV — THE HIGH 127

XV—OTHER WAYFARERS 140 XVI —TOGA VIRILI S 165

XVI-TOGA VIRILIS

XVII —YOUTH'S MANUSCRIPT 179

XVIII —DUX 194

XIX —A SUNBURNT SICKLEMAN 202

XX —CHEZ LORRIMER 209

XXI —AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR 223

XXII —ALMA MATER 237

XXIII — “AS ONE THAT MOURNETH FOR HIS MOTHER” 245

XXIV — THE DARLING OF THE GODS 250

XXV —MACAULAY’S NEW ZEALANDER 259

XXVI —“ TO MEET MR. LAWRENCE ” 268

XXVII —ACCLIMATIZATION 275

EPILOGUE 279

CHAPTER 1

UNCLE HERBERT TALKS THINGS OVER

Mrs. Lawrence sat with folded hands and listened to Lfficle Herbert. This state of quiescence was such an unusual thing with her that only a very solemn occasion could have brought it about. Usually her activity was of that swift unobtrusive sort that gets things done as if by stealth. One would be amazed to. learn how much work Mrs. Lawrence did in a day. Uncle Herbert had no idea at all of her horsepower—but then Uncle Herbert had a somewhat circumscribed view of things, despite his liberalism.

The occasion indeed was one for folded hands and undertones. Mrs. Lawrence had just buried her husband. Yes, Charlie Lawrence was gone at last, and all Uncle Herbert’s choicest quotations could not allay the silence of the empty room across the passage.

“ Oh, call my brother back to me, I cannot play alone.” This was the line oftenest on Uncle Herbert’s tongue. Ponto could not help cogitating upon the nature of those inhibited gambols. His uncle topped the scale at sixteen stone. It was difficult to believe that there had been a day when the late Charles Lawrence had lifted Uncle Herbert in his arms like a kitten. Yes, a kitten. Two large tears coursed down Uncle Herbert’s brick-red cheeks as he reiterated the analogy. Ponto watched their course from somewhere near the shelter of his mother’s skirt.

A POOR SCHOLAR

It was difficult to imagine his uncle playfully feline and dandled from the arms of his departed father. Ponto was, perhaps, too small to realize how inexorable that departure was. The events of the last few days had not frightened out of him that faculty for dramatizing every picturesque statement that fell from his elders.

Uncle Herbert had a square-cut beard with a patch of grey in it. This always fascinated Ponto, as did the back of his uncle’s neck with its rolls of flesh billowing up from the stiff linen collar. In after days, Ponto always visualized those captive coils when he encountered Hamlet’s expressed distaste for his too, too solid flesh. At the time of Charlie Lawrence’s decease, it is improbable that Ponto had encountered the Elizabethan dramatists. They were not studied in the kindergarten. Ponto learned of the Jolly Miller, and other folk whose psychology was less involved than that of the moody Dane. He learned, also, of the Three Wise Men who were led to Bethlehem by the lode star, and, though Ponto was not of the type of “ show child,” whose singing of Christmas hymns may always be calculated to draw tears from the onlookers, he none the less added his little meed of worship, and, if the value of such exercises be gauged by the sincerity of the performer, Ponto’s was an acceptable oblation.

At least this was the opinion of the assistant kindergartnerine, who “ spotted ” Ponto from the outset. Ponto’s attachment to this lady was a lofty and sustaining influence. The assistant kindergartnerine wore an overall, which was as blue as the sea, of which Ponto caught his first sight upon a certain

UNCLE HERBERT TALKS THINGS OVER

memorable Christmas Day. A very parfaite and gentle lady was the assistant kindergartnerine.

But we must return to the immediate consideration of the discussion in the Dundas Street cottage.

Mrs. Lawrence had paid her due of mourning for the departed Charlie. She now turned her attention to the needs of the living. She had three children dependant upon her. How was she to carry on?

" I was thinking,” she began tentatively, “ that I might buy out Mr. Higgins. I know he’s got it in his mind to sell. I’ve always had a fancy for the stationery. I could do a bit of sewing. Myrtle will soon be old enough to serve in the shop.”

Uncle Herbert sat up in his chair.

“ Charlie had his friends,” the widow continued, “ they’d patronise me. Perhaps I might try a light line of fancy goods for the other window, and I was thinking of a circulating library. It brings people in. Then there would be Christmas cards, memorials, and one thing and another. What I want is a quick turnover with a steady lot of subscribers for the library and the papers—nothing heavy at first. It would give me time to look around.”

Uncle Herbert cleared his throat. If there was anything he loved, it was a bit of business; but surely the sun should go down that day upon a scene of desolation in the Dundas Street cottage. So much was due to poor Charlie.

“ What a heart! ” murmured Uncle Herbert. “ Your husband had a great heart, Maggie. He had his failings. Which of us is perfect?”

“ I did my best for him,” said Mrs. Lawrence in level tones.

A POOR SCHOLAR

Uncle Herbert bethought him of a song he had once heard at a Freemason’s concert. It concerned a dead warrior, and a widow who could not weep. In the end the desired tears were struck by placing the babe in her arms. Mrs. Lawrence seemed, however, to have forestalled this manoeuvre by gathering her children about her. There was Myrtle in a skimpy frock of black serge which accentuated the meagreness of her legs and arms. Myrtle, with her broad freckled forehead and tip-tilted nose, her tight mouth, and little green eyes set far apart and very wide-awake. She was a year short of the age at which she might absent herself from school without incurring a visit from the truant inspector. Herbert, her next-born, stood behind her with his head propped against the mantelpiece. He seemed in need of this support. The events of the last few days had brought on a tendency to vertigo. He gazed at his godparent with large lack-lustre brown eyes. It was more than a year since Herby had been shorn of his long locks, but somehow he gave the impression that in his case violence had been done to Little Lord Fauntleroy. Mrs. Lawrence, so astute in many respects, had a blind spot when she looked upon her Herby. She had fought for the retention of the locks to the bitter end. To make a doll of Herby was the one luxury she allowed herself.

Herby’s new black clothes did not fit him. The knickerbockers were too long, the sleeves too short. Someone had called out “ Three-quarter mast! ” on the way back from the funeral. This had been the last drop in Herby’s cup.

UNCLE HERBERT TALKS THINGS OVER

Cross-legged on the floor was the babe, the potential tapster of tears. Frederick Hugh Battersby Lawrence would have resented any suggestion that he should have played such a part. He was Ponto, not Baby. He had been Ponto for a very long time. The name had sprung from his life-like impersonation of a little dog at some kindergarten festival. The lady in the blue overall had fashioned his disguise from a hearthrug and a quantity of brown paper. Ponto’s performance had been worthy of the great Lauri. His mother had officially recognized the soubriquet after a few feeble protests. She did not know how the Reverend Battersby would like it. The Reverend Battersby had christened the infant. His admonition “ Name this child! ” had seemed rather superfluous, for the Reverend Battersby had known very well what were the names selected.

He had made little jokes about Frederick the Great. Hugh of Lincoln, and “ poor little me.” But there had been no vestige of a joke as he waited by the font with his head on one side and the sleeping baby in his arms. “ Frederick Hugh Battersby ” was emphatically in the contract.

As things fell out, Mrs. Lawrence was reassured by the Reverend Battersby in the matter of “ Ponto,” but this is to anticipate.

Myrtle was never troubled with scruples about the name. “He looks like Ponto, somehow,” she would say, as she regarded her small brother with her humorous, piercing, beady little eyes. “ You’re a comic, aren’t you, Ponto ? ”

And the little boy would wrinkle up his small uneven face into a grin.

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Herby’s got the looks,” Mrs. Lawrence would say, “ let’s hope that Freddy’s got the brains.” Yet there were many who would have found Ponto more prepossessing than his brother, despite the somewhat smudged features. If Herbert’s face might be described as chiselled, then Ponto’s might be described as chipped. His eyes were small and a shade aslant, so that he narrowly escaped a Mongolian cast. His nose was certainly not a Norman nose. In this feature he resembled Myrtle. Yet Ponto pleased when he gave you his smile. It was a Puckish, rather than a Simian little face.

So the bereaved family fronted Uncle Herbert, and Herby alone gave any sign of the stirring of the waters. Even the humidity of his great brown eyes was caused by recent references to the cut of his knickerbockers, rather than by filial piety. Herbert had been thoroughly frightened by the comings and goings of death’s lackeys, frightened, and at the same time fascinated. Ponto had been mercifully kept out of the way. It was not in Herbert to mourn a father with whom he associated a largeness of hand and foot rather than a largeness of heart. Still, he appeared more responsive to his uncle’s mood than did the others.

“ Bear up, bear up, ’Erby, my boy. Your mother will be looking to you now.”

" I wouldn’t work on his feelings,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ Herby’s not old enough to do much yet.”

The little widow’s brutal practicality seemed to brace up her brother-in-law. With one last application of his black-edged handkerchief, he fell to discussing ways and means with an almost shocking gusto.

UNCLE HERBERT TALKS THINGS OVER

There would be something coming in from the lodge, and the proceeds from the sale of Charlie’s business. There was the furniture. The cottage itself was one of a brick terrace. If Mrs. Lawrence thought of buying out Mr. Higgins, there would be no difficulty in sub-letting.

“ I think I understand your instinct to move out of here,” said Uncle Herbert, with a glance about the immaculate little living-room. There was a steel engraving of Exeter Cathedral above the mantelpiece, a coloured photograph of Herby with his locks and lace collar, over a recessed cupboard, and there were two other pictures on the walls, the Child Christ in the Synagogue, and Daniel among the lions. There were three wands of feathery toi-toi grass stuck in a painted drain pipe. The latter decoration seemed to be the only touch of Charlie about the room.

“ You’ve been so happy here,” said Uncle Herbert, knowing in his heart that he lied.

“ Yes. I’d like to get out of it,” said Mrs Lawrence. “ Your sister’s keeping his things.”

“ His cups and all ? Don’t you want any of them ? ”

“ They’ll revert to Herby some day.”

“ That’s very true,” said Uncle Herbert, “ that’s very true.” Still he paused to regard his sister-in-law. What a close little woman she was—a tough little rag! Perhaps she really had been happy. Some people would be, managing Charlie.

“ Children have a better chance here than in the Old Country,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ it’s just the next year or two I’m thinking of.”

A POOR SCHOLAR

Uncle Herbert ventured to take her hand in his. She disguised her dislike of the process.

“ Now, don’t you worry,” he said, “ I’ve nothing to look after on my own account, and I won’t see my brother’s children want. If you’ve set your heart on the business, it may be the best thing for you and for them. It’s a risk, of course. You’ll just about be able to do it. Well, what I say is ‘Go in and win,’ and I’ll stand by in case you don’t win.”

“ You’re very kind,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “It’s the children I’m thinking of.”

“ Yes, yes,” said Uncle Herbert, and wondered why such very trite and orthodox sentiments should sound oddly on the lips of his sister-in-law. They may have sounded oddly because Mrs. Lawrence happened to be sincere.

But here Mrs. Lawrence decided to dispense with the protection of her family, and sent them forth upon that form of juvenile penance which is known as " a walk.” There were sundry papers to be dealt with, and if Uncle Herbert could be kept off sentimental generalizations, his help would be a comfort to her. So Ponto started off, between Myrtle and Herby, upon an aimless trudge to the Botanical Gardens. The afternoon seemed like a Sunday gone wrong. It was in the world, but not of it. The horse cars ambled along Great King Street. In the little lane that cuts down to Duke Street and the brewery, there stood, on a weighbridge, just such a cart as Charlie Lawrence was wont to drive. Never a shutter had gone up for poor Charlie. His children set their faces like flints and passed well-beloved windows. Even Herby fought down a longing for

UNCLE HERBERT TALKS THINGS OVER

liquorice as they went by his favourite “ lolly ” shop. Only he vowed that on the morrow he would wear his grey suit, with a crepe band. No more “ threequarter masts ” for him. Myrtle caught sight of herself in a shop mirror. Only then did a day-long suppressed sense of humour overmaster her.

‘‘What are you giggling at?” demanded Herby “ Haven’t you any feelings ? ”

“ I’m not giggling,” declared Myrtle.

“You are,” said Ponto.

“ I’ll smack you,” said Myrtle. But she didn’t.

CHAPTER II

THE “CALLY ”

The Lawrences did not have to flit far when they took up their new abode over the shop of Mr. Higgins. They were still within a dozen chains of the “ Cally,” which had faced the brick terrace in Dundas Street.

The “ Cally ” is the Mecca of every small boy whose lot is cast in that district of Dunedin, a district which once had at its heart the stopping place for the coaches that came over the hill from the North. The house where they came to rest in the old days, still looked upon the “ Cally ” from a corner on the other side of Great King Street, a thoroughfare which was to come into its own once more as the main North Road, with the advent of the motor car.

I must imagine the town of Dunedin as Ponto knew it, and as I knew it, before he had set out upon the career. In those days the “ Cally” accommodated three cricket clubs, each with its own coconut matting wicket. There were also those furtive and abbreviated pitches where one defended an empty kerosene tin against the onslaughts of some demon armed with an ancient ball which had, like as not, once done service in the centre of that arena upon whose fringe small fry emulated the prowess of a Jim Baker or an Alec Downes. “ Cally,” as any citizen of Dunedin in Ponto’s time would tell you, is an abbreviation of “ Caledonian.”

THE “CALLY”

At a day even more remote than that the Caledonian Society held their sports upon this acreage, but with the growth of the town the Society sought a more spacious domain, and the old field was officially named the North Ground, and relegated to the status of a recreation ground. To Ponto, however it was still the “ Cally,” as it was to his contemporaries. It was there that he first learned to take his own measure, to aspire to leadership. It was there that he first learned what a glorious and damnable business the human story can be, insensate cruelty and quick generosity playing with the inconsequential indifference of lightning, yet ever present that elusive background of peace, that reservoir of effort, which is, somehow and somewhere, to make effort worth while. He learned the self-forgetfulness of hero-worship, the savagery and chivalry of a crowd, the sudden loneliness in the midst of friends, the aching realisation of friendship and its passing, the mockery, the longing and the wonder, and the surrender to sleep when a day has been thoroughly lived out, which latter are the sole prerogatives of childhood.

The stranger coming upon the recreation ground where Ponto first kicked a football would have been aware of an open space compassed by a somewhat dilapidated fence of dirty white palings, and shaded on three sides by dusty trees. Beyond the railings ran four sections of macadamized street, whose dust was often laid simultaneously by the dews of heaven and the corporation water-cart. Frequently, however, one was aware of a white cloud coursing along one of these ways, like the sign that led the Israelites

A POOR SCHOLAR

forward. Then the swing doors of the shoeing forge in Great King Street would become restive, housewives in St. David Street would close the windows of wooden bungalows and box-like cottages, Ponto’s terrace in Dundas Street would return a glassy stare to the dust storm, while the aristocratic Cumberland Street (there is always a best side to a park, however humble) would shelter behind Venetian blinds or jalousies of Japanese fibre. In the midst of this eastern boundary, stood the parish church of All Saints’, where the Reverend Battersby had christened Ponto. It was a red brick cruciform structure. The “ Cally ” served it as a Close. This was another of the Reverend Battersby’s little jokes. To heighten the ecclesiastical atmosphere, the red brick tower of a clergy school was visible from behind the church door, while an attendant vicarage and schoolroom stood to the right.

If you had followed Frederick Hugh Battersby home from his christening, you would have had the “ Cally ” continuously on your left, and you would have had time to note the rank, uneven grass, the imported English trees, and low red weather-beaten pavilion on the Great King Street side. You would, perhaps, hear the Vulcan music of the shoeing forge, ringing across the space as if in challenge to the silent parish bell. Bell and forge were very rarely vocal together—if, indeed, they ever were.

To Mrs. Lawrence, whose childhood had been spent within call of a deep-throated Devonshire chime, the single tinkling of All Saints’ bell sounded like the peevish falsetto of a parvenu; but to Ponto, who had been born within sound of that bell, it was

THE “CALLY”

all the saints and prophets calling to him across the “ Cally ” —a monitor, a guarantor, a focus for all fears and hopes. To hear it ring on a week night was to hear the same voice through a thousand different moods. On summer evenings, when life was in full spate, it spoke of rest and security, or induced a little panic in accordance with Ponto’s spiritual fortunes at the time. In winter, it reassured or rebuked or tormented. On Sundays, it lifted up its voice with the other bells of the town. It was the odd, unlooked-for, mid-week occasions that caught Ponto on the hip. On Sundays, one was prepared for the bell by the feel of clean underclothes and the hush in Great King Street.

But I must not let that bell dominate this chapter. It was silent when Ponto first squeezed himself past a rotten paling in the white fence and was made one with the “ Cally.” It was in the weeks of Charley Lawrence’s last illness, a Saturday afternoon in spring. At dinner, Ponto had stained a white frock of Myrtle’s with jam. The small catastrophe had not been alleviated by the sense of impending gloom. Ponto made for open country, and the nearest place where grass grew was the “ Cally.” He had always been a little afraid of the place. Once Herby had returned thence with his beauty temporarily marred, a lacerated knee, and his sailor blouse in two sections. However, anything was better than the fiery darts of Myrtle’s tongue.

But Ponto did not find the “ Cally ” lying in wait to devour him. The denizens of that demesne were too much preoccupied with a matter that had something of the ordered pageantry of a kindergarten

A POOR SCHOLAR

game enhanced by a high seriousness. The things one played in the backyard of Dundas Street might not be mentioned here. One might go back and in its solitary seclusion dramatize for oneself the events of that arena.

A black crowd sat on the tiny slope at the western extreme of the “ Cally,” or lolled about the railings of the Great King Street footpath. Their attention was concentrated upon a group in the field, who in turn were riveted upon the doings of two white-clad figures with their shins bound up to the knees in red leather pads. Superficially, they appeared to be doing what Myrtle and Ponto often did in the backyard — hitting a ball with a bat. But there were all kinds of happenings contingent upon their behaviour that Ponto did not understand. Therefore his reverence was the greater. There were three yellow sticks set up at either end of a strip of matting, and the comings and goings, the alarums and excursions that centred about those two little monuments were invested for the crowd with a significance, an esoteric meaning that Ponto longed to share with them. Some of the figures about the yellow sticks were clad in white. Others were white to the waist and finished off more prosaically. One little bald man in white trousers had retained a dark waistcoat, reversing the state of the partially white. He was a favourite with the crowd, for whenever the ball was hit in his direction, they cheered good-humouredly. The two padded ones hit the ball and ran furiously up and down the matting. They reminded Ponto oddly of his toy stork, with their white bodies and their red legs. The men who threw the ball for them to hit

THE “CALLY”

seemed furious, too. Ever and anon they would walk away in a huff, and then everyone moved about in a set, determined manner. There was a third party in pads—white ones. He wore great red gloves, and when everyone moved, he said good-bye to Red Pads No. 1, behind whom he had been crouching in a protecting fashion, and went off to look after Red Pads No. 2 who was waiting by the other row of sticks. The throwing and hitting and chasing and crouching went on for some time, and then there happened something which changed the face of the field. One of the batsmen hit the ball into the air and the little man in the waistcoat caught it. A cheer went up from the crowd. The man in the red pads shrugged his shoulders, and walked disconsolately back to the crowd. Ponto watched him go with a mingled sense of cruelty and pity, some inherited instinct of the arena. Someone joined a little group by the railings behind him.

“ How goes it? ” he said.

“ Bill’s just out. Danny caught him.”

Instinctively Ponto knew that Red Pads was Bill, and that being out was something like being put in the corner. He was sorry for Bill, and thought that Danny must be feeling rather beastly about it too.

As a matter of fact, both Danny and Bill looked thoroughly pleased with themselves, for the crowd cheered them impartially. Ponto thought that Bill was being grave about it. He wasn’t sure that he didn’t hate Danny. If he only knew a little more about it all! A pair of white trousers rose from the

A POOR SCHOLAR

crowd. Bill shed his red pads and they were bound to the legs of the newly risen one.

“ Shake a leg, Ike,” called one of the group behind Ponto. The crowd laughed. Ike rose, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of Bill. Ponto thought him a poor substitute. He liked the way Bill had set his shoulders. Ike slouched.

The game went on. All manner of things happened that we have no time to record. Ponto’s quietus that afternoon was far more ignominious than that of Bill. He was caught by Myrtle. Still, the “ Cally ” had got him. He didn’t care. He walked off to bed as debonairely as Bill had gone back to the crowd. Between the sheets he re-enacted the scenes of that afternoon, not in dreams, but in his own waking and recumbent person, as children sometimes will do. He rose, white-robed, from the crowd, donned the red pads and strode past the sinister figure of Danny to the wicket. He hit the ball and ran up and down while the people cheered and men wrote in a book, and so he fell into a dreamless sleep.

In a very little while after that initiation, Ponto bowled his first ball in the “ Cally ” and had stood up to the trundling of Cocky Middleton. He had learned what runs were, and what it meant to be “ caught.” There were other things that Cocky Middleton “ learnedhim. Cocky had the showman’s flair. He wore unchildish clothes and was precociously hoarse through calling out “ Star! ” as he went his rounds with his bag of evening newspapers. Cocky could shy a folded paper into any verandah on his run. He was a swarthy, tousled being who never used a handkerchief. His condescension to Ponto

THE ‘TALLY ”

was immeasurable. That was a good day of Ponto’s when he realized that he had outgrown Cocky Middleton. But it was a day still comparatively distant at the time this story opens. Ponto had the privilege of a “ close up ” as he stood behind a rather seedy-looking practice net and watched Bill batting, Bill in blue serge with his shirt-sleeves turned back and his sleeve-links rattling as he smote. The sight of the hairy arms protruding from the white linen impressed Ponto with a sense of civilization. Bill was in an office. Offices existed for people like Bill. They gave a relish to Saturdays.

In another corner of the “ Cally,” Ponto saw blood flow, and knew remorse. Blood flowed freely from the nose of a boy who did not want to fight, and made a nasty mess of a striped cotton jumper. Cocky Middleton administered the “ coward’s blow.” This was Cocky’s phrase delivered with unction. The boy who did not want to fight had been pink and clean. Ponto was present, consenting unto his death. He held the coat of Cocky Middleton. The pink, clean boy was called Leslie Curtiss. His mother was a dressmaker in quite a grand way —she worked in Princes Street. The “ Cally ” was no place for Leslie Curtiss, but, with the gregariousness of his kind, he had wandered there.

Ponto consorted with Cocky by the little red pavilion on the occasion of a very grand match where all the players wore white, and some waited their turn to bat in magnificent coloured coats that made Ponto think of Jacob’s gift to Joseph. He was allowed to hang the metal number-plates upon the scoring board, Cocky acting as overseer. Cocky was

A POOR SCHOLAR

in constant touch with the men at the rickety scoring table. Ponto felt the poetry of numbers there in the sunlight among the coloured coats. He came to understand all kinds of things about cricket, though “ 1.b.w.” and “maiden” puzzled him for a time; “ 1.b.w.” sounded vaguely improper. He did not like to ask Cocky.

The men in the coloured coats came from Carisbrook. The name was music in Ponto’s ears. Cocky had been there, of course. You had to pay to get in if you didn’t know about a hole in the fence. They had a “ palivan ” there as big as a house. Cocky stuck to his pronunciation of the word pavilion with admirable verve. Ponto kept Carisbrook ahead of him as some divine far-off event.

In the course of things Ponto was to take Carisbrook in his stride, so to speak, on his way to St. Clair; but that was after his ride on the yellow chariot. Of these things we must speak in due course.

CHAPTER 111

COME, BUY!

Ponto had always envied the children who lived over shops. To do so was to have one’s privacy jeopardized, but at the same time to be lifted above the commonplace. It was to be part and parcel with the charade of life, this flinging of one’s front door open to the public. There was only an inner glass door between the public and the stairs by which Ponto went to bed. It was a thrilling moment when he first popped his head round this inner door and called “ Shop! ” to his mother, who had taken advantage of a slack hour to put things straight upstairs. Mrs. Lawrence studied the public in every way. Even Herby’s “ feelings ” took second place in importance. To Ponto, Herby seemed to be possessed of some strange sixth faculty that set him apart. He had heard his mother rebuke Myrtle for hurting Herby’s feelings. Myrtle had not thrown anything at her brother. She had simply said something in her sharp practical manner, and Herby had turned a curious colour. Then Mrs. Lawrence had flashed out with the expression.

But Herby’s feelings were nothing in comparison with the august susceptibilities of the public. The public were to be cajoled, cherished, led on from strength to strength.

The two or three town travellers who came to do business with Mrs. Lawrence on behalf of the warehouses, seemed to take a very different view of the

A POOR SCHOLAR

public. They regarded that entity as doubtless they would have regarded Herby. It stood in need of correction and chastisement rather than consideration. They did not, however, browbeat Mrs. Lawrence, who continued to buy discreetly. She took Myrtle into her confidence. Myrtle had her finger on the pulse of the public with regard to its juvenile needs. Mrs. Lawrence stocked blood-alleys when that particular marble was enjoying an unusual vogue, and reaped a profit. She knew when to buy tops, and met a sudden demand for skipping-ropes with the quiet assurance of the prepared.

The circulating library was a different matter. Only in after years was Ponto to realize what searchings of heart those few deal shelves must have caused. Uncle Herbert proffered advice. He quoted Francis Bacon, “ Reading maketh a full man.” Little Ponto, as usual, caught at the phrase. This was a novel explanation of Uncle Herbert’s avoirdupois. He had seen his uncle baulking at a plate of tripe and onions one day, and had wondered. Mrs. Lawrence listened patiently to Uncle Herbert’s intellectual snippets. He urged her to be catholic. She baulked at the word, as Uncle Herbert had done in the case of the tripe. He smiled tolerantly at her fanaticism.

“ Catholic don’t mean the Pope and all that, not in the sense I use it. Now, clear your mind of cant, Maggie. What is it ’Erbert Spencer says?”

Uncle Herbert would have fitted out the circulating library as a kind of shrine of free thought. He would have given pride of place to Grant Allan and Samuel Butler. Uncle Herbert was prone to making belated discoveries. Mrs. Lawrence let him talk on,

COME, BUY!

with two rather mousy little teeth closed upon her lip. It was curious that she should have hit upon the idea of the circulating library, she to whom reading was a torment and a passion. It may have been that she loved books, as people will, for their material semblance, the smell and the feel of them. The world they opened up for her was one in which she would not have any fellow-creature wander.

Mrs. Lawrence was of the stuff that saints and mystics are made on. Her scrupulosity, her solicitude for the happiness of others, amounted to something like an obsession. Yet along with this ran an intellectual curiosity, a zest for a certain kind of excitement which most women of her station would have satisfied by beating their children. Mrs. Lawrence was cruel only by proxy. There was that strain of compassion in her, a genuine and very rare quality of selflessness, which always prompted her to keep this malady of the mind to herself. She was considerate for others to a degree that was almost appalling. When people looked for an explanation of Ponto’s scholastic triumphs in after years, they were baffled. His father had been a carter, who had never read anything but the racing news. His mother? She kept a little stationer’s shop. It was not known that Mrs. Lawrence also kept a diary. Even Ponto did not know this, but when he was old enough to understand, he came upon evidences of her secret reading in an exercise book in an orange mottled cover ostensibly devoted to cookery recipes.

The circulating library promised to become a kind of clearing house for American sentimental morality. Mrs. Lawrence had a pathetic belief that people could

A POOR SCHOLAR

be persuaded to read about grain-elevators and cowboys, and keep their souls intact. Her blatant shelves attracted a few subscribers. When a new book was asked for, she sought it at the local Athenaeum to which she subscribed, and read it at a gulp. Often she lost a potential subscriber in her solicitude. Then one rainy evening in late spring, Long Dick entered the little shop for the first time. He swept a wire bracket full of newspapers off its nail by the door as he did so, and swore weakly. Ponto dived between the long legs to repair the damage. Long Dick apologized in the resonant tones of one who wishes to reassure himself. His manner of speech awakened dormant memories in Mrs. Lawrence’s mind. Before she had married Charlie and emigrated, she had been a maid in a Devonshire vicarage. Her master had filled his house at certain times with young men whom he coached for examinations. Long Dick spoke as one of these young men, or, perhaps, as a faint echo of such. There was something, too, about the cut of the shabby Norfolk coat that was foreign to the time and the place. Long Dick was blue of chin, and his hair and nails seemed in need of some trimming. Ponto thought of a picture he had seen of a buzzard as he looked up at the great hook nose and the huge Adam’s apple. Long Dick had just come to the end of a short term of employment as a clerk at a polling booth. There had been a general election in New Zealand. Mr. Seddon had gone back to power with the afflatus of the South African war.

Mrs. Lawrence had been wondering about Long Dick. A day or two ago, a customer had jerked an

COME, BUY!

elbow in his direction as he crossed by an advertisement hoarding on the other side of the street. To Mrs. Lawrence he seemed to pass like a figure in a fantastic drama. The hoarding had been covered with a representation of a circus ring.

“ Long Dick,” the purchaser had said, “ it was him they chucked in the river. He’s a pro-Boer. Lost his job on the paper. Drunk half the time, I’m told.”

“A journalist?” Mrs. Lawrence had said, in her prim little way.

“ That’s what he was. But what he’ll be next

only God and Long Dick know.” With which sour sally, the humourist had taken his leave.

Something in the manner of Ponto’s upward scrutiny as he tip-toed to restore the fallen paper rack, set the tall, gaunt man smiling. It was a wry smile, but not without a certain hesitating bonhomie. Mrs. Lawrence liked him the better for it.

“ I want something to read,” said Long Dick

“ Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ something in the magazine line, or would you like a book ? ”

Long Dick turned to the deal shelves and read the sign aloud: “ Circulating Library.” Then he added peevishly, “ Why ‘ circulating ’ ? ”

Mrs. Lawrence was silent. Instinctively she felt herself in the presence of one who might say interesting things if left to himself. She noticed that the ends of Long Dick’s trousers were shockingly frayed, and wondered how he managed about his socks. It was patent that if Long Dick had women-folk attached to him they were not of the mothering sort. Then she saw his shoulders begin to heave, and heard a hoarse guffaw. The two little teeth closed hard upon her lip.

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ What you laugh at ? ” piped Ponto.

“ Freddy,” snapped Mrs. Lawrence, “ don’t you be cheeky now.”

“ Bilge,” said Long Dick under his breath. “ Cabbage water. Pop com. Candy.” He turned upon Mrs. Lawrence. His deep-sunken eyes were lit by a kind of jolly malevolence.

" I’ll have a copy of he mentioned a certain journal which flourished more or less under the shadow of actions for libel.

“ Pm sorry, sir,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ I don’t take it in.”

" Then give me a copy of Good Words, will you?”

Mrs. Lawrence turned from a shelf crestfallen “ Pm very sorry, sir, but Pm sold out this week.”

“ Well, we are in a quandary,” said Long Dick.

“ I’m sorry, sir,” said Mrs. Lawrence with dignity.

“ Do you know,” said Long Dick, “ that it’s the first time I have been addressed as ‘ sir ’ for months. You’re from the Old Country?”

“ Devonshire,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ it’s twenty years now.”

"Might I ask a question? How do you choose your books for your library? Do they just send you what they think you will take ? ”

“ No, I read every book,” replied Mrs. Lawrence quickly, “Pm sorry there’s nothing you like. Here’s my catalogue. There are a good many out.”

Long Dick’s expression was a comical mixture of shame and concern.

“You read them yourself? Oh, I beg your pardon. I think—l think Pll change my mind.”

He turned once more to the shelves. He picked out a volume at random.

COME, BUY!

“ Yes, here we are, Fair Waved the Golden Corn by Alice B. Walker.”

At this point, there entered Mr. Lancaster of the Bank. It was due to Mr. Lancaster’s own communicative temperament that his name was always coupled with his calling. The University students had immortalized him in one of their lampoons. “ I’m Lancaster of the Bank ” had been set to the tune of one of the latest musical comedy numbers. Mr. Lancaster’s landlady had described him as a carnivorous reader. He had taken out a subscription with Mrs. Lawrence because he liked novels new, “ just as I like potatoes,” he added, with a deprecating little giggle. On the occasion of this encounter with Long Dick, he tugged at his goatee. Mr. Lancaster’s resemblance to Charles Dickens had also been celebrated in the students’ song.

“ Ah. Alice B. Walker. I can recommend anything of hers. She’s clean.”

Ponto, listening by a belated display of Guy Fawkes masks, wondered how Mr. Lancaster could know that Alice B. Walker was clean. How could he tell whether she went conscientiously behind her ears as he (Ponto) was admonished to do.

Long Dick’s thick lips curled into a smile that was not pleasant.

“ What precisely do you mean by ‘ clean,’ may I ask?” he said.

Mr. Lancaster began to stammer, “ Well, well, it’s a generally accepted term, is it not ?”

"When is a book not clean ?” demanded Long Dick with a gesture that reminded Mrs. Lawrence of her one and only visit to the theatre in Irving’s day.

A POOR SCHOLAR

Mr. Lancaster began to rub his palms together,

“ You know what I mean,” he said with a little laugh.

Long Dick seemed to find the little laugh very distasteful. He flung half a sovereign upon a little pile of newspapers by Mrs. Lawrence’s elbow. “ I’ll call again,” he growled, and strode out of the shop with Fair Waved the Golden Corn tucked under his arm.

“ A character,” said Mr. Lancaster, with another little laugh.

“ They call him Long Dick,” Mrs. Lawrence replied. “ Seen better days.”

“ So have I,” said Mr. Lancaster, with a glance at the wet pavement. He felt the need of a little joke to counteract the effects of Long Dick’s onslaught.

Ponto had listened to the little dialogue with his thumb in his mouth and a wrinkle on his forehead. What was it that made Long Dick so angry? Mrs. Lawrence proceeded to cut off the title and date from the front sheets of yesterday's Daily Times. She impaled the resultant streamers on a letter file. She was allowed discount on unsold copies, and the waste paper was her perquisite. The streamers were an earnest of good faith. She generally gauged very nicely the number of copies she would require. It was bad business to disappoint customers when they dashed in for a paper at odd times.

Mr. Lancaster was busy among the shelves. The widow’s face as she watched him had the sadness of those little faces that look out at you from behind bars at the Zoo. There was a faint disgust, a gentle disrelish in her eyes. Long Dick’s mockery had made them bright and hard.

COME. BUY!

Mr. Lancaster made his choice and shambled out of the shop. Ponto watched him go, and then transferred his attention to the half-sovereign. Had his mother forgotten about it? Another customer entered and asked for a copy of Tit-Bits. He squinted at the half-sovereign but, being a diffident man, he made no comment. Then Myrtle came to relieve her mother. There was no finesse about her discovery of the coin.

“Hello, where did this come from?”

Then Ponto, young as he was, was aware of a change in his mother’s face, the memory of which was to haunt him through his childhood and oddly intensify his love for her. It was a very terrible change, a momentary flash of passion. Then again she was the little patient marmoset. So Ponto would think of her in after days.

“ Gawky,” said Mrs. Lawrence, as she snatched up the coin, “ what do you want to shout like that for? I’m not deaf.”

Injured innocence was personified in Myrtle’s limpid gaze. There was indignation and rebellion too.

“ Oh, please yourself,” said Myrtle, “ it’s none of my business, I suppose. And if I am gawky, whose fault is that ? ”

“ Come along, Freddy dear,” said Mrs. Lawrence, ignoring the repartee.

Ponto did not witness the sequel to the enrolment of Long Dick. He came back on just such a wet evening as that on which he had paid his first visit. Mrs. Lawrence looked up from a tray of Christmas cards.

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ I’ve come back to make my apologies,” said Long Dick, “ I think I was a little drunk the other evening.”

“ No, I don’t think you were, sir,” said Mrs. Lawrence composedly.

“ I was rude to that little man. What is the use of being rude ? ”

“ Here’s your half-sovereign,” said Mrs. Lawrence. Long Dick smiled unpleasantly, like a boy under rebuke.

“ But my subscription ... ? ”

“ I’m giving up the library,” said Mrs. Lawrence " it doesn’t pay.”

Long Dick stared down at her from his great height. She played with a packet of pencils, and met his gaze with the two little teeth just showing.

“ You must make it pay,” said Long Dick. “ No,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ I’ll sell off what

I have and stick to the stationery and fancy goods.” For a moment they seemed to read each other’s eyes.

“Why do you worry?” said Long Dick, “we’re all alike.”

“ No, no, don’t say that,” said the little widow Long Dick laughed harshly.

“ I’ll take out my half-sovereign in books, then, Why do you treat me like this ? ”

“ I can’t sell till all the subscriptions have run out,” said Mrs. Lawrence.

“ But I’ve had a book out.”

“ I’ll take twopence for it, then. I let them out at twopence a time to non-subscribers.

Long Dick produced the coppers with another of his twisted smiles.

COME, BUY!

“So mote it be,” he said. Then, as if to lighten the atmosphere, he enquired for Ponto—'“ How’s Peeping Tom?”

Mrs. Lawrence looked mystified

“ The little boy who asked me what I was laughing at.”

“ Quite well, thank you,” answered his mother.

“ Would he like to come for a ride some day?'

“ A ride?”

“ Yes. I’ve got a new job. I’m driving a baker’s cart. I’m very reliable. I’ve driven a coach and four in my time. That was in the Old Country. Do you still call it Home ? ”

“ I suppose so,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ I still talk of the ‘ Home papers ’ anyhow.”

“ I’ll call for him one of these days. Will you let him come, just to show you trust me?” He looked down into her face, pleading dumbly for something of which the entrusting of Ponto was by way of sacrament. Mrs. Lawrence could not bear to meet that gaunt gaze.

“ I’ve been very honest with you,” he went on. his voice vibrating with a kind of desperate gaiety, “ I’m not a clean man. I’d take it kindly, as they say, if you’d trust that little boy alongside of me one afternoon. I’d show him the world from the seat of a bread cart. Bread and circuses. Isn’t that what the Roman statesman prescribed for the populace ? ”

Mrs. Lawrence wrinkled her forehead. She was vaguely flattered at being lifted up to the level of his thought. One had to be full of such allusions to be a journalist.

“ Well, yes. I’d let him go,” she said

A POOR SCHOLAR

" Thank you,” said Long Dick, and strode out of the shop.

Mrs. Lawrence went on with her sorting. That other one who had besought of her so many years ago in the Devonshire Rectory had spoken in the accents of Long Dick. He had been a gentleman, technically, that is to say, not in the canting sense. She alone could save him. Thus he had spoken. She had married Charlie Lawrence, who had made no such appeal. One does not save people from themselves. It was part of her punishment, she supposed, that Long Dick should remind her of the boy who was drowned in the Teign. She turned to light the gas jet, and, as she did so, Herby lolled in by the street door.

‘‘Where have you been, Herby dear? I thought you were doing your lessons.”

“ Cally,” was the laconic reply

“ In all this wet ?

" It’s only a Scotch mist. I’m not made of sugar.”

“ You don’t think, you boys. Then when you get a pain, you wonder why.”

“ I seen a bloke run in,” said Herby, “ they put him on Farrell’s express. He didn’t half sing out.”

“ I don’t want to hear about it,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ you just be careful it don’t happen to you some day.”

“ How d’you mean? ” asked Herby. If Ponto had been present, he would have noticed a similar change in Herby as on that occasion when Myrtle hurt his feelings.

COME, BUY!

“ 1 mean that’s what happens to boys who steal. Why don’t you ask me for things if you’re hungry instead of taking them, Herby? I’ll never stint you.”

Herby regarded her with lucent brown eyes. What a pretty baby he had been, always needing her! Was it just a trick of nature, that steadfast gaze? In the loneliness of her married life, she had fancied that the little boy had silently answered her appeal. Very doggedly she had fought against the truth that Herby’s beautiful eyes had just as much ethical import as a sunflower. They simply stared. When she found him out in a deceit, they appeared softer and more appealing than ever. Once, since Charlie Lawrence’s death, she had called in Uncle Herbert to administer chastisement. The resultant scene had haunted her, like one of those pictures she remembered having seen when the Rector had taken a party to London for the day and they had “ done ” some of the Old Masters in the National Gallery. Uncle Herbert should have made it Hogarthian, but her eyes were on her son. She loathed herself for the quickening of her pulses. The fact that her heart was not rent, but exhilarated, surely argued something in her to be exorcised. She never called in Uncle Herbert again. It might have been for Herby’s good if she had. There lay the strength and the weakness of this close little woman. Ponto never occupied her mind as did Herby. His later arrival may have had something to do with this. It may have been that she had bequeathed to him something of her own spirituality. “ Herby has the looks,” she had said, “ let’s hope that Freddy will have the brains.” So Ponto all unconsciously counteracted

A POOR SCHOLAR

that morbidity in her by his abundant vitality. There was nothing lymphatic or sullen about Ponto. Herby always looked at his best when a sulky mood was upon him. Ponto, who never sulked, sometimes looked a little wizened, if he had been concentrating upon anything with particular zest. As a rule, however, he wore a certain air of childishness which children of his build sometimes lack. Both Herby and his mother turned to him with relief as he agitated the white knob of the glass door and entered noisily with a mouth organ against his white teeth. Then by the other door came more representatives of the public, and Mrs. Lawrence’s mind was mercifully occupied with pennies and twopences until it was time to let down the red canvas blind that acted as shutter, and to turn out the gas in the shop.

CHAPTER IV

THE YELLOW CHARIOT

“ In the afternoon they came unto a land wherein it seemed always afternoon.” In after years Ponto never came upon the line without a thought of the yellow chariot. Long Dick kept his promise, but Ponto had not reckoned upon his coming on a Saturday afternoon. The little boy was inwardly desolated as the baker’s cart drew up by the kerb opposite his mother’s shop. On Saturday afternoons he went to the “ Cally ” as religiously as he went to church on Sunday. He was profoundly sorry for any able-bodied male who could not do so. Long Dick himself had only recently been cut off, by reason of his new avocation. He had to content himself with Wednesday cricket, which was an affair of half tones. There were no coloured coats, and there was no superfluity of white flannel on Wednesdays. The men who worked on Saturdays always seemed to play their cricket in a kind of twilight. Ponto had seen Long Dick playing in Wednesday cricket. Excitement always centred round Long Dick and the umpire when the former was put on to bowl. Would the umpire decide whether Long Dick really was bowling? His peculiar action might have been interpreted as a throw. On many occasions it had been so interpreted with picturesque results. A little vignette that Ponto retained in his memory was a scene of wrath at the conclusion of one of those Wednesday contests. The heavens themselves seemed

A POOR SCHOLAR

to have been influenced by the dispute, for they were black with thunder clouds which had threatened all the afternoon. To little Ponto, Long Dick and the umpire had seemed like the protagonists in some Homeric quarrel. They affected him as did the electricity in the air. The umpire balanced a cigarette and talked at the same time, to the peril of his sandy moustache, and monotonously incarnadined every other word. He had been at the gory game for twenty sanguinary years, and he would be overtaken with haemorrhage if he couldn’t tell a ball from a no-ball. Long Dick replied with gesture and eloquence. His style, however, was too literary to be effective. The little knot of onlookers laughed and taunted. Ponto began to feel ashamed, as he had done at the baiting of Leslie Curtiss.

This, however, is a digression. I am to tell how Ponto came to the land of afternoon, not by way of joss-stick or incantation, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but charioted by Long Dick and a roan mare.

Ponto’s car was a little covered waggon with a white canvas canopy bearing the name of Long Dick’s employer. The yellow body had a little ventilated door at the back where the name of the coachbuilder was emblazoned. Ponto was lifted up into an atmosphere of new? bread and horseflesh, too polite to confess his nostalgia for the “ Cally.” Then Long Dick whipped up the mare and the strange thing happened.

They drove past the “Cally” itself, and Ponto was aware of a pleasurable detachment. He who had pitied the folk who passed by, was now passing

THE YELLOW CHARIOT

himself, and he did not mind. Perhaps this explained difficulties about heaven. To find you were going past it all and not to care, perhaps that was the state of the blessed. He saw the white familiar figures beyond the dirty railings. He saw Cocky turn from lounging near an entrance where once there had been a turnstile.

“ Hallo, Long Dick, ain’t yer cornin’ to learn us how to bowl ? ”

Cocky’s features were distorted like a face in a dream. Long Dick waved his whip with a great guffaw. Presently, he turned up into George Street, where there are better houses than in the older thoroughfare. To-day the electric tramcars speed along George Street, but that afternoon they existed only in the minds of progressive Town Councillors.

Long Dick pulled up at a two-storeyed wooden villa with corrugated iron roof and staring windows and much tortured iron scroll-work about the verandah. He secured the yellow wheel with a little chain, and, flinging open the fluted door with a fine flourish, proceeded to fill his basket. From his perch on the seat, Ponto heard the drop of the crisp loaves. Then he was aware of the passage of long legs, shirtsleeves and basket through the iron gate. Long Dick bore the basket on his back, like the academic hood he should have worn. Another house was visited and the process repeated. All the while Ponto watched as he would have watched some piece of ritual. To deliver bread from door to door seemed the one thing in the world that could bring rest to the soul. Long Dick smiled oddly as he returned with his basket and caught the boy’s gaze. He might

A POOR SCHOLAR

have anticipated the curd-seller in the Indian play: “ You have made me so happy, selling curds,” says the village hawker to little Amal.

So they went onwards and upwards, for Long Dick’s rounds took him up Park Street and so on to Argyll Street by way of Heriot Row. That meant a stiff climb for the roan mare.

Such is a prosaic account of the journey which would be significant only to those who know the town of Dunedin. We are concerned with what happened to Ponto. At the end of that steep green climb the chariot turned. Ahead was a dip of metal road, green-flanked. Past this there was a foreshortened vista of the city roofs. The chariot swung round to the right into a narrow lane with an opaque wooden fence that shielded a sunk garden on one side and a tow of two-storeyed villas on the other. Then came a dark little road that led in turn to a triangular open space with a row of poplars at the base. If one had been on the seat with Ponto, in the spirit of the town planner, one would probably exclaim “ Civic reserve ” and begin, a little wearily, to suggest improvements. One would also praise the foresight of the civic fathers in setting aside that long belt of native bush for the refreshment of posterity. One might not have noticed the little girl in the red cloak as Ponto did. She flitted past the poplars in pursuit of a white fox terrier. They seemed to be the only things that moved. The little pleasaunce waited. There was a brown gap in the hill above the poplars where stone had been quarried. All about was the green of broadleaf, ngaio and lawyer. Against the skyline at the back of everything was a row of eucalyptus trees.

THE YELLOW CHARIOT

To Ponto, it was as if the yellow chariot had suddenly entered another dimension. In later days, this waiting scene was to be inhabited by a strangely assorted host. Faces and forms encountered in the work-a-day world met there with others who had lived only at the bidding of some writer of books. They had this one thing in common, this communion of Ponto’s elect. He met them for the first time with that same little shock of discovery that he had felt as he came upon that set scene. It was a world just beyond his reach. Had he but descended from the yellow chariot on that afternoon of escape and remoteness from all that had gone before, he might have made a bid for permanency within that region of faery. But Long Dick whipped up the mare, and the chance apparently was lost. Ponto was to pass the spot a thousand and one times, but always with a sense of exile. Something was amiss. Perhaps you had to come by the yellow chariot, or not at all. Ponto always thought of the little girl with the red cloak when he witnessed some attempt to make less remote that otherwhere which is the reflection of our dreams, our reading or our desires. They never satisfied. Even Peter Pan appears heavy-handed when forced upon one through the lineaments and gestures of some young lady who will have you know all about it. Her Peter Pan is not your Peter Pan. I have hesitated to speak about Ponto’s Fairyland, because that is a word about which people are inclined to be quarrelsome. The little girl in the red cloak was not Little Red Riding Hood. She was something far more remote. She was a real little girl on whom Ponto probably never set eyes again.

A POOR SCHOLAR

I shall not wound anyone’s feelings or sense of propriety by calling her a fairy. Yet for Ponto she shepherded all manner of folk in that open space by the poplars.

I must not, however, put the cart before the horse. Let us return to the yellow chariot with the roan mare in her rightful place at the head of affairs. Ponto was whisked out of sight of the poplars and the red cloak, and the cart turned into Argyll Street. So Long Dick circumvented the switchback and came into Royal Terrace with the assurance of one who had driven a coach and four from Newmarket to the Red Lion in Petty Cury, which, as everyone who knows the streets of Cambridge will tell you, requires some little skill. The gate before which they halted opened to a path leading up to a large white wooden house that looked superciliously at Ponto over the crests of macrocarpas and a tangle of shrubbery. Behind that again was the green line of the town belt. Long Dick swung down from his seat and disappeared through the red gate with his basket. There were six tarnished gold letters upon the top bar of this gate. Ponto spelled them out “H-u-r-z-e-1.” He crooned the name over to himself. There was something inexpressibly gracious and sanguine in the name. The red of the seasoned rimu wood, and the old gold of the lettering harmonized with the music of the name. Behind that gate dwelt Harold and Pauline, but Ponto was not to discover this for many a long day. That afternoon he only heard a child yodelling from the invisible fastness of the garden. The call was answered far away from the little path that led down from Roslyn. Ponto did not know that

THE YELLOW CHARIOT

it was Pauline signalling to Harold on his way home. He connected the sounds with the little red-cloaked girl. The children in this land of afternoon were not as the children of Great King Street.

Then faintly came to his ears a sound that was not unlike the exhaust of an engine heard at a great distance. It was the crowd cheering the winning hit at the “ Cally.”

Long Dick returned with the empty basket. In his dark felt hat and shirt-sleeves, he might have looked sinister to any but Ponto, as he emerged from the green fastness. The little boy knew him for one whose feet were shod with benevolence. There was no sign of the cloven hoof that afternoon.

On the homeward journey Ponto fell asleep. He opened his eyes as the yellow chariot turned the corner where the tramcars crawled complainingly into Great King Street. There was a fight in progress outside the Captain Cook. The great coloured bottles in the chemist’s window opposite glowed before the newly lit gas jet.

Mrs. Lawrence’s shop seemed to have shrunk in size when Ponto was set down at the door. He was aware of the scent of printer’s ink and fried fish. He heard Long Dick’s guffaw. A yellow wheel scrunched against the paving stone. The roan mare set off in the direction of oats and stabling, and the yellow chariot disappeared for good and all.

Long Dick does not reappear in this story, until a day when Ponto had outgrown the confines of the little shop, not in spirit, but as a matter of actual physical fact.

CHAPTER V

NOEL!

The services of the entire Lawrence family were requisitioned in the little shop on Christmas Eve. The circulating library was being sold off, and there was a furtive scamper on the part of many neighbours for belated cards and little presents. The long dusk served them almost up to closing time.

This was Mrs. Lawrence’s twentieth Antipodean Christmas. She hardly felt that it was Christmas at all. A tired street, filled with jaded people, most of whom had been rushing things up with a view to going away —that was her outlook. People did not come home at Christmas as in the Old Country. The rich and fortunate went away to the country or the sea. Some few kept the domestic flag flying. There were enough to crowd the thoroughfares on a Christmas Eve.

Ponto had but lately said good-bye to the lady in the blue overall. He had graduated from the kindergarten with honours. The honours had been somewhat illusory. The plaudits of papas and mammas, committee and press, accompanied his slick manipulation of a doll’s cot and bedstead. One humourist had remarked that he would make a good ship’s steward; this may have been suggested by the little sailor suit. Ponto had also been “ on ” in one of the Christmas mimes. His weaving and basket-making had also been admired.

After the six weeks’ holiday at Christmas he was destined for the State School in George Street, That

NOEL!

was in the vague future. Six sunburned weeks shone between. Ponto’s part in the shop activities was humble, but he was sustained by the memory of much edifying verse in wdiich the phrase “ little hands ” often occurred. Also he had never known an English Christmas, and there was sufficient glamour for him in what he saw and heard.

It was a thoroughly happy and sleepy little boy that Myrtle supported up the stairs after the last customer had gone and the red blind had covered the wreckage of Mrs. Lawrence’s dressed window. He sank into a dark oblivion of delicious sleep, which seemed but a matter of a moment before he sprang to a sitting posture with thumping heart. Outside, the Salvation Army Band was playing “ Oh, come all ye faithful.” The summer dawn had almost turned to morning. It was Christmas Day.

At its close, Ponto felt that he had not done full justice to the day. What child ever did? Still, it was a very happy day, with no casualties. There were presents on the little table in the living-room, most of them out of stock, but the fact was tactfully ignored. Ponto had a box of paints with a book full of splendid soldiers with bloodless facsimiles on the opposite page that cried out for colour. There was a new half-crown from Uncle Herbert and a copy of Water Babies from “C. H. Battersby, Wellington.” This was the surprise of the morning. It had come by post. Mrs. Lawrence was more pleased, if possible, than Ponto.

Followed matins with sermon at All Saints’ Church, with the choristers in newly laundered surplices, and an arch of flowers and greenery across the

A POOR SCHOLAR

chancel, bearing the words “ Holy, Holy, Holy.” There was also Mr. Lancaster in grey tweeds instead of his Sunday blacks. This fact more than any heightened Ponto’s sense of festival. Mr. Lancaster always helped to take up the collection in one of those salvers of silver and red plush that were the peculiar glory of All Saints’.

Somehow, he seemed on tiptoe for a flight as he went down the western aisle that Christmas morning. That was the case with others in the church. The sea and the country called them, but first of all the Christmas dinner had to be faced.

Mrs. Lawrence did not attend matins, because she was cooking the Christmas dinner. Like the lady in the poem, she rose up so early and stole out unbeknown and went to church alone. She had, however, returned in time for breakfast, and had seen to it that the children went off at ten minutes to eleven suitably groomed and habited.

So Myrtle had been second in command at matins, and as the Lawrence family filed out into the sunlight, with the vicar’s exhortation “ Ye that do truly and earnestly repent ye of your sins ” floating down from the laden altar the released choir boys stripped of their heavenly raiment burst out from the vestry door, ready for the real business of Christmas.

A Deaconess stood at the ivied west door, her eyes a little moist with the combined effects of early rising, Christmas hymns, the vicar’s sermon, and the sight of the choir boys filing past the festooned pulpit to the decorated vestry door. The little Lawrences had the appeal of a family on ceremonial parade, an occasion always fraught with pathos. She allowed

NOEL!

herself a little whispered colloquy as the released portion of the congregation went past and the exhortation droned on. How was their mother? Very well, thank you. Would Herby like to join the choir? A shake of the head and an uneasy roving of the big brown eyes. Ponto then? Too small? Not in another month or so. He must think it over. Merry Christmas.

Ponto thought it over all the way home. To pass the status of a proselyte at the gate into the precincts of the altar, to pass in white raiment mystic, wonderful ! The idea appealed to all the latent drama in him. To be one of that dedicated band who wore their sacrosancy so lightly, as they skylarked along Cumberland Street! The thought had never before occurred to him. He postponed the discussion of it with his mother till a suitable time.

Uncle Herbert came to dinner. He never went to Church on Sunday or festival, but acquiesced in the pagan rites that followed a Christmas service. He exuded peace, goodwill and platitudes. The little party was a happy one, and the goose and plum pudding disappeared decorously. Herby’s manner towards his godparent suggested a Christmas armistice. He smiled wanly at Uncle Herbert’s sallies, and stoked plum pudding. Ponto did not eat very largely. There were too many other interests. Uncle Herbert was profoundly interesting. His platitudes were not platitudes to Ponto, not at that time. He teased every sonorous phrase through his own little mind. There were citations from Dickens and Swedenborg and other philosophers. Uncle Herbert had a weakness for the rhetorical question. “ What is it

A POOR SCHOLAR

Matthew Arnold says?” he would roll forth, and after a respectful silence on the part of his auditors, he would answer the question himself.

Following dinner, came an event upon which Ponto had been setting great store. Uncle Herbert was going to take the family for a ride on the topdecker tramway to the sea beach at St. Oair. They would pass quite near to Carisbrook. Herby knew the street that led to the main gate. Ponto made up his mind to do nothing that should disturb the Christmas mood, so that Herby should be pleased to act as showman. Cocky Middleton would have been “ the bloke to learn him,” but Cocky was not persona grata with Mrs. Lawrence. Cocky had behaved rather badly over some newspapers. He could not possibly have been of the party.

So Ponto seated himself beside Herby on the top of the horse car and, as they rollicked along George Street through the Octagon Reserve, down the incline of Princes Street, there was an unwonted effusion of brotherly love. Ponto knew Princes Street. The Grand Hotel corner at the junction of High Street, up which the cable tramcars mount the hill to Mornington, was the busiest place he had ever seen. It was the hub of the universe for Ponto, until he saw Christchurch.

They changed at the Grand Hotel comer, and walked up to Manse Street, where the St. Clair car awaited them. Here, Ponto entered a new country, and surrendered himself utterly to Herby.

Manse Street was another busy corner. A species of enlarged Melbourne cab called a “drag” plied for hire, its driver repeating its destination as

NOEL!

he stood up on the box seat. “ Here you are, Ocean Beach and Forbury. Ocean Beach and Forbury.”

The tramcar pulled off, and they were on the second stage of their journey to the sea, which Ponto had heard and seen only at a distance. They were soon out of the region of shops and running under the lea of a hill with the Oval on their left. The Oval was a reserve whose glory had departed. It had flourished in the palmy days of the “ Cally.” Then they were in the congested junction of Ogg’s Corner, which used to resemble a dreary London suburb more than any other part of Dunedin. The corner was rounded with a complaint of wheels upon metals, and they were passing the long low line of railway shops in Cargill Road. Then came a sight of Carisbrook, a high fence gaudy with advertisements, at the end of the road. Above the fence a line of eucalyptus trees and the roof of Cocky’s “ palivan.” Ponto stood up on the seat for a sight of the velvet sward, but he was not tall enough. Then came another turn into Forbury Road. They continued with a high hill on their right and market gardens farmed by Chinese on their left. Then the air seemed to grow suddenly soft and sweet. There was an aroma that faintly suggested chocolate cream. “ Corse,” said Herby, pointing to a great splash of yellow on a bank below them. There was a murmur in Ponto’s head as it was when he put his ear to the shell that served as an ornament on the living-room mantelpiece. He was aware of a new elation, a lightness of spirit and body. At the end of the way they traversed was a two-storeyed building like an

A POOR SCHOLAR

hotel, opposite it a fenced reserve, beyond a strip of blue. They were coming upon the sea.

The Pacific Ocean did not belie her name that afternoon. When Ponto descended from his height, still clutching his punched green ticket, she lay before the little boy, a new element. “ Play by me, bathe by me, mother and child! ” Thus she might have sung to Ponto in the words of the author of his Christmas book. The waves beat along the great stretch of sand dotted with mothers and children, laughing white waves peopled with laughing humanity, a scene of inexpressible joie-de-vivre and excitement.

Little Ponto took the human family to his arms as he stood on the crumbled ledge of Esplanade above the sands. People were very nice when you saw them in such a setting, and he made haste to be one of them. The rest of the acts of Ponto that afternoon, and the sand castle that he built, are not written here, because they are all the conventional things that a child does on his first visit to the seaside.

When the tramway man rang the bell in the low white wooden bel fry- overlooking the sands, and they knew that they must run for the homeward car, he summoned Ponto back from the rim of heaven to the stale odours of Great King Street. Still, Ponto found a store of white sand in his stockings when he went to bed that night, and this he kept in a box along with many other strange possessions, including a collection of the little caps that drop from the eucalyptus trees at the turn of the season. They made admirable counters to represent Bill and other great men when Ponto presided over an imaginary

NOEL!

cricket match under the kitchen table, with a pencil box to represent the pavilion. It was thus that the little boy spent the last twilight hours of that happy Christmas.

" Filling from time to time his varying stage

With all the persons, down to palsied age,

That life brings with her in her equipage,

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.”

The stage for the time being was Carisbrook, the time—present.

Mrs. Lawrence went off with Herby to hear some carol singing. Myrtle settled down to Water Babies in the arm-chair. Occasionally she stole a glance at her little brother. Ponto wasn’t any trouble. What a cure he was, with his little games and plans! A comic, was Ponto. Then she became absorbed in Linley Sambourne’s illustrations, and her bright assertive little face softened. She forgot all about Ponto’s bedtime. It was a long and happy Christmas that closed with the return of Mrs. Lawrence and Herby, and instant marching orders to bed.

CHAPTER Vf

“THE GEORDY"

The weeks following Christmas in such a colonial town as Dunedin, correspond to what was once called the silly season in London—-those exhausted weeks in July and August, when everyone who can afford to do so is making holiday. Mrs. Lawrence, of course, could not afford to take her children away, so Ponto and Herby encountered ennui, each after his own characteristic fashion.

Herby spent an unconscionable time in contemplating the tangled wreckage of the advertisements that languished on the hoarding opposite. He had a friend who worked, or was supposed to work, in a wood and coal yard next to the hoarding. These two would converse across the street, Herby drumming one heel against the board that bore the fly sheet of that week’s Otago Witness, his friend Lew Moss with his bare arms at rest on the fence of the wood and coal yard.

Lew was of a Semitic cast of face, unrelieved by intelligence. He had large flesh pockets under his eyes, the white of which showed up against a Christy minstrel make-up of smeared coal dust. He was considerably older than Herby, almost a man, but stunted physically, mentally and spiritually.

Ponto always thought of Lew in connection with a trivial little incident that stuck in his memory by reason of a certain apt picturesqueness.

“THE GEORDY"

A boy from Mrs. Moyatt’s bakery hard by was passing the wood and coal yard with a tray of jam tarts balanced on his head. Lew, as usual, was contemplating Great King Street from the fence. He saw the tarts coming to the level of his black hands. A moist and cunning smile lit his ghoulish face. His eyes were enlightened. The boy went on, whistling unconsciously. Lew selected two of the largest tarts from the tray. Ponto saw a hurried orgy amid the coal dust. It was a strangely macabre little picture, funny enough, yet partaking somehow of the nature of a bad dream.

Well, there was Lew and the coal yard opposite for Herby, with an occasional game of “ rotten cricket ” in the “ Cally.” Sometimes there was a tramp to Opoho for brushwood.

Herby would look very picturesque on his return from one of these wood-chopping excursions, trailing behind him a tremendous besom of manuka scrub. He had a knack of knotting a coloured handkerchief above his jersey, and when his hair was in disorder he would look almost Byronic. Herby also carried on flirtations with little girls. These little girls were not friends of Myrtle as a rule. Ponto once went woodcutting with him. On this occasion they penetrated as far as the hill above the rifle range. They had a fine view from this eminence. Below them. Lake Logan shimmered in the sun. To-day, Lake Logan is no more. They have filled it in, and have built an Exhibition upon it. Ponto saw his first rabbit hole on the side of this hill, and was rebuked by Herby for trying to pick up one of the little pellets of dun? that littered the entrance of the cavity.

A POOR SCHOLAR

Shortly afterwards he saw his first rabbit. Herby threw his tomahawk after the scurrying white blob of a tail. Such a pretty, frightened thing it was! Ponto was glad his brother missed. There were sprays of bracken and fern, and lichened boulders. Ponto came upon a lizard under one of these.

On the way home, Herby was overcome by one of those unaccountable moods that make one inclined to believe in the reality of demoniacal possession. He acted like a little fiend, swishing Ponto about his bare sandalled legs with a spray of manuka, twisting his arm, taunting him, threatening him with a bath when they came to ford the creek. Ponto did not go out with him again. He stuck to the “ Cally,” the Museum Reserve, and ihat enchanted spot where pines whispered about the Water of Leith at the foot of a rocky declivity. Here he came one day with Myrtle and worked at some kindergarten plaiting while she read him Water Babies. They could not have chosen a better spot. You could almost see Tom sporting about among the wet boulders. That was an afternoon to be marked with a white stone.

On the whole, however, it would not be true to say that Ponto was sorry when the holidays came to an end. He braced himself for his initiation as a unit in the system of free, compulsory and secular education in vogue under the benevolent regime of Richard John Seddon. Of course Ponto did not put it to himself like that. He only knew that he was “ going to the Geordy,”

In the north end of Dunedin where Ponto dwelt, the State schools formed rather prominent landmarks. There was the Union Street School, now converted

"THE GEORDY ’

into the Normal, occupying one end of a block entirely devoted to public services. On the same block stood a post office, a police station, and the University Museum. In Ponto’s boyhood, a corrugated iron lean-to housed the Art Society’s collection of pictures. This anachronism has now disappeared. The State School in George Street resembled the Union Street School in that it was a two-storeyed structure, and both wore a coat of paint whose colour was determined by the whim of the Education Department.

There vras, however, about “ The Geordy,” despite, or perhaps on account of, its more sequestered site, a certain distinction. In a democratic country like New Zealand parents who could have afforded to educate their children privately sent them to the State School because of the sound curricula, and the opportunity they afforded of taking one’s measure with one’s future co-citizens. You might easily rub shoulders with a Prime Minister in the making at a State School. There were sharper contrasts at George Street because that school happened to enjoy a vogue among rich parents imbued with democratic ideals.

Thus it was that Ponto, after a preliminary herding and drafting, and a perfunctory interview with the Headmaster on the part of his mother, found himself a member of the Infant Room. As a graduate with honours from the Kindergarten he displayed a precocity, which might have made him enemies, but for that saving smile of his. In the process of time he slipped very comfortably into Standard One, and closed the door of babyhood behind him.

A POOR SCHOLAR

He found himself seated in a large and airy classroom between two neophytes who differed from him profoundly. On his left was a little boy with a shock of red hair and a pleasing aroma of good soap, faint but unmistakable. He wore a well-laundered blouse of green linen, immaculate serge knickerbockers and grey stockings. From the other side came the breath of aniseed, and that indefinable suggestion of fustiness that comes from paucity of soap and worn textiles.

Ponto thought the boy in the green blouse was rather like a nice frog. The boy on the right seemed to belong to the rodents. The red-headed boy had a wonderful schoolbag, pigskin with a shining metal clasp. It bulged with a round tin which Ponto soon discovered contained biscuits against the morning recess. The bag of the boy with the worn jacket looked as if it might have been part of a blacksmith’s apron.

Just in front of Ponto was a boy with a very white skin. He wore a kind of jumper or blouse fastened with a button at the back. The points of the collar had feather-stitching upon them. Ponto thought it a very effeminate garment. It belied the nature of its wearer who was bellicose in the playground. He was something of a divinity to Ponto, and in the words of John Morley he found himself contemplating his divinity from behind, noting the way his chestnut hair anticipated the next visit to the barber by straggling into the nape of his neck It was a very shapely neck. Ponto unconsciously contrasted the torso with that of Uncle Herbert.

"THE GEORDY”

The girls sat away to the right. You would call them a well turned out bevy on the whole.

Upon the walls there were pictures and maps, and a chart for teaching singing on the Tonic Sol-Fa principle. Heaven itself was framed in a series of large windows, but the pupils’ eyes were directed willy-nilly at the black quadrilateral that faced them.

Standard One was ruled by Miss Struthers. Her despotism was something quite novel to Ponto. Here was a panoply more instant than that of the police. In after years Ponto came to think kindly of Miss Struthers, but until he had felt her terrible strap curl its tails about his outstretched hand, and had found that it was not so bad after all, she obsessed him like a figure of doom. The strap came out the very first day during class singing. Ponto saw that the boy with the chestnut hair was fondling an object in his hand. The sun streaming through the window from behind, glinted on metal. Ponto recognized one of those compact whistles, a “ line ” which his mother had found quite profitable of late. The combined lungs of Standard One were extolling the sports of childhood.

“ Oh the sports of childhood

Singing in the wildwood,

Playing in the meadows happy and free.

The boy with the chestnut hair in a kind of Orphic frenzy put the whistle in his mouth, and with a fine disregard for the consequences he added a shriller note to the general paean. Miss Struthers caught the note as if it had been a challenge. She arrested the chorus with the pointer which had recently been traversing the Sol-Fa chart.

“Charlie Waters, what’s that in your mouth?”

A POOR SCHOLAR

A pleasant little shudder passed over Standard I

The sports of childhood were dismissed perfunctorily in favour of a pathological thrill. Charlie Waters, the boy with the chestnut hair, blushed at the back of his neck. He may have known himself as a public benefactor. On the other hand he may have resented this affront to his privacy. Ponto had no means of deciding upon the cerebrations of Charlie Waters. He was aware only of the heightened colour in the region where the barber’s shears had recently been at work. It was patent that Charlie Waters must speak now or forever hold his peace. To compass the latter end he must needs swallow the whistle. Charlie Waters with a detachment that caused Ponto to marvel, rose, removed the whistle from his mouth, and with an almost jaunty gait proceeded down the graded aisle to Miss Struther’s desk. He yielded up the whistle as a defeated general might have yielded up his sword. Miss Struthers received it with none of those attendant courtesies which one associated with the magnanimous victor.

“ I’m sony to have to use this on the first day,” said Miss Struthers, looking down upon Charlie Waters through her spectacles and taking the tawse from her desk. Charlie extended his hand and closed his eyes. He wore red cuffs which accentuated the whiteness of his skin. The tawse descended. Charlie blew upon his hands, then hugged them to his side. He was quite au fait with the procedure. He extended his hand for several more cuts, and then walked back to his place with an affectation of nonchalance which greatly impressed Ponto.

“THE GEORDY"

Charlie Waters wore a spreading red tie. Ponto came upon the red tie in the playground afterwards. Charlie Waters was swinging his schoolbag about his head, repelling an attack, laughing and showing white teeth. Ponto almost envied him, a debonair figure of tragedy.

Ponto went home that afternoon with his new books and his set lessons, and the fear of Miss Struthers upon him. He had little difficulty with the lessons. Herby, from the heights of Standard Four, made mock of them. The incident of Charlie Waters also moved him to mirth. Wait till Ponto got up to Standard Four. Then he would see the fur fly. Myrtle chipped in with some cutting reference to Herby’s behaviour under correction, and an argument ensued in which Herby’s feelings again came on the carpet, so to speak.

A little girl fainted in Standard One during Ponto’s second week, and he had a different impression of Miss Struthers, one that he subconsciously called to his aid on that dreadful morning when he was called down the graded aisle for his first misdemeanour. He had given his neighbour the point of his elbow in the ribs, exasperated by whispered pleasantries about his nickname repeated ad nauseam. It had happened during class singing, always a fatal time. Ponto walked back with a numbed hand, and the conviction in his heart that the cloak of romance had fallen from Charlie Waters and others who had suffered in his train. There had been Miss Struthers’ spectacles at a great height above him, the poised strap, and the hushed room. There was no time to feel himself the centre of things. Then had come

A POOR SCHOLAR

the phenomenon of pain. It was worse when he got back to his seat. There was the sense of injustice to aggravate his discomfort. However, he was aware of a secret sense of relief as he went home. He wasn’t afraid of Miss Struthers any more. If she strapped him again he would know what to expect. As a matter of fact, Miss Struthers did not find it necessary to call Ponto out again. He was quick at his lessons, and very keen about working his way up.

This keenness first possessed him after his encounter with Andy M’Laughlin. He first made Andy’s acquaintance during drill. For some reason, the boys of Standard One and Standard Two were being drilled together. Ponto was in the second rank. Their Instructor, a lanky student from the Training College, explained that “ Stand easy ” meant doing whatever you liked within reason. Whereupon, the boy in front of Ponto took a peg top from his pocket, and very dexterously spun it. The Instructor, being an incipient humourist, called “ Shun ” just as the top reached Ponto’s feet. Ponto swooped upon it. and stood at attention almost in one action When they were dismissed, he returned the top to its owner. Andy M’Laughlin put out a brown hand, with a very pleasing smile. Andy was a study in brown that afternoon, brown Norfolk coat and shorts, brown tie to his soft white shirt, eyes of a lighter brown than Herby’s, and brown hair in a fringe across his forehead.

“Ta,” said Andy, “what’s your name?”

“ Frederick Lawrence.”

“ Where do you hang out ? ”

“ Great King Street.”

“THE GEORDY”

“ I’m going that way. Coming along ? ”

So they went, with many halts for a display of top-spinning. Ponto found Andy’s voice one of the most agreeable and reassuring he ever heard. Andy spoke with a suspicion of a Scotch accent. He had a very ready laugh, which somehow suggested reserves of strength. Andy lived down by the University. His chief justification for living at all, seemed to rest in the fact that he was brother to Mooree M’Laughlin. Had Ponto never heard of Mooree? Mooree played scrum-half for Union and was in the Otago reps! “You wait till the football season comes in again,” said Andy. If he had been an English boy, he would have said “ Rugby ” or “ Rugger,” according to his status. In New Zealand you talk of “ Football ” and you mean “ Rugby Football.” If you mean anything else, you say “Association ” or what not. At least such was the case in Mooree M’Laughlin’s dav.

Ponto met Cocky Middleton with his bag of newspapers on the return journey from Andy’s house in Leith Street.

“’Elio, Ponto! Walkin’ round the world for a wager? ”

Ponto grinned a non-committal grin and passed on. He had found a new leader, and, with the heartlessness of his kind, he was aware of a desire to “ shed ” Cocky. Cocky went to the Union Street School. Cocky wasn’t quite up to the “ Geordy ” standard.

So Ponto found an inducement to work, and it is quite possible that the eddies of Andy’s spinning top

A POOR SCHOLAR

set in motion other eddies of desire, with what Uncle Herbert would call “ far-reaching results.”

Enough has been said to indicate the nature of Ponto’s small beginning at the George Street School. We must now try to write of other factors in his education.

CHAPTER VII

COBBERS

Had Andy and Ponto belonged to a later decade, they would have been described in the jargon of the “ Cally ” as “ cobbers.” The word so exactly hits off their relationship, that I must use it. The bond between cobber and cobber has about it no taint of sentiment. Andy and Ponto consorted from sheer force of expediency. It was a need of Andy’s nature that he should exercise a benevolent tyranny over someone, and Ponto unconsciously found in Andy a corrective to that passion for make-believe, which was a symptom of an almost abnormal vitality. Andy’s home was never invested for Ponto with the mystery and decorous remoteness of the house with the red gate, although it became the Mecca of his Saturdays. It was situate near to the group of blue stone buildings, which to Ponto had always stood as a means whereby to compute the size of Alladin’s palace or Solomon’s temple. These buildings were surmounted by a tower whose contours were as familiar to him as the face of his own mother. It suggested a kind of perpetual open-mouthed astonishment. This was probably due to the fact that it was a clock tower without a clock. It is impossible to conjecture upon the enrichment or otherwise of Ponto’s horizon, had that rounded cavity been filled by a white dial with inexorable pointers, or if the tower had been vocal with a chime that should dominate all the clocks of the North End, and render less individualistic the

A POOR SCHOLAR

single note of All Saints’ bell. But the tower stood blind and speechless, and time was marked only by the swinging to and fro of the dusty red gate at one extreme of the untowered annexe as sorties of students appeared at the end of a lecture, or as fresh detachments disappeared in quest of knowledge. Ponto would watch these exits and entrances of chattering or preoccupied men and women, and it was probably only the thought of Andy that deterred him at some later hour from himself shouldering open an imaginary gate, with an imaginary handbag in his hand, and penetrating the most sacred secrets of the sightless tower, in the privacy of his Great King Street backyard.

Sometimes he would turn the comer to Andy’s just as a professor emerged from the terrace of red gabled houses that flanked the University buildings. Ponto knew them all. There was Black Beard, who marched out from the St. David Street side; and there was White Beard, who flitted out of the gate on the Leith Street side. White Beard always wore a swallow tail coat of pepper and salt. There was something elfin in his gait. He seemed to be blown along to the entrance, and proclaimed his calling, despite the absence of cap and gown.

Andy had many tales of what went on under that unheeding tower. They cut up frogs and dead bodies. They extracted gold from rocks. They acquired the wisdom of a Miss Struthers. For his own part, he had little veneration for the place. He was going into his Dad’s business when he left school. Andy’s Dad was a grain merchant. Everything about Andy was obvious and utilitarian. Everything in the house

COBBERS

and garden seemed to have passed some test of common sense. The very set of Mrs. M'Laughlin’s clothes props seemed to proclaim her neighbour’s ineptitude. The house and garden abounded with scientific contrivances which intrigued Ponto, and encouraged his objective powers. The very postman’s box on the front gate was scientifically proof against rain, dust, or molesting fingers. Ponto explored the central heating apparatus and the cisterns in company with Andy. They also paid predatory visits to the abiding place of Mr. M’Laughlin’s vines and tomatoes. He fell into sudden reveries among rows of vegetables, whose names alone seemed to induce a contented somnolence —kale, broccoli and lettuce. The two spots for which he most earnestly desired Andy’s proffer of entree, however, were the seed house and the fowl run. He usually came away from the former haunt with his pocket full of treasure, dried beans of all shades from claret or magenta to black or crimson, dried poppies, like the dissevered heads of Chinese mandarins. All went to increase the miscellany which Ponto housed in an old crate which had been dumped in the back yard of the Great King Street home.

It was Andy’s flock of fowls, however, which justified most surely those proprietary airs. In the first place, they really did belong to Andy; whereas the seeds and the cisterns, the phonograph and the electric bells were his merely by presumption. Andy’s line was Golden Pencilled Hamburgs. It almost seemed that his choice had been prompted, as is a woman’s when she buys a hat. The first time that he looked upon that little sea of russet and gold, as

A POOR SCHOLAR

Andy’s family came squawking and cluttering round the cast grain, it seemed to Ponto that no other livery could possibly have been so apt.

There came a day when he assisted at the triumph of Andy’s favourite rooster. Victor Emmanuel was placed first in his class at the poultry show. The sight of Victor, cut off from his harem and confined within a cage amid that noisome Babel, made Ponto think of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, a very inapt analogy, but there it was. It was quite evident that no such comparison had occurred to the owner. Pride and affection beamed from the candid freckled face. On such occasions, the presence of a cobber was as essential, almost, as the presence of a best man at one’s wedding.

Occasionally Ponto would be vouchsafed a glimpse of the great Mooree himself, but Andy seemed to advocate extreme temperance in this matter. The eagle must not gaze too steadfastly at the sun. There was, however, one notable Saturday, when Ponto made one of the complement of Mooree’s dinghy, when the Thelma came second in the model yacht championship on Lake Logan. The failure of the Thelma to come first was something of an enigma to Ponto. It was, also, be it confessed, a secret source of relief. To find one department in human activity in which the M’Laughlin family was not facile princeps seemed, in some way, to widen one’s horizon. A model yacht race is the most leisurely and picturesque form of competitive progression that man has evolved —unless one excepts betting on the progress of two flies across a ceiling, which is not man’s invention, but his opportunity. It hardly

COBBERS

seemed consonant with Mooree’s greatness, thus to be sailing a toy ship upon a toy sea. Yet even a M’Laughlin make-believe had a kind of bland actuality about it.

Had Ponto been left to the devices of that other self, the backyards of Harbour Terrace might have been transformed into the dim and distant wharfage of some Mediterranean town, while the manuka scrub upon the hills to the north and east, might have changed magically to cypress and olive. The Thelma would have been loaded with Tyrean bales with bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in wine, or some equivalent from the shelves of Mrs. M’Laughlin’s model storeroom. As it was there were allowed spaces for momentary dreaming, from which he would be recalled by the Thelma’s latest tack, when the talk of Andy and the Thelma’s gubernator would emerge, as it were, from a distant sing-song to an immediate and urgent dialogue.

There were days when the cobbers packed a day’s rations in their schoolbags, and went by way of the road that skirts the long arm of the harbour towards Port Chalmers, would stay to throw stones at a solitary gull seated atop the disconsolate black tile of a disappearing bridge, or to watch the scarcely perceptible passage of some coastal steamer making its way between the beacons to the distant wharves of Dunedin. On such excursions, the sleek, polished metals of the railway track on their right, always seemed a provocation to go further and further.

There were other excursions which induced a different mood. The Port Chalmers road was the iron way of resolve. The other ways had each their

A POOR SCHOLAR

dominant note. When they returned from the Leith Valley, laden with clematis and fern, for instance, the thought of those waiting polished metals, of the sea-bird’s scream, and the insistent lap-lap of the penetrating sea, was not a thing to be entertained by two tired woodsmen.

It is probable that Ponto over-taxed his strength upon some of these rambles, but one had to keep pace with one’s cobber. He paid for his pertinacity by the undergoing of such nights of sleeplessness as that of which I must shortly write. It was a small price to pay for his increase in stature in his own and in Andv’s eves.

The latter’s part in the process of Ponto’s progress would be more easily calculable than that of Harold. Yet, as we are not altogether concerned with that which is calculable, we must consider the circumstances of his meeting with Harold.

CHAPTER VIII

DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS

The Deaconess at All Saints’ had never lost sight of Ponto since that Christmas morning when she had encountered the Lawrence family in the church porch. The little piece of grouping had all the essentials of an illustration for a Sunday School story. Even the tendril of ivy that had crept round the brickwork had been in the picture. Herbert had been a great disappointment. His beautiful eyes and features seemed to mark him for a place in the sanctuary. Herbert in white raiment with a good glaze upon his collar and a hymn book in his hand might have led the whole parish to the new Jerusalem, if it had not been for certain fundamental disabilities that did not show on the surface.

In the first place, Herbert could not sing in tune. In the second place, he could not tell the truth. The first handicap might be explained biologically. Some folk would so explain the second, and for all I know they may be perfectly right. But there it was. Herbert had also been caught stealing the vicar’s apples and showed no disposition to penitence. So the Deaconess decided that for the time being Herbert must be accommodated with a place in the democracy of those for whom she prayed, and that Ponto should be made one with the commonwealth of the choir stalls. Now, the Church has often been supposed to stand for caste and privilege. There was an inscription over the chancel arch of All Saints’ in Ponto’s day which ran thus, “ The rich and the poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of them

A POOR SCHOLAR

all.” Such an inscription might seem to protest overmuch in a church where some paid pew rents, and others did not. But whatever the state of things in the nave and transepts, a true democracy reigned in the choir stalls. At the “ Geordy ” you rubbed shoulders with sons of doctors and sons of dustmen, but there were some of the former who still were free of the draw-net of democracy. Preparatory and secondary schools still held out, and it was to one of these sporadic establishments that Harold Marsh and others belonged. However, democracy was in the air, and in the choir stalls Harold and one or two other fugitives from Mr. Seddon’s system met their peers from the “ Geordy ” and the Union Street. It was thus that Ponto met Harold Marsh, and this is an important point in the history of his development, because of Harold’s connection with that otherwhere of which we have already treated in our account of Ponto’s drive in the Yellow Chariot.

From the day when Ponto had first been stood out in the aisle by his mother to see the choir in procession, he had wanted to be a choir boy. The part they played in the conspiracy of worship appealed to his innate sense of drama. When everybody was going home after church, he would pick out the faces he remembered in the procession. He wondered what they did behind the closed doors of the vestry, when the scarlet hood on the Vicar’s back had finally disappeared. A few seconds elapsed, and then there would come a muffled “ Amen,” which always appeared to Ponto more impressive than anything that went on in the sanctuary. To pierce that mystery would be a step in the pursuit of ultimate knowledge.

DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS

Ponto may still hold to the illusion that in those days they did something else than hang up their surplices and cassocks and don their coats, before barging into the churchwarden on his way to count the money in the red salvers.

Illusions die very hard in us. But I must tell how Ponto’s introduction to the choir was coloured, as it were, by the essence of that Pentecostal Saturday when he drove through the “ land of afternoon ” with Long Dick. It was quite dark when the Deaconess conducted Ponto across the “ Cally ” on his way to be introduced to Mr. Littlejohn and the choir. It was winter, and the moon had not yet made its appearance, though, in view of its expected arrival they had not lit the gas-lamps. It was a sort of no-man’s hour as Ponto and his shepherdess flitted across the reserve.

A lancet window by the west door was faintly illuminated. There came the shrill sweet chanting of boys’ voices, distant as the light, because of the wind that swept and eddied about the asphalt and the laurel and paling fence. The shepherdess gripped Ponto’s arm a little tighter as the wind redoubled in force. Presently they came to the door of the north transept, having traversed a path of screenings, and encountered a derelict copy of last night’s Evening Star with which the wind was making merry. Having gained the door, they pushed it open, and were greeted with light and a gust of singing. The singing ceased as the shepherdess appeared from under the cover of the pulpit, with her one ewe lamb. Ponto felt himself enfiladed by sixteen pairs of eyes. Some held coigns of vantage in the men’s seats. This was the

A POOR SCHOLAR

boys’ practice, preparatory to the adult practice at eight o’clock. They were liberally distributed, with open psalters on the desks in front of them. To Ponto it seemed that their mufti had taken a character of its own. They were different from ordinary boys, who never wore surplices, though there was the familiar display of shining serge, pepper-and-salt with an odd collar or two of jean and as many more of linen. There was also an indefinable sense of community, which one would not find at school.

The agency that had brought them together was something so different. When all has been said in despite of Mother Church, there remain such recurrent phenomena as that which little Ponto encountered. We are concerned with Ponto’s pro-

gress and our attempt is to follow him upon its various stages. Like the rest of us he was to be periodically forced to a readjustment of values. He may not have settled the enigma of the sanctuary when he comes to the end of his days. Generation upon generation encounter the same discrepancies, witness the same tarnishment of the early conception. But somehow the convention persists, and there is often a poignant reproach in the words of the Psalmist, “ I was glad when they said unto me ‘ We will go into the house of the Lord.’ ” Though one may have carried all manner of contraband under one’s surplice in those early days, still one was glad, and despite the back-biting and the petty tyranny and even the perversion of words and phrases proper to the sanctuary there was an acquiescence in the idea of service. One practised a chant or an introit in a spirit different from that in which one practised a

DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS

chorus for an opera. It is a question whether it is better to be tormented by the voice from the sanctuary because one has been part of that voice, or always to have remained outside, as Ponto might have remained if the Deaconess had suddenly turned back with him upon that windy night.

It is possible that Ponto suffers under no sense of exile. We can only trace his progress up to a certain point. He may have come full circle to that moment when the stream of light fell on him through the north transept door.

But here we are dealing with a very early impression, and we are at the task of tracing a connection between the sanctuary and the pleasaunce. I am not sure that this is not an attempt to let something pagan in, along with little Ponto and the Deaconess. It is quite certain that when Ponto heard that Harold Marsh hailed from Hurzel, the word danced before his eyes in an aureole of sunlight to the momentary exclusion of the monogram on the dorsal opposite him. Hurzel gate had been steeped in late sunlight that afternoon. This discovery did not come till the end of the boys’ practice, which proceeded decorously after the interruption of Ponto’s entrance. There was some whispering and giggling and shuffling of feet as the shepherdess introduced Ponto to Mr. Littlejohn.

“ I’ve brought you a new boy,” said the Deaconess. “ His name is Frederick Lawrence, Mr, Littlejohn.”

“It isn’t,” he heard someone whisper, “ it’s Ponto.”

Mr. Littlejohn looked down at him, and smiled, not disagreeably. He was an old hand at the game,

A POOR SCHOLAR

and cherished few illusions, but Ponto provoked that smile in folk.

“ We’ll try him presently,” said Mr. Littlejohn. “Here, Marsh! You’d better have him up by you. Find him a place.”

Harold Marsh stepped out from a sequestered nook into which Ponto had often seen a bald-headed tenor disappear. He was never sure whether to envy or pity the tenor for his complete eclipse by the occupant of the southern prayer desk. On that evening it appeared that the lot of the tenor must have been enviable. Ponto sat down on the red cushion beside Harold Marsh, and the latter put his own Psalter into his hand. Harold Marsh was dressed in a blue jersey with a deep collar and blue shorts. His red necktie had come all the way from the Burlington Arcade, but Ponto could not be expected to know this. It would be difficult to explain how he was aware of the patrician in Harold. It was certainly not a matter of habiliment. It must have been something in his manner of whispering the directions. Harold was a blond good-natured looking boy, considerably fuller in the face than Ponto. He did not pronounce “ Nine ” “ Noine ” as Ponto would have done. It happened that they were at verse nine in the psalm.

Mr. Littlejohn tapped with his baton, and everyone stood up. Ponto climbed up on to the kneeler beside Harold. His jack-in-the-box appearance caused titters from the opposite side.

“ Sing with me,” said Harold Marsh, “ you’ll soon get used to it.” To Ponto, the pointing of the Psalms was more mysterious than the points of the

DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS

compass. Mr. Littlejohn saw that he must seek the one sheep that was lost and jettison the ninety and nine.

“ That will do for the Psalms, boys,” he said. “ We’ll have hymn number Thirty-seven.”

Harold found Ponto’s place

“ Never mind the music,” he whispered, “ stick to the words.”

Ponto’s sharp ear caught his vowel in the word “ mind.” It was a happy mean between “ mayned ” and “ moined.” Ponto thought it very comely. He ignored the music, and stuck to the words with good results.

“ That will do to-night, boys,” said Mr. Littlejohn presently. “ You might stay a moment Marsh, and you, what’s-your-name.”

“ Ponto, sir,” said a voice below him.

“ Don’t be silly, Scoular. Off you go.” There was a general stampede. Harold Marsh and Ponto stood by the little piano that Mr. Littlejohn used in the chancel for practices.

“ Oh, Marsh, I want to write to your mother to thank her for that fruit, and I’ve stupidly forgotten the name of your house.”

“ Hurzel, sir,” said Harold. He spelled the name out, and then it was that the letters danced before Ponto in the sunlight. That explained everything. If Harold Marsh lived at Hurzel, of course he would talk like that. He stood before Ponto invested in a new romance. Harold was of the Pleasaunce. He was of the race of red cloaks that flitted among the leisurely shadows. He was of the race of those who dwelt in a land wherein it seemed always afternoon.

A POOR SCHOLAR

How incredibly gracious a thing it must be to live at Hurzel. Mr. Littlejohn’s eyes went from one chorister to another. His hand went to his mouth to cover a smile. So they all three stood there for a moment grinning at nothing, or at everything. Perhaps Mr. Littlejohn was visited by a whimsical thought of the inscription above their heads. He knew what Mr. Marsh was worth for a subscription. He would not have had the heart to ask Mrs. Lawrence for one.

“ I’ll try you with a scale or two.”

“ Good-night, sir,” said Harold, and turned to go.

“ Wait a minute,” said Mr. Littlejohn, “ I’ll gel you to take a note if you don’t mind waiting.”

“ All right sir, if Lawrence doesn’t mind, we can walk home some of the way.”

“ I live across the ‘ Callv,’ ” said Ponto hoarsely.

“ Come along,” said Mr. Littlejohn, “ never mind where you live. Let’s hear you sing a scale.'”

Ponto’s “ audition ” was of the briefest, and before very long Harold and he were forcing their way out of the north transept door. Harold’s escort did not extend far beyond the church gate, for Mrs. Lawrence was abroad in search of her baby, and gathered him into her arms as the adult choristers began to turn in at the entrance by the schoolroom. Harold smiled very pleasantly at Mrs. Lawrence, and took off his cap. Then he turned and ran off in the direction of Union Street.

“ Oh, Freddy, what a nice looking boy.”

“ That’s Marsh,” said Ponto, his little body all aquiver with importance, “ and he lives at Hurzel.”

DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS

"And where’s Hurzel, may I ask?” began Mrs Lawrence in her tone of conventional banter.

Ponto replied that it was in Argyll Street, but the answer seemed like an evasion of his mother’s question. Where was Hurzel?

“ Lo, we heard of it at Ephrathah, and saw it in wood.” So they had sung at practice that evening, and Ponto’s quick and acquisitive little mind had caught at the poetry of the phrase. What was it that he had seen in the wood that afternoon when he drove through Fairyland on the Yellow Chariot beside Long Dick? Whatever it was, Ponto was very close about it. The emotion of that day continued to be linked in some strange way with the memory of his introduction to the choir; but before he actually passed through the red rimu gate, the dreamer in him was, to a large extent, to be ousted by that other Ponto whom the world was to know. So it was that he did not re-enter the Pleasaunce until years afterwards, though many a time in the course of his boyhood and adolescence, he passed under those same poplars that had shaded the little girl in the red cloak. The truth of the matter is that Ponto had no time to dream. It is a commonplace that in every man a poet dies young. Ponto’s many eulogists in after days referred to him more than once as “ a live wire.” No one thought of associating him with a dead poet. Ponto had never paused to think of himself as such. He was too busy with the business of getting on. Still, it may be that Mother Church took into her keeping that essential child, and that her associations and her ritual preserved him from worshipping exclusively at

A POOR SCHOLAR

another shrine, the shrine of his own career, a movable altar which was set up in many places, and finally seemed to come to rest so strangely in the Pleasaunce itself. We must follow Ponto’s progress, step by step, and our starting point from which to enter upon another stage is that windy night when he became a chorister.

The “ Cally ” was all dappled and splashed with moonlight as he hurried home with his mother. The clouds raced across the surface of the pale orb, and Ponto was glad he had not so far to go as Harold Marsh. He wondered what Hurzel would be like without the sunlight. It would be beautiful, no doubt. Heaven was beautiful, according to the hymn they had just been singing. But Ponto would not have exchanged Great King Street for Heaven that night. Myrtle and Herby were very jocular about his initiation in the democracy of the choir stalls.

“ You ought to write to the Reverend Battersby,” said Myrtle. “ and tell him how you’ve become a little Reverend yourself.”

Herby began to sing

Shall I be an aingel Mawther,

An aingel in the skeiy."

“ You wicked boy,” said Myrtle, “ you’re not the only one with feelings you know.”

“ Oh, shut up,” said Herbert

“ Oh, Herby,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ that’s not the way to speak to your sister.”

Ponto ate porridge and grinned cheerfully. Having supped, he retired to bed. He did not dream of Hurzel or Ephrathah or anything so obvious. He dreamed that he and Andy M’Laughlin were chasing

DEMOS IN THE CHOIR STALLS

Golden Pencilled Hamburgs along St. Clair Beach, an exhilarating chase. And as he slept, the adult members of the democracy wended their way homeward from choir practice, while the wind chased the clouds across the face of the moon.

CHAPTER IX

THE GOLDEN PIRATE

Andy M’Laughlin was the principal sponsor for that other Ponto who was to father the man of attainment. There was a healthy objectivity about Andy which befitted him very well for this role He took up Ponto’s education where Cocky had left off, and it will be allowed that he was a far more prepossessing mentor. Only he could not be expected to be aware of that curious hinterland in Ponto’s nature to which no one, save perhaps his mother, had access. In after years Pauline was to rediscover the poet in Frederick Lawrence, but that is looking too far ahead.

In this chapter we are to bid good-bye to the child Ponto for the time being, but, lest we should make the transition too violent, we will set down some word of the Golden Pirate before we buckle down to a chronicle of events which are common property for all who care to follow “ the career ” with the aid of such documents as school reports and newspaper files.

In the matter of the Golden Pirate, Ponto was still moving and having his being in a light other than that of common day. Mooree M’Laughlin played for the Union Football Club whose habitat was the “ Cally.” When the goal posts went up the face of that arena changed with the rest of the world. Ponto felt the exhilaration of the change in his world. To a boy the turn of any season is a matter of exhilaration, and Ponto was rapidly outgrowing the

THE GOLDEN PIRATE

child. It is to young children and the very old that change is fraught with dread. So he was very content to find himself at Andy’s side in the midst of a vociferous crowd that pressed against the boundary chains as two opposing teams took the field. Andy had come to see Mboree’s side pull off a victory against a team that hailed from Carisbrook, and Ponto was there, as he had thought, to share Andy’s satisfaction. But he had not reckoned on that queer streak in himself which, before the first spell was half over, had betrayed him into a secret treachery. The name Carisbrook was fraught with the music of the sea, the scent of gorse. In short, Ponto succumbed to the lure of the otherwhere. The men from Carisbrook looked slight and dapper in comparison to the wearers of the maroon jerseys, Mooree’s compatriots. They wore black jerseys and white shorts, and the ghastly emblem they carried on their breasts did not detract from their appearance of gentility. This was odd, but true. From the moment that the Pirates appeared Ponto was aware of a secret misgiving.

Before the kick-off they indulged in a few preliminary scampers up and down the field, passing the shining ball from hand to hand. To Ponto this junketing had about it the pathos of a sacrificial herd gambolling in the vicinity of the altar. Someone behind him forecasted their doom with the embellishment of a few expletives. Ponto recognized the voice of the umpire who had penalized Long Dick at Wednesday cricket, Tn the opinion of the umpire Mooree’s men would “ eat the Pirates cold.” He was sanguine concerning the fate of that sanguinary pack

A POOR SCHOLAR

of bank clerks. The arena would stream with their gore. Ponto could not share in the umpire’s sentiments. His heart went out to the dapper Pirates for a moment, but he checked this weakness in the light of Andy’s side-long scrutiny. Andy began to bawl " Maroon! Union! Union! Maroon! ” the moment after a powerful-looking forward advanced from the ranks of the Home team with a little mincing run, ending with a kick that sent the ball over the heads of the black and white pack. Ponto began to shrill “ Maroon ’ too, but as the game wore on, he became less and less vociferous. It was all rather a puzzling business to him, as he stood there wedged among damp overcoats and inhaling the aroma of stale beer, tobacco and bedrizzled Mother Earth. He was, perhaps, more interested in the havoc wrought upon the immaculate uniforms of the Pirates than in the nuances of the game. Still he was old enough to understand that when the game pressed towards the northern goal that meant the discomfiture of the Pirates and the aggrandisement of the Maroons; and when he saw the former dejectedly line themselves in front of that Tom Tiddler’s ground on the far side of the goal posts, while the Reds carried off the ball in triumph, he knew that the Union were by way of winning the game. Then the game so shifted for a while that the right wing three-quarter of the Pirates was stationed exactly opposite Ponto’s pitch, and this was the point at which his loyalty to Andy gave way. The wing-three-quarter had managed to keep himself surprisingly clean. He was a lithe, slim youth with fair hair, and pleasantly moulded features. He did not actually come to rest opposite Ponto, for

THE GOLDEN PIRATE

he was on the move all the time. It seemed rather that he was poised there for a moment. To Ponto he was like Mercury, the wing-footed. He always associated the Greek myth with his Golden Pirate when he became a student of something other than copy-book maxims. The Golden Pirate epitomised youth and comeliness in the midst of a muddied world. He remained poised long enough to make that indelible impression upon the little boy, and then the hall came bobbing in his direction, he gathered it in and punted it well down into touch towards the southern goal posts. Whence onwards the game, as far as Ponto was concerned was a set scene on which the Golden Pirate played.

Once again, the storm-centre shifted to Ponto’s stance. This time the Golden Pirate was heavily collared, and did not rise from his fall. The referee blew his whistle. A little circle of sweating breathless men closed about the recumbent figure. Someone administered massage, and the Golden Pirate was on his feet again, smiling. Ponto had thought that he was dead. Not so the erstwhile cricket umpire behind him.

“ Garn, flour-bags. None of that now,” The Golden Pirate turned towards his detractor and grinned pleasantly. Ponto was engulfed in a sea of sentiment. All the Sunday School stories of magnanimous heroism he had ever read seemed to claim the Golden Pirate as protagonist.

The referee ordered a scrum. There was a terrific imbroglio of heads and hind-quarters, from which the Golden Pirate was immune. He hovered afield, alert and tense. Ponto noticed that his hand went to his side.

A POOR SCHOLAR

We cannot follow the game in detail. Ponto could not have so followed it himself. Let it suffice to tell how M’Laughlin’s men kept ahead by three points until within ten minutes of time, when the Golden Pirate in the mists of the evening gathered up the ball, ran and dodged, swayed and fended, and finally dashed across the Union’s line, and saved his side from defeat. Even Andy could not withhold a cheer. The resultant attempt to convert the try into a goal was a failure. The score was equal. Mooree’s men made a desperate attempt to “ get across ” in the last five minutes, but the referee’s whistle blew a last long blast, and the match had become history, like the Battle of Waterloo. Mooree called for three cheers for the Pirates. The Pirates responded with three cheers for the Union. Then they all cheered the referee. Seven cheers. It was like the sevenfold “ Amen.” How often was Ponto to hear them lifted into the air. Oftenest the air was dank or frosty. There were to be times, however, when the game closed upon a hot forenoon, or on such a time as that when he had heard the “ Gaily ” calling him from his perch on Long Dick’s cart. But the proper time for that seven-fold cheer was in the gathering dusk of a winter evening, such an evening as that on which the Golden Pirate had saved his side.

Ponto and Andy took a short cut out of the “ Cally ” and stationed themselves at the mouth of an alleyway beside the Caledonian Hotel. It was by this way that the two teams sought their dressing room. There was quite a little crowd to see them pass by. Lew was there at the van of a posse of Unionists. They hooted the “ flour-bags ” as they

THE GOLDEN PIRATE

passed by. But Andy and Ponto cheered indiscriminately, and there were tears in Ponto’s eyes as the Golden Pirate swung in at the narrow entrance. A street lamp had just been lit close by and its light fought with the murky dusk, so that the Golden Pirate seemed to pass by with the nimbus and the halo of the saviour about him.

So it was to little Ponto, and if we have lingered overlong upon the incident of the Golden Pirate, it is because we are taking farewell of the child who watched his passing. Ponto wondered what happened when they had all passed out of the shrill publicity of the street, those gladiators who had made a Roman holiday for people like Lew and the cricket umpire with the sandy moustache. Did the Golden Pirate undergo some process of apotheosis? He was not to know, for out of the crowd about the Caledonian Hotel emerged Myrtle, hot on his tracks.

“ Now then young fellow,” she said, “ you come home at once. What are you doing here, loafing about the public house ? ”

Ponto did not look a very desperate toper, but Myrtle had her opinions concerning the influence of environment.

“ Good-night, Ponto,” said Andy, “ good-night Myrtle.”

Myrtle appraised Andy with her sharp little eyes.

“ I expect you’ll cop it when you get home,” she predicted cheerfully. But Andy did not cop it. He was waiting to carry home Mooree’s bag. That was

Ms prerogative. In after days it often happened that Ponto made one of thirty gladiators who turned in by the alleyway

A POOR SCHOLAR

after some contest, Homeric or otherwise, on the “ Cally.” He never gained the dressing room without a half-whimsical smile of disillusionment. Surely the place had been different when the Golden Pirate turned in with the comrades he had saved from defeat. And who was the Golden Pirate? What does it matter? It matters not who was the little girl who flitted from poplar to poplar, while her red cloak streamed behind her. She was a fairy to Ponto, and so, for that matter, was the Golden Pirate.

CHAPTER X

TRANSITION

The best way that I can indicate Ponto’s transition from the child to the boy is to show him on the other side of the boundary chain in the place of the gladiators he had watched.

A little preliminary explanation is necessary, for he did not pass from the child to the lad per saltern.

There was a slow process of change at school and at home, and there were certain sharp incidents that contributed to his growth. There was, for instance, the culmination of Herby’s friendship with Lew, This awakened in Ponto a sense of actuality which his father’s death might have done, had he been a little older.

Mrs. Lawrence’s failure with Herbert was the main tragedy of her life. In other directions she seemed to have acumen enough, but in the case of her firstborn, she was as silly and incompetent as any parvenu mother.

So it came about that Herby developed into something of a pariah in the district. Mrs. Lawrence was prosecuted once or twice for failing to send her boy to school. Here, as often, the law operated obliquely. Mrs. Lawrence had certainly sent Herbert to school. His non-arrival was entirely a matter of his own volition. Then Lew and Herby were jointly indicted for theft from a dwelling, and the neighbours were duly edified by the appearance of a policeman in their quarter.

A POOR SCHOLAR

Mrs. Lawrence and Myrtle wept. Ponto wore that wizened expression that was wont to appear when he had been too long at a task. Herby looked sick. He may have remembered his mother’s words on that evening when he came back from the “Cally” and saw the man in Farrell’s express. The upshot of the affair was that Herby was committed to the Industrial School. His uncle did not “ stand by ” as Mrs. Lawrence had thought he would. Uncle Herbert’s fine speeches had as little value as most of such flights. His godson had not ingratiated himself with Uncle Herbert, and, to tell the truth, the godparent was not loth to shift the responsibility for Herby on to the State for a while.

So Herby incurred a stigma which he would find it difficult to obliterate, and, since misfortunes and shortcomings usually affect others besides the principal in the affair of life, it is all the more to Ponto’s credit that he became what he was. This intrusion of something that was not to be placated, as was the public, acted upon Ponto in a curious way.

In the first place it precipitated his affection for Herby. Ponto had little cause to love his brother, but there existed the indelible fact that he did. He was probably unaware of this filial bond until Herby stood at the point of banishment. Ponto was not at all demonstrative at the time. It was Mrs. Lawrence and Myrtle who did the weeping. In Ponto it ran to a very unreasoning bitterness against the power that ordained Herby’s fate. His respect for that power was in no way diminished. On the contrary, it was very considerably increased. If one lived in a house which the police had entered one had to be

TRANSITION

careful. Another effect of Herby’s sequestration was that Ponto became precociously avid of responsibility. He began to quarrel with Myrtle, who continued to treat him like a baby. Mrs. Lawrence kept the peace between them. The wretched business had taken 101 l of her nervous reserves. She determined not to repeat, in Ponto’s case, the mistake she had made with Herby. Sometimes she was almost harsh with him. Ponto was far too resilient to be crushed by such treatment. He was argumentative, but never sulky, and in telling of the truth he spared neither himself nor his mother. But Ponto was no longer the comedian of the family. Life had caught him on the raw, and there was no time for wooing laughter.

He made very rapid progress at school, and was something of a stormy petrel in the playground. But Ponto’s peccadilloes were all above board. He figured in one or two “ scraps ” and in numberless arguments. He was a favourite with teachers and pupils, for he never bore malice. There wasn’t time to nurse grudges. In those days games had not been organized to a great extent in the primary schools, but the “ Geordy ” led the way in this respect. People who saw Ponto play at “ scrum-half ” in after days, might have found it difficult to believe that he was weaned on “ Soccer ”; but so it was.

The first time Ponto appeared on the “ Cally ” en grand serieux it was as a diminutive and nippv forward in the George Street XL “ Ponto ” followed him wherever he went. It certainly seemed very apt. He had lost the habit of dramatizing himself by the time of this appearance. For him the rigour of the game precluded any side glances in the direction of

A POOR SCHOLAR

the touch-line for a phantom child who should acclaim him, Ponto, as a wing-footed Mercury. It is doubtful if he gave the Golden Pirate a thought. It might have been different if the opposing teams had filed down the alleyway by the Caledonian Hotel at the end. But they didn’t. They wriggled into their overcoats and made for their respective homes. There was no pageantry about “ Geordy ” football. There was only the game.

There was still the remoteness, the regular and ordered pomp of All Saints’ Church, however. It was by no means an elaborate ritual, but there were the changing of colours in accordance with the seasons, the decorating of the church for Harvest and Easter and Christmas, the coming of strange preachers with strange hoods, and the changing story itself.

Ponto had outgrown that earlier feeling of being caught up in a white company. He had ceased to suppose that one put on sanctity with a surplice any more than one put on wisdom with a wig. He had suffered some disillusionment as regards the high privilege of his calling. Still, the bell continued to call him across the “ Cally,” and he could not have disobeyed the summons. He could not understand the attitude of one boy, who left the choir in a huff because of some dispute about precedence. The thing had to be carried on. One did not consider “ feelings ” in this connection.

Still, little Ponto’s own modest aesthetic needs were well satisfied in the course of his service. He was not, perhaps, such an altruist as he would have had you think.

TRANSITION

Then there was the perennial aura of romance that seemed to surround Harold Marsh. It was a long time before this began to wear thin. One never encountered Harold Marsh except on Sundays or at practices. There were rare exceptions to this rule. Ponto met Harold one day in Princes Street. Ponto was carrying a parcel back from one of the warehouses for the little shop in Great King Street, and Harold, as it happened, was trying to make up his mind what to buy for Pauline’s birthday. Ponto somehow felt that the shops had no business to be open, as Harold dwelt in a perpetual Sabbath and a perpetual Thursday evening after closing hours. So it had seemed to Ponto. It was difficult to accommodate Harold in his work-a-day world. But Harold dispelled this illusion by enlisting Ponto’s aid in the matter of the gift. He was bothered if he knew what to get. Ponto was grimly amused at the thought of a boy with three half-crowns in his pocket and with no idea of how to spend them. He knew what he would have bought for Myrtle. But there the barrier arose. Pauline wasn’t Myrtle. Pauline lived at Hurzel. She would probably want something in gold. He was afraid he would have to catch his tram. So he was torn away from this newly-opening world. Harold stood and smiled after him in his curious puzzled way. He was wearing a boating straw and a blue sailor jacket and shorts. There was something in the way he wore clothes that marked him out in Ponto’s eyes.

Somebody jostled him as he stood that morning on the pavement. To Ponto he looked a curiously forlorn figure. He was like a strayed god from that

A POOR SCHOLAR

Olympus beyond the poplar trees. Ponto hoped that he would meet Harold again in this unofficial manner. He did not know that another such meeting would be another step in the direction of disenchantment. It was well for him that there remained the old loyalty to the first enchantment of the sanctuary.

There was another to whom the Church remained something more than a convention. That was Ponto’s mother. The sequestration of Herby had happened towards the close of summer, not very long before the colour of the frontal, the book-markers and the Vicar’s stole turned from white to purple. Mrs. Lawrence had long become accustomed to an autumnal Lent. It no longer struck her as incongruous to count the approach of Easter by the closing in of the days.

In that particular Lent she did not miss one of the week-night services. Once Ponto went with her, across the “ Cally,” while the familiar voice of the bell at an unfamiliar season called to them across a space that, for the time being, was an English field for Mrs. Lawrence. To Ponto it was something other than the “ Cally.”

“ Forty days and forty nights,

Thou wast fasting in the wild.

Forty days and forty nights

Tempted and yet undefiled.”

To Ponto, Lent was just a rather agreeable intrusion of the Sunday element into a week night. His self-denial was merely a species of competitive frugality in which he joined with Myrtle. They thoroughly enjoyed hoarding sugar and pennies against the Easter, when their offerings would go to

TRANSITION

the children’s hospital. The Lenten dirges in which Ponto joined as he stood black-cassocked in the depleted choir stalls, never interfered with a basic contentment that those supererogatory services induced in him. He thoroughly enjoyed the feeling that he was assisting at something for which the State did not provide leisure as on a Sunday. The choristers turned up to Lenten services in a haphazard sort of way. It usually fell out that they were rather less than a quarter of their full strength. This, added to the fact that they discarded their surplices, gave the whole proceeding a pleasant air of intimacy in Ponto’s eyes. It is not the function of this story to portray the reactions of Mrs. Lawrence to her environment. She may have felt that there was something vaguely wrong in Ponto’s happy expression as he joined her after the services. She may even have thought, as she had once thought of Herby, that Ponto was in danger of incurring the attention of the angels. The latter is not a likely hypothesis. She refrained from inflicting the aftermath of her Lenten exercises upon Ponto on the wav home. She did not chide him for singing “ Girls and boys come out to play ” as they spied the coming of the Easter moon. It may have been that Mrs. Lawrence found more sesthetic satisfaction in her Lenten exercises and her walk home therefrom than she would have cared to admit. At any rate those walks were restful points of memory in this transition time of Ponto’s progress.

CHAPTER XI

A MAN AND HIS MAKERS

The Rev. Andrew Barrie stood on the platform beside a table loaded with books. Prizes were not on a very grand scale at the “ Geordy,” as the Committee had no money to spend on such luxuries. But there were friends of the school who presented prizes at the end of the year, among whom was Andrew Barrie himself. He was a broad shouldered, lumpy featured fair-haired man who seemed to have groomed himself into an appearance of sleekness. His face was redeemed by his eyes, which were grey and keen, and his mouth, which was unaffectedly benign. It did not appear that he had schooled it into a conventional smile. Rather one felt instinctively that Andrew Barrie had weathered his forty odd years without undue grimace. It was the smile of a boy that he turned to the prize-winners as they came upon him by way of the three steps. Among these was Frederick Hugh Battersby Lawrence, and for him the minister had something further than a smile. There was a quick note of interrogation in his eyes, and a lingering hold upon the copy of Westward Ho! which he had placed in the small brown palm. Ponto was so palpably set upon “ getting there.” He pressed forward toward the goal offered by the beflagged dais with such manifest resolution that he stirred in the minister a whimsical response.

“F. H. B. Lawrence,” said the minister. He felt that if he did not detain Ponto, the small boy in the grey blouse and shorts would disappear from his ken for all time, and that, somehow, would be a pity. Still, the ceremony waited. Andrew Barrie could not stand there, contemplating Ponto’s exterior for

103

104

A MAN AND HIS MAKERS

all time. He made a truce with exigency by asking what “ F.H.8.” stood for. Neither Ponto nor he were familiar with the “ family hold back ” legend. It had probably not been perpetrated at that time. Everyone knows that F.H.B. was the signal for a certain Scotch family to refrain from a certain dish in the presence of visitors for fear of dearth. For Ponto F.H.B. could only mean one thing.

“ Frederick Hugh Battersby,” he replied hoarsely

The clergyman caught at the last name. “ Battersby! ” said the minister. “ You’re from All Saints’ ? ”

“Yes, sir,” said Ponto, and then the current of events could be stemmed no longer. Ponto grabbed his winnings, and clattered down the three steps. But the minister had his clue. He could not tell why Ponto had elicited that “ quo vadis ” from him. Every child who had mounted those steps was equally bound upon the great adventure; only Ponto, it seemed, was so magnificently intent upon it.

Andrew Barrie was attached to one of the Presbyterian churches in the north of the town, and in Battersby’s day, he and the assistant curate had struck up a friendship, which was regarded with mild amusement by their respective friends in the two camps. Some people thought it very broad-minded of Mr. Battersby, and some people thought it very broad-minded of Mr. Barrie, while others scented heresy and schism, and could not understand how Mr. Battersby could bear to be seen walking with Mr. Barrie, or Mr. Barrie with Mr. Battersby, as the case might be.

Andrew Barrie hated to lose his friends, and so when Battersby was transferred, or translated, to

A POOR SCHOLAR

Wellington he kept on writing to his old antagonist in theological argument, and coadjutor in secular schemes for the betterment of things in general. The greater space of Andrew Barrie’s letters was occupied with polemic, but there was room for matters of a more human interest. Thus he wrote of Ponto;

“ I came across a child bearing your name among the three given to him at baptism. His surname is Lawrence. Such an intelligent little face. I was distributing prizes at the George Street School, and he came up to receive two. He looks as if he means to annex a great many more. I should like to help in this, if I could. My heart went out to the bairn. You will like to have a word of him mavbe.”

In reply, Mr. Battersby, having pulverized the attempt of Andrew Barrie to fortify the Westminster Confession against all Episcopalian attack, went on to the minor matter of Ponto:

“ That is my godson you bestowed your fatherly smile upon the other day. His mother keeps a little newspaper and fancy goods shop in Great King Street not far from the North Ground. If he is by way of collecting a library, I shall have to consider before I buy him his Christmas present. Poor little woman. She lost her husband some time ago, and now the eldest boy has gone off the rails. All Saints’ is looking after them as well as may be, but she has not been able to control that boy of hers. So she has lost him for the time being. My godson was only a baby when I took myself off. I do hope he is going to turn up trumps. I think you could act as my emissary without being suspected of wishing to proselytise. I will drop a line to my successor to

105

A MAN AND HIS MAKERS

say you are interested in the child. I can trust you to play the game.”

Andrew Barrie played the game scrupulously. He entered Mrs. Lawrence’s shop one summer evening, and selected half a dozen Christmas cards. This was rather a protracted process, and while he hovered over the tray he announced himself as a friend of Mr. Battersby. Mrs. Lawrence had taken his measure, as she did that of all her customers. She saw disinterested kindness in Andrew Barrie’s eyes.

“ I’ll call Freddy,” she said, and went to the glass door. Ponto was tying up errant sweet peas in the scrap of garden that he and Myrtle had managed to reclaim from the backyard. School being over for the time being, he had been helping his mother all day. He was beginning to understand how to handle stock. Myrtle and he had been sparring at intervals, but somehow, between them they had managed to help Mrs. Lawrence very materially in her preparations for Christmas. Ponto w r as in his shirt-sleeves when he answered his mother’s call. There was no time to tittivate.

“ Here’s somebody with a message from your godfather, Freddy,” said Mrs. Lawrence.

Ponto smiled his recognition.

“ We’ve met before,” said Andrew Barrie. “ You came at me for two books, Westward Ho! and I vanhoe. Which are you reading first ? ”

“ I’ve read them both, sir,” said Ponto. Ponto always “ sirred ” anyone who stood in places of authority at the “ Geordy ” or at All Saints’. It was not till later that he came to address the minster as “ Mr. Barrie ” with his funny little twist of a smile.

106

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ He reads too much,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “ I’r always catching him at it.”

A tu quoque flashed from Ponto’s bright greel eyes towards his mother, but he kept silent.

“ Oh, well,” said the minister, “ he’ll be gettin away somewhere for Christmas, I suppose. Don let him take any books with him.”

“ Oh, we shan’t be going away,” said Mr Lawrence. She rather gave the impression of a lad who has decided to brave Mayfair through Augus rather than battle with tedium among the grouse an partridges.

“ Well, I’m not going away either,” said th minister. “ I’m going to pull down the blinds, an do what Freddy’s been doing, read my head of Perhaps he would come and see that I don’t read quite off. Can you ride a bicycle, Fred?”

“ I can ride one all right,” replied Ponto. “ Now Freddy,” snapped Mrs. Lawrence

“ How would it be,” continued Andrew Barri unabashed, “ if instead of a book, Mr. Battersby gav vou a bicycle for Christmas.”

Ponto laughed raucously.

“ Oh! go on,” he said

“ Freddy,” snapped Mrs. Lawrence again. Mi Barrie was an angler by temperament. He let rest at that for the time being. But the bicycl emerged from the region of myths and chimeras. 1 was no aristocrat, but it could be ridden, and Pont spent his time, as Mr, Battersby (and be it added Mr. Barrie had spent their money upon it. It wa an advance upon the Yellow Chariot at all event though Ponto seldom invaded the Pleasaunce on hi wheel.

107

A MAN AND HIS MAKERS

That Christmas was fraught less with wonder and more with expectation than the previous Christmas. Ponto was putting away childish things. His discovery of Andrew Barrie, or Andrew Barrie’s discovery of him, was perhaps, one of the chiefest factors in the making of that career. It is strange that Ponto should have been weaned away from all preoccupation with mystery by a minister of religion, but so it was.

Andrew Barrie’s vicarious ambition was a curious contradiction. He was himself the least ambitious of men. He had not attained to the “ meenestry ” after a stern apprenticeship on a diet of oatmeal, but had turned aside from a prospect of becoming a rich man in the room of his father, and had slipped quietly into his manse after a brilliant studentship at the local Theological Hall. He did not seem to hanker after great “ scope,” nor did he greatly repine at the sight of empty pews in his church, except in so far as it is incumbent upon a minister of religion to repine, at the godlessness of the age. He was an anchorite who had strayed into the wrong fold, but he was also endowed with his father’s native gumption. If the world was not for him he had a very shrewd idea of how to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness. To Ponto the Manse was the first house he had ever entered which gave hint of that world in which he was to wrest a place for himself, that world of ideas that has superimposed itself on a world that is wholly occupied in getting and spending. Little Ponto sniffed at the suggestion of it, as he sniffed the aroma of printer’s ink and leather which always seemed to pervade Andrew Barrie’s study. The former should have been familiar

108

A POOR SCHOLAR

enough to Ponto. It may just have happened that Andrew smoked a better quality of tobacco than that in vogue among Mrs. Lawrence’s customers, and that those opening vistas that Ponto always associated with that morning of summer rain when he was first made free of Andrew’s study, may have resulted from the sensuousness of an alert child. At any rate it was always of the Manse study that Ponto thought when some coin of Philosophy newly minted as the outcome of strenuous research, seemed to demand repository. This habit of mind was akin to that other subconscious habit of localizing his dreams under the whispering poplars of the Pleasaunce.

Ponto’s visit on that occasion was the sequel to a bicycle ride he had taken with the minister. They had gone off together one morning and in the space of the day they had established a kind of pact which lasted well into the hey-dey of Ponto’s career. The route they took was one over which Ponto had often ventured with Andy. The Water of Leith prattled in the opposite direction for the greater part of the way, and Andrew spoke of that other Leith by whose side he had wandered when he was Ponto’s age. Tuis called to them as they pierced their way through the long green gully towards a northern bay, where the sea shimmered across a drab flat, like some lazier counterpart of that other sea that had danced and sparkled along St. Clair beach on that Christmas afternoon. They sped past paddocks where burnt tree trunks still remained to tell of an earlier day before the coming of the settler.

To Andrew the four-fold chime of the tui mingled oddly with the voices of cattle, but to Ponto it was a native wood-note. But Andrew’s talk awakened in

104

A MAN. AND HIS MAKERS

him a call of the blood as all the geography and history lessons, all the patriotic verse he had assimilated, had never done. To Ponto, “ Home ” had always been vaguely associated with the engraving of Exeter Cathedral, until that afternoon of remoteness, when he had driven off with Long Dick. Since then he had begun to localize his reading and his dreaming. Andrew Barrie did not close down the Pleasaunce, so to speak. Ponto never lost that habit of mind altogether. All roads led ultimately to the line of poplars in the triangular clearing where he had “ seen into the life of things.” Still, the Pleasaunce was in abeyance when Andrew Barrie began to talk about Home. Andrew lived very happily in the past that day, dwelling upon his sojourn at one of the Scottish public schools, and of the three years his father had vouchsafed him at Oxford before he went into business. He had the knack of presenting salient features in his career, and these were not necessarily the big things he had seen or done. They were just the things within Pontb’s comprehension, the things that touched his imagination. Ponto had a profound reverence for people who wrote books, and Andrew Barrie had not only met many such phenomena, but he had actually written books himself. They were there for Ponto to look upon at the end of that day’s outing, when they returned to the Manse for tea. The minister smiled oddly as he handed an ascetic looking volume in brown cloth boards to his guest. The title alone contained two words that were absolutely unintelligible to Ponto.

“ That’s all about how to be happy and wise,” said the minister. He had in mind Solomon’s saw

105

A POOR SCHOLAR

concerning the making of books, but to little Ponto nothing was vanity. He nosed at the volume like a terrier.

“ I’ll read it some day, Mr. Barrie,” he said.

“ Not to-day,” said Andrew. “ Let us be wise over our bannocks and jam,” and he set Ponto down before the excellent spread his housekeeper had prepared for them. Afterwards he lit a pipe.

“ I have to write an article now,” he said. “Would you like to explore for a bit before you go home? You can look at anything you like, and you can come some other day and ask me about what you find.”

Ponto divided his attention between a football group in which A. W. Barrie occupied a position in the front row, and a large volume of Don Quixote with the Dore plates. There was certainly no connection between A. W. Barrie squatting on his hams in jersey and shorts with his arms folded, and the tall gaunt knight at tilt with the windmill. A. W. Barrie’s tasselled cap was no chimera to little Ponto. There was only one satisfaction that might pale before the satisfaction of having written a book: and that would be to win and wear such a cap. So Andrew Barrie deliberately paraded his penates before the boy, and who shall say whether he was very wise or very foolish. It all depends on one’s definition of progress. It is certain that when his visitor stole away in the direction of Great King Street, he had a first taste of that “ divine discontent ” of which someone was to speak, when in after years Frederick Lawrence was entertained by his fellowtownsmen, who had taken a proprietary pride in Ponto’s progress.

106

CHAPTER XII

A YEAR OF GRACE

Ponto’s last year at the George Street School was perhaps the happiest that he was to know. It witnessed Herbert’s reinstatement, and a general mending in the Lawrence’s fortunes.

Herby’s fine eyes had won him another friend. He had gone as a probationer to a fruitgrower in the Roxburgh district, where once the alluvial soil had yielded gold, and now was supposed to be friendly to stone fruit. There it appeared he gradually worked off the stigma of the charity boy. It was a process as protracted as Ponto’s progress through his last year at his primary school. It is an old fallacy that time passes quickly when we are happy. It was a long year to Ponto in the retrospect, and it certainly was a happy one.

Ponto and Andy found themselves in occupation of high places at the “ Geordy,” both in and out of school. Ponto won favour in the sight of the master who presided over the sixth standard; Andy’s triumphs were of an alfresco nature. He placated the master, but he captained the cricket team. Their combined triumph reached its zenith on the morning when they batted first for the George Street School XI, and put up more than a hundred runs between them. It was an historic occasion in school cricket on the “ Gaily,” where scoring was usually low. One may date the universal acceptance of Ponto's nickname from that morning. Andy was first to go, and

107

A POOR SCHOLAR

shortly afterwards declared the innings closed. Ponto returned grinning to the cheering crowd. He looked ridiculously impish in shirt sleeves and shorts. He wore a solitary pad, as the supply of material was meagre in those days, and the bat he carried had been spliced and bound out of all recognition. The other Andrew had been among the spectators. He smiled in his quiet grim way. He looked to the day when Ponto would walk back to a lordly pavilion properly clad and caparisoned. He made a vow to do all that in him lay to help this child of the people on the way to his achievement. Ponto had found his way to the Manse that evening. The minister looked him up and down approvingly.

“Well,” he said, “how did you enjoy yourself?”

“ Foine thanks, Mr. Barree,” Ponto replied.

The minister laid his hands upon Ponto’s shoulders.

“When you go to Oxford, Ponto,” he said, “you mustn’t sav ‘ foine.’ ”

“ I know, sir,” said Ponto, “ I must talk like Harold Marsh.”

The minister was a little taken back at his glibness. “ And who may Harold Marsh be?” he enquired.

Ponto began a limping account of the events and impressions contingent upon his first sight of Hurzel and of Harold. Mr. Barrie listened with a twinkle in his eye. It must not be supposed that Ponto gave expression to what I have already written of his enchantment, but Mr. Barrie seemed to divine, in some strange way, that Ponto had lit upon something other than that which is revealed by the light of common day.

113

A YEAR OF GRACE

“ Et ego in Arcadia vixi,” the minister murmured, smiling whimsically down at the Puckish little face. It was not of cricket that he was thinking.

“ Beg your pardon, Mr. Barree ? ” Ponto ques tioned, scratching his head.

“Oh, Latin,” the minister replied. “Just Latin, Crudely translated it might be rendered ‘ I happened to be there.’ ”

“ I didn’t know you knew that song,” said Ponto.

“ What song ? ”

“ ‘ I happened to be there.’ ”

“ I shouldn’t know it, should I, Ponto ? But one picks things up as one goes along.”

Never before had Andrew Barrie been launched upon such a sea of evasion. He determined that never again would he think aloud in Ponto’s presence. There are things of which one must not speak. When Ponto had learned a little more Latin, he came upon the tag. It was something else to connect with that book-lined, tobacco-scented study. What had Andrew Barrie meant? Ponto had been talking about Hurzel, he remembered. He remembered, too, how they had proceeded in an endeavour to exorcise from his own speech that neo-Cockney twang against which he waged such valiant warfare.

“ How now, brown cow,” Mr. Barrie wou'd exhort.

“ Heow neow, breown ceow,” Ponto would reply.

“ No, Ponto, try again.” Ponto would contort his small mouth into a “ prunes and prisms ” mould, and the minister would guffaw. That was Ponto’s strength. He never sulked under ridicule if there were benign intention behind it. The minister gauged

114

A POOR SCHOLAR

with uncanny wisdom just how far he could coerce, and just how far he could trust Ponto’s native good sense. It was unlikely that Ponto would parade peacock’s feathers in the company of his fellow jays. But Ponto could wait and listen and learn. “Breown ceow,” of course, would not veto the career. “Breown ceow ” might come between Ponto, and the kind of friend who could best further the career. There was another truth of which the minister never lost sight. “ Brown cow,” be it ever so rounded and exquisitely English would avail Ponto little without his own native guts and gumption.

So Ponto remembered that descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, from Arcadia to “ Breown Ceow ” when he came upon the quotation: and in after life he wondered what had lain behind the minister’s reserve. Especially was this the case when he was visited by those doubts and forebodings that will visit a man intent upon the pursuit of a career. “ What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Andrew Barrie had certainly not captured the world, but he had retained that old deep-chested laugh and an unfailing benignity of eye.

How different it was with Pauline Marsh. Yet Ponto had encountered in her eyes a something which seemed to say: “Et ego in Arcadia vixi” With Pauline there was always a sense of something mutually shared, of something which, it sometimes seemed to him, she would uphold and scout at one and the same time. Pauline laughed at Ponto when they first met, and she continued to laugh at him, but all the time there was that unspoken sense of a

115

A YEAR OF GRACE

mutual recognition. She was not just a rich little girl who lived in a fine house and patronized the urchin that Harold had fortuitously introduced that afternoon at Hurzel. She belonged to the Pleasaunce, or she should have belonged there. Ponto was sure of this, when for the first time, he found himself on the other side of the red gate.

116

CHAPTER XIII

THROUGH THE RED GATE

The red gate swung open for Ponto on a late summer afternoon when the air was heavy with the scent of verbena. Verbena was always Pauline’s flower from that day onward. Ponto never encountered the scent of it without a sense of her baffling and provocative presence. The sweet disturbance she caused in him at that first meeting came to be a factor in his make-up that his friends seldom reckoned with. They usually associated Ponto with a sturdy objectivity. It was as if Pauline had taken him up where the Yellow Chariot had dropped him. The year had come almost to a close, and another midsummer Christmas was upon Ponto. It was a period so fraught with happiness for him that a discerning friend might have dreaded some ironical stroke from the gods. Andrew Barrie was not altogether a discerning friend. I would not accuse him of recklessly warming his hands before the flame of Ponto’s enthusiasm. Ponto did not gush. His fires were self-contained. This vicarious hedonism in Andrew Barrie was a curious contradiction in his nature. He was utterly devoid of ambition himself, and asked little of life. His theology set him on that trend. But the sight of little starved Ponto with his tremendous capacity for appreciation must have awakened the economist in Andrew Barrie and expelled the theologian.

At all events, Ponto sat on the roof of the world at that Christmas season. He had won his scholarship, and had said good-bye to the “ Geordy.” Next

117

THROUGH THE RED GATE

year would, in all probability, see him at the High School. That would be the beginning of the career in earnest. For the present it was carnival time.

Ponto was now one of the senior boys in the choir. Harold Marsh and three others topped him. Next year Harold was going off to Christ’s College. Of the others senior to Ponto, one already wore the blue cap with the white piping that proclaimed the High School boy. The other two were “in business,” and were becoming raucous. Harold’s disappearance to a boarding-school would have a strangely denuding effect on the choir stalls in Ponto’s eyes. It would be difficult to imagine the choir without Harold in the year to come. However, there were so many other portentous novelties looming on the other side of Christmas that Ponto had little time for repining.

Harold’s feelings on the subject of his impending banishment were on a par with other of his susceptibilities. He was outwardly the most phlegmatic of persons. " Laisser Faire ” was written ■ all over his handsome even-featured face. His likeness to Andy M’Laughlin was a very superficial thing.

There was a certain rugged candour about Andy that was absent from Harold. He was the least aggressive looking of mortals. He was just a wellnurtured, indolent, sunny-tempered boy, whom nothing in life had yet disturbed from a fundamental contentment. He was Herby, without Herby’s inherent depravity. That is, perhaps why Mrs. Lawrence had looked at him so hungrily on that evening when she had come to claim Ponto from his first choir practice.

A week or so before Christmas, the Ladies’ Guild at All Saints’ Church held their annual sale of work.

118

A POOR SCHOLAR

The Vicar would never allow this function to be called a bazaar. Apropos of this prohibition, the Rev. Hugh Battersby had once perpetrated a very execrable pun “ Bazaar sounds so bizarre.” This sale of work was always looked upon as a kind of parish festival, and, coming as it did, at the end of a school year, it was a time of very happy activity for old and young alike. The church schoolroom was converted into a combined universal stores and theatre. The walls of the main building were lined with stalls. A Christmas tree was placed in the centre of the room, while behind the red curtain at the eastern extremity of the hall, the little stage was set for the performance of a play. In Mr. Battersby’s day, these entertainments had won a diocesan celebrity, and it was not uncommon for an All Saints’ “ show ” to be transferred to the schoolroom of some other parish. Then Mr. Battersby had disappeared, and his mantle had fallen on Mrs. Marsh. Of recent years, she had not only provided the performers but the playwright as well. The playwright had been her own twelve-year-old daughter, Pauline, and the play had been just such a play as little girls of twelve are wont to write. Pauline Marsh was not a Daisy Ashford. But the play of a very ordinary child can be made amusing if it is skilfully staged. Mrs. Marsh was a generalissimo to the Ladies' Guild, and Pauline was an inoffensive child, so everyone conspired to appreciate her play and extracted what fun they could from it. Pauline herself was far more interested in the production than in any kudos that might accrue to her as the authoress. A consignment of her parent’s furniture arrived by express van under

119

THROUGH THE RED GATE

her direction, and the pieces were duly placed hi position. Ponto had bowed in unison with other choir boys in obedience to her directing hand. Pauline was not fair and lethargic like Harold. She was dark and compressed, with an almost perpetual pallor and a pair of the most expressive brown eyes that Ponto had ever seen.

On Sundays she sat with her father and mother in the north transept, and when the choir filed out Ponto would sometimes nearly brush Mr. Marsh’s elbow with his head. Mr. Marsh always stood with his elbow on the rounded capital of the pew in front of him. He always reminded Ponto of a picture of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain in a favourite attitude as the statesman addressed honourable members from the floor of the House of Commons. Mr. Marsh’s monocle was a source of secret merriment among the choir boys. Pauline never looked round as the white-robed procession passed. She gazed steadfastly at the pattern of a stained glass window in the opposite transept, as the Lady of Shalott might have gazed at her tapestry.

Pauline’s clothes came from London, like Harold's tie. Their costliness did not show altogether on the surface. As Mrs. Lawrence succinctly put it, “ She would have undressed better than any other child in the church.”

But I have been writing of things prior to that afternoon of “ Open Sesame.” Pauline was thirteen when Ponto had finished with the “ Geordy,” and she had written her second play. It was an exigency of this second play that took Harold and Ponto up to Hurzel.

115

A POOR SCHOLAR

Earlier in the afternoon, Ponto had been presiding over a pyramid of kindling-wood, which was the choir boys’ contribution to the general levy. He had just surrendered his charge to a successor when he caught sight of Harold entering by the sunlit space that an open door allowed. He came into that happy and busy scene with its unwonted aromas of merchandise and its sounds of revelry from tin whistles and rattling tea-cups, like something out of the woods, for he was laden with his mother’s contribution to the flower stall. Mrs. Marsh’s gardener had been too busy, or perhaps too autocratic, to bring the flowers himself. Harold was wearing a flannel shirt and shorts, and looked like a genteel rustic. He greeted Ponto with his usual pleasant undiscriminating smile.

“ Hallo, Ponto. Come and have some strawberries and cream. My shout.” He bore Ponto off to the refreshment stall. A lady in white rallied him from behind a large copper tea-urn.

“ Whv wouldn’t you take part in the play Harold?”

“ Too many lines to learn,” replied Harold. “ I like scene-shifting better. Can you spare me an hour afterwards, Ponto? I’ve got to bring down our Ceylon tea-tray. It would be a bit of a sweat carrying the legs and the top as well.”

“ What ? Go to Hurzel ? ” Ponto questioned in his quick eager way. He seemed to swallow the prospect of a visit to Hurzel as he swallowed a strawberry.

“ Oh, I know it’s a whale of a distance,” Harold began apologetically. He had quite misinterpreted Ponto’s astonishment.

116

THROUGH THE RED GATE

“We could get there in a quarter of an hour, running,” said Ponto.

“No thank you,” said Harold. They got there in twenty-five minutes walking, going by the way of the Pleasaunce. Ponto had never been so near to Fairyland since the day he rode in the Yellow Chariot. There was that old odd sense of sudden remoteness as they passed under the shade of the poplars. He could have cried out in his happiness. Harold would have thought him “ balmy ” if he had.

At length they came to Argyll Street, and the red gate. Harold held it open courteously, and Ponto passed in by the way Long Dick had gone with his basket of loaves. He emerged from a green colonnade on to a yellow path that flanked a lawn.

The first shadow fell upon that garden of enchantment at the appearance of Turnbull, the gardener. He was a red faced, red bearded, angular man in pepper-and-salt trousers and shirt of blue striped jean. He strode across the trim lawn with an implement in his hand, that to the uninitiated Ponto, might have been some form of lethal weapon. Turnbull looked, and was, a fierce man. He had a choleric eye that transfixed any who would seem to intrude upon Mr. Marsh’s domain. Neighbours wondered why he was tolerated at Hurzel. However, it was not their business if Mr. Marsh consented to be dominated by this insufferable person. Ponto incurred a searching glance from under the fierce bushy eyebrows.

“ Now then, Master Harold, what are you bringing street boys in here for? There were two of the young varmints after my cherries yesterday.”

122

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ We’ve come to get something for the bazaar,” Harold answered meekly. “ Come on Ponto. Keep vour hair on, Bull of Bashan.”

The latter admonition was added in an undertone as Harold steered his guest past a bed of mignonette, and so on to the steps of the verandah. The shadow of Turnbull continued to fall across the landscape, like a mark of defacement or cancellation. But for that, Hurzel would have been Elysium. Through a laurel hedge on the left, Ponto could catch the glint of sunlight upon glass-houses. The bank on the other side of the house was a riot of summer colour. Harold led the way across the verandah, and through the open door. A great tiger’s head returned a glassy stare to the intruders from its station on the floor. The skin of the animal lay flattened out behind the head. Ponto looked up from a scrutiny fiercer than that of Turnbull, to encounter Harold’s lazy laughing eyes.

“ An uncle of mine shot him in India,” he said “ The table’s in here.”

As they passed on, Ponto caught a glimpse of a tantalus on top of a cabinet, and book-lined walls that made Andrew Barrie’s study seem quite a meagre place. There came the elusive breath of pot pourri mingled with a suggestion of last night’s cigar, which little Ponto sniffed up acquisitively. He was on the qui vive for Hurzel’s secret. What was it at the back of all this suggestion of enchantment? What was it that gave each object its sacramental significance, that invested Harold with the qualities of someone in a story book? It was not merely the costly objects in themselves that awakened that delight in the little

123

THROUGH THE RED GATE

denizen of Great King Street, it was some spirit that informed them. It was not the light of an ordinary afternoon that played upon the carven dragons at either end of the dark hall settle.

Back of it all was the hostility manifested by Turnbull, the sense of being unlawfully on the premises which added a piquancy to the adventure. Harold, presumably, had no inkling of what was going on in Ponto’s mind. He was exercised with hospitable thoughts. Ponto must be made to feel at home. He did not know that Ponto was trying to feel at home in Fairyland.

“ The table’s in here,” said Harold, opening a door that stood concealed behind a tapestry. He showed the way into a room such as Ponto may have seen limned in some story book. It was a downright drawing room, and was not ashamed of being thought so. The Indian table was by far the most exotic piece of furniture in it. Harold was proceeding to reduce this to its smallest compass when he was arrested by a sound which Ponto had always associated with his first visit to Hurzel. A child yodelled from the direction of the glass-houses.

“ That’s Pauline,” said Harold, pausing in bis burglarious operations. “ She’s supposed to be in bed.” He went to the window and made answer. Ponto felt that he was really getting to the heart of things. His eye had been caught by two portraits that hung on either side of an oaken overmantel. One was a little pixie of a girl in a yellow frock smocked at the neck and wrists. Her hair was in two black braids. The other was Harold in a white sailor suit, a portrait redeemed from mere prettiness

119

A POOR SCHOLAR

by something of the essential Harold. He must have been almost a beautiful child. Herby in his lace collar would have looked twopence coloured beside the child Harold. Ponto appraised the two portraits in his quick way. So they must have been when first he came upon Hurzel. He was recalled to the present by Harold withdrawing his head from the open window, and turning to him with that pleasant indolent smile of his.

“ Well, as she isn’t in bed perhaps she’ll forage for us. I expect you’re pretty thirsty.”

Ponto admitted that he was. Then Pauline’s red kimono flashed past the window, and a few seconds later, she was in the room with them. Then there happened to Ponto a something of which it will not be easy to write. To say that Hurzel’s secret stood embodied and palpitating under the red kimono would be as misleading as to say that Ponto fell in love with Pauline Marsh at first sight. Ponto was never in love with Pauline. She challenged and provoked his mind. She did not subjugate his senses. It was a matter of the spirit, this flash of recognition which seemed to pass between the two children.

“ You’re Ponto,” said Pauline, and she regarded him with a little pucker between her eyes, which had in them a challenge very different from that in Turnbull’s eyes, but a challenge nevertheless.

“ Yes. He’s Ponto,” laughed Harold. “ Are you going to give him something to drink?”

“Yes. What would vou like. Ponto?”

Ponto did not reply

“Oh for a beaker full of the warm south, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene"

125

THROUGH THE RED GATE

as he might have done, seeing the unlimited range that Pauline seemed to proffer. Instead he continued to stare at the little figure in the red kimono, while he rubbed the back of his head meditatively with his hand. Pauline, it appeared to him, was propounding a choice of roads rather than of beverages. Of what had he come in search, beside that carven table? Was he still in two minds as regards the Pleasaunce? Was he sorry or glad that Long Dick had gone home by the other way? He was awakened from his momentary trance by the sound of Harold’s laughter.

“Why don’t you ask her what she’s got?” he demanded. But Pauline appeared to have made up Ponto’s mind for him.

“ I know.” She said “ Lemon syrup and soda water,” and disappeared. Ponto’s eyes went from the door to the pictures. Harold smiled curiously.

“ You mustn’t mind her,” he said. “ People who write are always a bit absent-minded.”

“Is that her when she was wee?” asked Ponto hoarsely.

“ That was painted in England, just before we came out here.”

“Out here?” echoed Ponto in a kind of stunned perplexity. Hurzel had always seemed to him as remote as England. It sounded odd for Harold to speak of it as “ out here.” He was also considering that Pauline may have been wearing that very frock on that afternoon when he had waited without on the Yellow Chariot. Presently Pauline returned, bearing two glasses and a plate of cake. There followed an unaccountable little contretemps, of whose beginning Ponto was never sure in his mind At anv rate the

126

A POOR SCHOLAR

cake tumbled on to the carpet, and Pauline and he dived simultaneously to recover it. Their heads met with a crack that should have knocked all the moonshine out of them.

“ The rich and the poor meet together,” said Pauline. “ The Lord is the maker of them all.”

She was rubbing her head and laughing, and the arm that extended from the red kimono was the whitest and frailest arm that Ponto had ever seen. That somehow seemed to make her words sound harder.

“ Pauline,” Harold protested

"Are you hurt, Ponto?” Pauline inquired. “I don’t mean your head, I mean your feelings ? ”

“ You shouldn’t joke about texts,” said Harold

“ I know I shouldn’t,” said Pauline, “ that came out before I knew what had happened. Last time I bumped my head I saw a stained glass window. This time I saw that text.”

For a moment it had seemed to Ponto that she was more terrible than Turnbull. Then as the colour came back to her face he felt that he must take her side against Harold. She really was afraid she had hurt him, ridiculous as it might seem. He did not know what to say, so merely grinned as pleasantly as he could and took the proffered drink.

At this point there entered Mrs. Marsh, and Ponto began to feel that this incursion into Fairyland was bringing the whole place toppling about him. It was not that Mrs. Marsh justified this catastrophic impression. She did not enter like some avenging goddess, but with a composure that was almost more terrifying.

122

THROUGH THE RED GATE

“Oh Mum,” said Harold, “ this is Ponto. He’s come to help me take something down to the bazaar.

“ That’s very kind of him,” said Mrs. Marsh. She began to take off her hat, a somewhat irregular, but exceedingly graceful proceeding, as it involved her standing before the mirror with uplifted arms. She had quantities of fair hair, and resembled Harold in complexion and feature. Only she had an almost bovine contentment in her eyes, while Harold’s complacency was far more superficial. He was a fai more temperamental person than his mother. Mrs. Marsh took in the Ponto phenomenon with the unruffled calm with which she apprehended most things.

“ I wonder if I shall have any furniture left soon?” she said. “Pauline, I don’t think you are dressed to receive visitors.”

“ Ponto isn’t a visitor, Mummy,” said Pauline “ he’s a friend.”

Mrs. Marsh’s fine eyebrows were elevated a fraction from the normal. Ponto knew that Pauline was trying to atone for “ The rich and the poor meet together,” and was only making matters worse. He wished he had not come. Mrs. Marsh’s coiffure was almost more menacing than Turnbull’s frown. The tortoiseshell comb that crowned it seemed to shriek “ street boy ” at him.

“ I think you had better hurry, Harold,” said Mrs. Marsh, and Harold and Ponto made off with their plunder.

At the red gate Harold paused, as if caught by an impulse.

“I’m going to ask Turnbull to give you some flowers,” he said, and dragged Ponto off in the

128

A POOR SCHOLAR

direction of the gardener, who was making the utmost use of the garden hose that the City Council would allow. This frontal attack had the most unexpected effect upon that irascible man.

“ Here’s somebody who’s fond of flowers, and hasn’t much room to grow them,” said Harold. “ Could you let him have some to take to his mother.”

The gardener looked down at Ponto, and his eyes relented.

“ You’ve pretty well stripped the place for your bazaar,” he said severely, “ but I’ll see what I can do.”

Ponto went down the hill with the legs of the table under one arm, and a bunch of carnations in his hand. He also seemed to carry something of the afternoon sunlight of Hurzel with him, and this latter acquisition remained with him through tea-time, and afterwards when he repaired to the schoolroom to make one of the audience that witnessed Pauline’s play. Otherwise how could one explain that mood that fell on him as he sat between Myrtle and his mother on one of the forms near the open door, and watched the gas footlights gain in strength as the summer twilight failed outside. It was a mood comparable to that which had been induced by the so often quoted journey with Long Dick. The stage forest, which consisted of a few painted flats and some boughs of marcrocarpa became for him the Pleasaunce, and Pauline was “ La Belle Dame Sans Merck” There was rather an involved plot which was concerned with the vagaries of a certain Ogre. Pauline herself was his accomplice, and waylaid certain passengers who crossed the stage in a

129

THROUGH THE RED GATE

fortuitous fashion. It was very perilous and very sweet to linger in her vicinity. She diverted people from very obvious and lawful occasions, and rendered them an easy prey to the Ogre, played with an admirable sense of burlesque by Mr. Gerard Burnaby. Gerard Burnaby was Mrs. Marsh’s brother, and something of an enigma to the parish. He was a “ remittance man ” from England, who took pupils in Latin and English, and appeared, to quote the lady behind the tea urn, to be “ living down something.” Gerard Burnaby’s antecedents are irrelevant to the present chapter. It is our business here to relate how the burlesque was completely lost upon Ponto. He was secretly furious with the Ogre for putting Pauline to this base use. For him she was the child in the red cloak who had haunted the Pleasaunce. though Pauline was habited in white.

When it was all over, and the players were being regaled by a grateful management in the neighbourhood of the tea-urn, he hovered in the vicinity of Pauline’s table, aware of that odd mixture of antagonism and attraction which he had felt at their first meeting. What did she want of him? What did the Pleasaunce want of him? Neither she nor that remembered hour and place with which he connected her should be allowed to hold him in that ineffectual wonderment. There were so many practical things to be done. Still Ponto continued to hover in her neighbourhood, until Pauline looked round, as if she felt that someone was watching her. Her smile was frank and friendly, but Ponto cast his eyes upon the floor and shuffled off. He asked himself that night how it was that Pauline had

130

A POOR SCHOLAR

recognized him as Ponto. There could only be one explanation. Harold had been talking about him. This consideration elated and embarrassed him at the same time. It seemed a great pother over a very simple matter. Yet it was not merely that Ponto had attracted the notice of two children who lived in a large house. He had, as it were, penetrated the mystery of a former enchantment, and he was not sure whether he was disappointed or otherwise. Thereafter, whenever he encountered Pauline, he was aware of the same disturbance. It was not that the “ rich and the poor ” incident rankled, or that her clothes or her face awakened the man in him. Ponto had not Herby’s susceptibilities. It was that insistent impression that somehow she belonged to that remote day when he waited outside the red gate, and was aware of having achieved something without anv effort upon his part. He had enjoyed the sense of achievement in quite a number of directions in his circumscribed course, but that afternoon he had come upon something that transcended the daily round. Ponto had no words with which to formulate to himself this fact in his spiritual history. He was nevertheless aware of it, as all children are of such facts. It is only when they come to look back with the aid of a Wordsworth, or some other with the gift of expression, that they are aware of having been aware. Ponto only knew that Pauline dwelt behind the red gate on the fringe of a place that had once appeared to him to be a Fairyland, and that somehow both she and that Fairyland had to be reckoned with

131

CHAPTER Xl\

THE HIGH

Ponto went camping after Christmas with Andy and Mooree M'Laughlin.

Christmas Day itself was a time of reunion for the Lawrence family. Herby was on holiday from Roxburgh. He looked large and brown, and his mother’s eyes were seldom turned from him. Ht hardly sparred at all with Myrtle. It was evident that his period of duresse had wrought a change in him. Uncle Herbert’s tact was enough to undo all the good work of that year; but Herby only grew a little paler under his bronze, and looked at his boots. His mother’s attentions he accepted with the old sang froid. His manner to Ponto was painfully diffident. It was clear that he recognized that Ponto was the “ bright boy ” of the family, and that he accepted the position, as he had accepted the finding of the magistrate. It was useless to kick against the pricks. Also, Ponto did not flounder in oceans of tact, as Uncle Herbert did. He did not catch his breath in a kind of spasm if he inadvertently dropped the word “ police ” nor did he substitute “ working men ” for “ industrial ” with an apprehensive glance at Herby, lest the “ feelings ” should make their appearance. Herby’s feelings were at a discount that Christmas. Ponto and Myrtle expressed themselves by the lavishness of the presents they put upon his plate.

The part of the Prodigal Son is always a difficult one to play, and at the sight of those equivalents of

132

A POOR SCHOLAR

the fatted calf, Herby’s fine eyes were moist. He could not look his sister and brother in the face. If he had looked, he would have been aware of that suggestion of the Mongolian in both of them. Myrtle and Ponto both had the same habit of screwing up their eyes, especially when their affections had been called forth.

It was a very happy Christmas. Ponto went off with Andy on the following Tuesday. It was before the days of the Boy Scout in New Zealand, but Mooree’s “gang” as they assembled on the station platform, might have passed as a kind of adumbration of that movement. The illustrious scrum-half had a penchant for fathering small boys, and always took kindly to Andy’s friends. They camped in a piece of native reserve “up the line,” and Ponto learned to make himself generally useful. They shot rabbits and fished for cod. Mooree had the use of a fisherman’s boat. They were only a mile away from the sandy haven where once the old whaling boats had sought sanctuary. There were relics of the great cauldrons in which they were wont to boil down the blubber for oil. There were also Maori remains to be found in the neighbourhood of the sandgrassgrown cemetery. I cannot dwell for long upon that holiday, though it certainly contributed to Ponto’s growth. He learned lessons in cooking and woodcraft that were to stand him in stead. He learned how to accommodate himself to a space even more restricted than the little shop in Great King Street. He learned how to find his way across a trackless hill-side. Ponto was, however, at heart a townsman. When the Dunedin train panted up the line close to which their camp was pitched, it was always Ponto

128

THE HIGH

who would importune the passengers from his perch on the roof of the plate-layer’s hut.

“ Hi, mister. Chuck us a paper.” Ponto always got one, and would return to the camp with his trove, and everybody would fall upon him. They all wanted to know if Otago had beaten Auckland at cricket. In those days Otago never had. There were nights when he lay awake and listened to the voice of the sea, and, just when it seemed to become unbearable, there would come the friendly “ Humph-humph-humph ” of a goods train toiling up the incline. Ponto remembered that train when he first encountered Rupert Brooke’s The Great Lover, “ the deep panting train.”

Ponto shared in youthful ribaldry, but took no great hurt. Somehow the thought of “ Barree,” and his own native instinct for making the most of life brought him round to the wind again. He returned to Great King Street looking almost as brown as Herby had been. He learned that Andrew Barrie had been to see his mother. He never knew whether the purchase of what seemed to him such lavish equipment was a result of that visit. Nor shall the reader. At any rate, when he took his place among the new boys in the assembly hall at the High School, he was clad in a neat serge suit with a white collar, and looked an altogether more considerable person than had Ponto of the “ Geordy ” days.

Also, he was not alone, as he had been on his introduction to the “ Geordy.” There was quite a little contingent from his old school, and the “ Geordyites ” were able to compare notes at the conclusion of their first day. There were two ways by which one might reach Great King Street from

134

A POOR SCHOLAR

the High. One might go direct by London Street, or one might go by the Queen’s Drive, and so on till one came to Argyll Street, and there you were, on the fringe of the Pleasaunce itself. Ponto’s choice of one or other of these two routes was, as it were, a norm by which one might have judged the dominance of one or other of two moods. Ponto in search of “ the career ” went by way of London Street. That was the quicker way. Ponto, when the rarer mood was upon him, went by Queen’s Drive, and the Pleasaunce.

It was on one of these latter occasions that he met Pauline Marsh. It was a grey still afternoon, and the birds in the ngaio and broadleaf trees along Ponto’s way sang intermittently, but very distinctly. He had enjoyed a good day at school, which not even a period of durance in the detention room at its close, had been able to spoil. Ponto had been punished for skylarking, so there was no stigma attaching to the card that was handed to him in the course of the day. It had made him feel that he was gaining experience without loss of prestige. Also there was that unaccountable lassitude, which sometimes overtook him, a mood in which one is very glad to fall in with routine of any kind. Detention had deprived him of companionship on the way home, and for this he was secretly relieved. It was emphatically an afternoon on which to choose the way that led by the poplars, a still grey day wherein all things seemed to be enclosed, as within a crystal. The scatter and chirrup of a bird in the bush to his right seemed to break into what was not so much a silence as a sublimation of all the normal voices of the place and hour by that happy langour which had overtaken

135

THE HIGH

Ponto. Even the gong which sounded from behind him as the cable tramcar emerged from the cutting by Littlebourne, seemed to be softened and sweetened.

It was thus that he came upon Pauline, almost at the very spot where the Yellow Chariot had passed the child in the red cloak. She was coming up the little incline with a music portfolio in her hand. Ponto noticed that the texture of the hat which bore the ribbon of her school was exceedingly fine. He noted also the quality of her shoes and stockings. She was very simply dressed in a short blue skirt and cream coloured blouse. Ponto had the impression that the texture of her own being was of a similar fineness and he was conscious of his own rough brown hands and stubby shock of hair. But these physical considerations gave way to something of more moment. He was confronted in the Pleasaunce itself by “ La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and he was aware of a kind of panic instinct to stammer out a justification of himself and his ways. She was not going to detain him there against his better judgment. But Pauline merely smiled and nodded with a very commonplace “ Hallo, Ponto ” and proceeded upon her way. Then Ponto behaved in a manner that he could only explain to himself in the sober light of after judgment, by the theory that the place was bewitched. He must not let her go like that. He had lost his first chance by not jumping from the seat of Long Dick’s cart. Here again he had been confronted by the spirit of the place, and she had passed him. He turned as if someone had caught him by the scruff of the neck.

"Have you heard from Harold lately?” he asked, and he was astonished at the sound of his own voice. Pauline turned in answer to this challenge. She

136

A POOR SCHOLAR

looked down on him from her superior height. The Pleasaunce waited. The array of back gardens to Ponto’s left was like a set scene. He felt that any fantastic thing might happen. The Ogre might pop his head over a hedge or wall, or King Arthur’s calvalcade might come prinking past the brown quarry.

What actually happened was that Pauline shifted her portfolio from one hand to the other, and said “ Oh, Harold,” as if Ponto had propounded a sort of conundrum that required thinking out. Turning to answer Ponto had involved a retrospect of the Pleasaunce. He saw her eyes take in the prospect, and he wanted to say “ Yes. Here we are again,” and to laugh, which would have been a more flagrant solecism than Pauline’s “ the rich and the poor meet together.” Then the moment of bewitchment or whatever it was, passed, and Pauline was just a very staid little girl with a very real devotion to her brother.

“ I wish you’d write to him, Ponto,” she said, “ I think he’s rather miserable at school.”

“Me write ? ” said Ponto in some wonder. This was a completely novel idea to him. He had never considered himself more than the acquaintance of one or two whimsical hours.

“ Yes.” said Pauline, “ he can’t be more homesick than he is already, and you’d make him homesick in a different way. Oh, how I have hated it since he went away. But there, I mustn’t stand bemoaning here in the wood. Do you remember the first time you came here, Ponto?”

Ponto stared at her. Was she seeking information, or was her question merely rhetorical, like the question a mother puts to her child?

137

THE HIGH

She gave a sudden little laugh

“ Don’t look so dumbfounded,” she said. “ Most people remember the first time they come to a place.”

“ But this place,” Ponto blurted out.

Pauline laughed again.

“ Poor Ponto. What a shame to tease him. Goodbye. Remember to write to Harold.” She flourished her portfolio at him and walked out of the Pleasaunce

as if she were walking off from one of those scenes in the play of the Wood of the Ogre.

All the rest of the way home Ponto seemed to be walking down, down and out of Fairyland; and yet it seemed that he was taking down with him

something that differentiated him from the other folk he met on the flat. At length he reached the shop, to be greeted by his mother.

“ Oh, Freddy, I’ve been wondering where you’ve been. I wanted someone to go and get a parcel from Fergusson and Mitchell’s. What have you been up to?”

Ponto answered her absently

“ I suppose lam a bit late,” he admitted. He had quite forgotten about “ detenny ” that had kept him back. It was not his form master who had detained him. It was Pauline. No! It was not Pauline. It was the Pleasaunce. Ponto did not take long to focus himself to things terrestrial. His mother had looked at him sharply. With Herby’s example in front of her, she was fearful for Ponto.

“ What is it, Freddy? ” she began, “ Tell me.” But Freddy could no more have told his mother what it was than he could have told you or me.

“ I got detention, and I wasn’t feeling too good coming home,” he lied.

133

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Oh, Freddy,” his mother said with that tired querulousness that he hated above all things to evoke. It’s that dinner in the middle of the day. I don’t suppose you even sit down to it. And what did you get detention for ? ”

“ Scrapping,” said Freddy.

“What will Mr. Barrie think when I tell him?

Ponto grinned.

“ Mr. Barree’ll laugh,” he said. He wished his mother would laugh. He used to be able to make her laugh. He wondered if Pauline were right, if the good times were past. In that mood he addressed himself to the collection of the parcel and afterwards to the preparation of his homework. If the Pleasaunce was going to make him feel like that, then th** sooner he forgot it, the better. He slogged at his work. It collapsed before his onslaught. He had squared his arrears by nine o’clock, and there was time to run round and see Mr. Barrie. The minister looked up from his writing as the small familiar figure entered in response to his “ Come in.”

“ Hallo, Ponto,” he said, “ what of the day?

“ It’s been a peach of a day, Mr. Barree,” said Ponto. He appeared as if about to precipitate himself into a “heart-to-heart talk,” but pulled himself up, almost with a gasp.

A slow smile appeared on the minister’s face

“ That’s satisfactory,” he said. “ What have you been doing ? ’’

" I got detenny,” Ponto grinned.

“ What’s dentenny ? ” demanded the minister. Ponto explained.

134

THE HIGH

“ Well, there’s no accounting for tastes," said the minister, “but I don’t see that detenny is a matter for such a smile as you’re smiling. What else? ”

“ Nothing much,” said Ponto, “ I’ve done my prep, sooner than I thought, and so I thought I’d come and see you.”

“ I’ve done mine too,” said Andrew Barrie, as he put his papers away. Then he walked to the window, and pulled up the Venetian blind. “ I agree with you, Ponto,” he said. “It has been a peach of a day. I came down by way of the Botanical Gardens. It was so still and quiet and grey.”

“ Where had you been, Mr. Barree ? ” Ponto inquired.

Andrew Barrie, as a matter of fact, had been conducting a funeral. He had felt that day’s benediction on his return from the graveside. The contrast between the peace that is in life and the peace that, they say, is in death, had acted upon the curious quality of his nature. The theologian and the poet had been at war upon that downward walk. He looked at little Ponto, and wondered if he should tell him. Why should he? He was not the boy’s spiritual pastor. He was his friend, his companion. One needed companionship in this world, and the essentials of companionship are few and simple. One must learn to give and take. Ponto had reined himself up on the point of what would, in all probability, have been an inarticulate outburst. He would not speak of the thing that lay uppermost in his soul. He could not. Well, no more would Andrew Barrie. Let them warm their hands at the shrine of “ the career.”

140

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Oh, I was just doing duty,” said Andrew lightly. “My parish is rather scattered. Tell me about your prep., Ponto.” Ponto told him. Andrew listened and made a few suggestions.

“ In every man a poet dies young,” is a well-used tag, but it serves my purpose when I write of Ponto. I am not sure that Andrew Barrie did not assist at the death of a poet that evening. I cannot be sure, in the light of after events. Frederick Lawrence has never written verse, but that does not altogether exclude him from the category of the poets. It is certain that as Ponto trotted home he was preoccupied more with “ the career ” than the Pleasaunce.

He prospered at the High School, as he had prospered at the “ Geordy.” The High School in Ponto’s day was adapting itself to a change in the whole educational system of New Zealand. It was one of the schools to capitulate to democracy. Ponto’s scholarship was a relic of earlier days when a free place at the school was not easily won. Now any boy may qualify for admission by attaining a certain standard of efficiency. In consequence of his manner of entry, Ponto found himself by no means in the lowest form.

The first term of the year sees the zenith and the waning of the cricket season. Ponto did not attract much attention until after Easter, when they began to punt a football about between morning and afternoon school. He was a little anxious in his mind as to how he should adapt himself to Rugby football. By this time, of course, he was well up in the lore of the game. It was a happy chance that he found himself with Andy when first he appeared on the waste of mud that did duty for a junior football

141

THE HIGH

ground. Ponto had already worn his blue-and-white jersey at gymnastics. It was now called upon for rougher service.

“ You’re Mooree M’Laughlin’s brother aren’t you ? ” the captain of their side questioned Andy. Andy admitted that he was. “ Where do you play ? ” “ Forward,” replied Andy laconically, as if playing forward at Rugger were second nature to him, “ and Lawrence plays scrum-half. He’s hot stuff.”

So Ponto was rightly placed from the beginning. He had been coached for the position by none other than Mooree himself. On that first afternoon he attracted the attention of a master, who was interested in the games of the school. In those days, games were not, perhaps, the fetish they have since become. At the High School they were not nominally compulsory. In a school where the majority are dayboys, it is not so essential to organize games.

This particular master was an enthusiast, and, like the assistant to the kindergartnerine in very early days he “ spotted ” Ponto. Ponto’s lithe zebrastriped body seemed to be always in the storm-centre of the play. Whether the ball came away to him clean from the scrum, or not, he always managed to get it away to his attendant five-eighths.

“ Oh, pretty, pretty,” murmured the master with a disregard for appropriate phraseology lamentable in a teacher of English.

Ponto was a “ scrum-half ” to the manner born. The name “ Ponto ” was to become associated with that position in the field throughout the Province. Ponto was also to become an immense favourite with the football crowd. Somehow there was never time to see himself in the light of the Golden Pirate. One

142

A POOR SCHOLAR

was always too near the scrum. That, was, perhaps, the way of things right through “ the career.” It was always demanding some sort of violent reaction. There was no time to attitudinize. At any rate, Ponto played a heady and plucky game on that first occasion, and the following Saturday found him set down to play for a junior team against the Christian Brothers. Andrew Barrie raised his eyebrows when he heard whose Ponto’s foes of the morrow were to be.

“ I believe Catholics are pretty hot stuff at football,” said Ponto.

“ Roman Catholics,” corrected the minister. “Well, I hope you win, Ponto, not on theological grounds, but for your own sake.”

Ponto looked up quickly, as he always did when Mr. Barrie joked obscurely. Ponto’s side did not win, but that was not his fault. He retained his place in the team for the rest of the season.

Andy and he usually spent the afternoon after their Saturday morning bout in following the fortunes of Mooree’s men. Ponto had outgrown that initial sentimental weakness that had attached him to the Pirates. He never encountered the fair-haired wing-three-quarter again.

That was a year of strenuous work and play, another happy year for Ponto, though perhaps he may have heard at times the call of the Pleasaunce, and wondered if really all were so well with him. His mother, too, was becoming more and more querulous. Ponto had not left the choir when he became a member of “ The High,” but he found that he could not spare an evening from his lessons to run across the “ Cally ” in answer to the call of the

143

THE HIGH

bell to Lenten services. Myrtle went with her mother once or twice. Myrtle had outgrown the “ leggy ” stage. She was now a full-grown “flapper.” It would not be so very long before she put her hair up. She squabbled with Ponto, and fussed over him by turn. Ponto realized how slowly and insidiously she was winning away the management of the shop and the house from her mother. It saddened him sometimes. But then, there was little time to be sad. The bell on the hill called him, the bell that boomed from the grey tower of “ The High.”

144

CHAPTER XV

OTHER WAYFARERS

The day of Ponto’s encounter with Pauline, following on his first experience of “ detenny,” was one of those days which we subconsciously record, not for the events that mark them, but for the state in which they found us. That particular day, as we have already indicated, closed with a visit to Andrew Barrie.

There was that other evening, memorable only for the fact that Ponto fell asleep over the Don Quixote volume. He had spent a strenuous day in the service of “ the Career.” Head, heart and hands had been abundantly occupied. It may be that the boy had taken too high a toll of his vitality. At any rate he fell asleep, and the great tome tumbled to the floor. He was reassured by the minister’s smile, as he looked up from his manuscript.

“ That’s enough for the present,” he said. “ I’ve let the time run on. Your mother will be wondering what I’ve done with you. Come on, Ponto.”

The minister rose and searched for his hat. The boy watched him, greatly wondering. Had he forgotten that he (Ponto) was no longer a child? However, he made no demur, for somehow the thought of Andrew Barrie’s company on the homeward way was infinitely comforting. They walked the distance to the Great King Street shop in silence. Andrew Barrie was probably preoccupied with the peroration to his interrupted sermon. To Ponto the business of locomotion absorbed what remained awake

140

OTHER WAYFARERS

of his faculties. There was no menace between himself and sleep, because Andrew Barrie was walking by his side. The minister may have been thinking of an evening Carlyle once spent with a brother scribe. It passed in silence, and was memorable.

There was a suspicion of frost in the air. What sounds there were came to them with extraordinary clarity. A dog barked, a cart rattled homeward, a late train from Port Chalmers whistled as it rounded Logan’s Point. Presently they came to a stream of red light, issuing from behind Mrs. Lawrence’s shop blind. Myrtle and she were taking stock within. Andrew Barrie stood at the door, and knocked. If Ponto were ever to know complete happiness in his life, surely it came to him then. It is not the event that makes for happiness. It is the condition. Mrs. Lawrence made the minister welcome. She looked anxious for a moment.

“ Freddy’s not ill ? ”

“ Oh, no,” said the minister, “ he’s heavy with sleep. That’s all. ‘ Steals home my heavy son.’ That’s what Romeo’s papa said.”

“ You’ll stay and have a bit of supper, Mr Barrie ? ”

The minister hesitated

“ My sermon,” he parried.

“ Now do, Mr. Barrie,” Myrtle pleaded. A sociable little party, was Myrtle. Mrs. Lawrence seconded the plea dumbly. Andrew’s eyes suddenly softened. He remembered an admonition that had been delivered to those first bearers of good tidings. “May I? Just half an hour?”

“ Have you got your pipe, Mr. Barrie ? ” Ponto questioned.

141

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ You go off to bed, young man,” said Mrs Lawrence.

Andrew took a briar from his pocket and winked at Ponto. The boy went off with a “ Good-night, all.” He fell asleep to the murmur of voices below, voices of three whom he loved. “ There were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night.” Ponto never heard the phrase without a thought of the night when he walked home under the stars with Andrew Barrie. So much for the influence that kept the child in him alive, in despite of “ the Career.”

Then there were other wayfarers who called Ponto aside from his own relentless way. Harold was one of these, and Gerard Burnaby was another.

To Ponto it seemed that Harold, after his going, had receded into the shadows of the Pleasaunce, to emerge therefrom on such an occasion as that afternoon of grey stillness when he had encountered Pauline. It was with a little shock that he actually met Harold in the flesh, upon a wet and windy morning in September. They met outside a milliner’s window, that contained an abortive display of spring hats. Harold had the collar of his Burberry turned up. His black cap with white pipings struck an exotic note, there in the principal mart of his own town.

To the travelled Dunedinite it might have suggested cathedral bells, grass-grown river banks, and possibly tea at Broadway’s. Ponto was not a travelled Dunedinite, so it merely suggested the exotic. Harold seemed to have cultivated a jowl since he had gone to school. He turned upon Ponto an unhappy pair of eyes that changed suddenly to the old indolent merriment at the sight of his fellow chorister.

OTHER WAYFARERS

“Hallo,” he said, “did you get my letter?”

“ Yes thanks,” Ponto replied, “ I hope you didn’t think it a cheek me writing.”

“Cheek? Why?” he demanded. Then he was ready with his smile again, for another face stood framed against the bedizened window, the face of Mr. Gerard Burnaby. He, too, was enveloped in a Burberry, and his felt hat dripped on to the glazed cellar skylight below him. Mr. Burnaby looked as if he stood in need of some homely remedy such as housewives administer in the merry springtime. His eyes were sadder than Harold’s had been, and they were not pleasant eyes, as Harold’s were.

“ Hallo, Uncle Gerard,” said Harold, “ have you ever met Ponto ? ”

Mr. Burnaby’s full red lips twisted into a smile. “Have I met Ponto?” he echoed in a kind of remote tenor which suggested gentle boredom, and an utter repudiation of “ Breown ceow.” Mr. Burnaby was from England. “ Well, no,” continued Mr. Burnaby, “ I can’t say that I have, but then I haven’t met Cinquevalli or General Booth. I’m not a lionhunter you know, Harold.” There was an ineffable sadness in Mr. Burnaby’s manner of addressing Harold. He seemed to linger on the name as a shabby gentlewoman might linger on some relic of departed glory.

Ponto went on his way, feeling vaguely discomfited. The following Sunday, Harold sat in the family pew beside Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. He didn’t gaze steadfastly in front of him as Pauline did, when the procession filed past with Ponto and the other High School boy in the lead. He looked round and smiled. Mr. Burnaby was making one of

148

A POOR SCHOLAR

his sporadic appearances that evening. Whenever he did appear, he sat in the Marsh’s pew.

When Ponto emerged from the vestry that evening, Harold was waiting for him. Mr. Burnaby hovered indeterminedly in the rear.

“ Hallo, Ponto,” said Harold, “ we want you to come to supper. Uncle Gerard thinks he was rude to you the other morning. I want you to come and see my new camera. Won’t you come ? ”

Ponto stood aghast. He had never known any form of supper party except a foregathering about a cup of cocoa at one or other of the two Andrews. At Hurzel he supposed they supped as the people in the illustrated papers did. He also had in mind Turnbull’s “street boy,” and that sudden narrowing of Mrs. Marsh’s eyes.

“ I don’t think my mother would let me,” he faltered.

“ We’ll soon fix that,” said Harold. “ I’ll ask her.” He was off with a scattering of screenings and a rasp on the asphalt. Mr. Burnaby and Ponto found themselves on each other’s hands.

“ I’ve often wondered,” said Mr. Burnaby, “ whether there is an efficacy in a surplice that you pop over your head which one misses in a surplice that you button up in front. Mine used to button up.” Ponto had nothing to say. “ Hadn’t we better follow Harold up?” said Mr. Burnaby. “I suppose you haven’t a match. Church-going always induces a craving for nicotine in me. We’d better wait till we’re out in the street.”

Harold returned in possession of Mrs. Lawrence. Ponto forgot about securing a match for Mr. Burnaby. He was too interested in Harold’s handling

149

OTHER WAYFARERS

of his mother. Mrs. Lawrence seemed to have shed her later self, and to have become the rectory servant again. Her manner to Harold was that baffling mixture of deference and proprietary pride which sometimes confounds the ultra-democratic.

“My mother said I could ask who I liked,” Harold was saying.

“ Freddy’s never been out much,” Mrs. Lawrence replied.

“ Well, it’s time he made a start,” said Mr Burnaby, “ I add my request to Harold’s.”

“ Well now, Freddy,” said his mother.

“ Well that settles it,” said Harold. He raised his cap, and slipped his arm into Ponto’s. Mrs.

Lawrence stood looking after them as they went. She fervently prayed that Ponto would not commit

any solecisms. She also marked Harold’s manner of wearing his clothes, not for the first time.

She would have made an excellent family retainer, one of those women whose attachment to a house and a name is, perhaps, the most self-less form of attachment that one may encounter. But she had married Charlie Lawrence, and had been called upon for another kind of loyalty.

Ponto was borne off, and it seemed, for that night at least, that the Pleasaunce and the Church were in a conspiracy to bewitch him. It was a clear evening after a period of rain, so that one was able to gauge the advance that spring had made. There was still the suspicion of daylight above the Pleasaunce where the sun had set in a glory of saffron and red.

150

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Oscar Wilde says somewhere, Harold,” Mr. Burnaby fluted, “ that you shouldn't enjoy your sunsets because vou haven’t naid for them.”

Ponto had never heard of Oscar Wilde, nor had Harold. Ponto felt that, for his part, he had paid for his sunset by hymning it in “ The day Thou gavest” at the end of the service. He had never known a Sunday open out again, so to speak, as this one was doing. It was like the beginning of a new day, of a new age. Mr. Burnaby and Harold seemed like fantastic figures in some puppet show. There was a pleasurable sense of anti-climax, or rather, of deferred closure that evening. Nothing ever happened after church on Sunday night. That evening anything might happen. He might encounter the red cloak that had flitted among the poplars. He might discover that Mr, Burnaby really was the Ogre. There was something flambuoyantly anti-Sabbatical about Mr. Burnaby. His remarks concerning surplices and sunsets suggested hidden sources of cynicism. The odd thing about it was that Ponto felt vaguely attracted towards Mr. Burnaby. If he were an ogre, he was such a sick ogre. If he were the devil, he was such a poor devil.

Ponto could never understand how it was that he had walked into that night’s charade. Everything had an air of topsy-turveydom that affected him as pleasantly as a visit to one of those halls of illusion which one may visit at exhibitions and elsewhere. In the first place it was queer to see Mr. Marsh carving chicken instead of portraying Mr. Joseph Chamberlain at the end of the pew. It was queer to see Pauline’s eyes lit by the radiance from scarlet-shaded candles grouped on a table that shone and glittered.

151

OTHER WAYFARERS

Pauline’s satisfaction at Harold’s capture of Ponto was, perhaps, the most tonic effect of that entire heady evening.

Mrs. Marsh, now that Ponto was actually her guest, played the game without flinching. Mr. Marsh began with the assumption that Ponto was a Christ’s College boy. He was a short sighted, preoccupied man with a very winning diffidence.

“ You’ve seen Ponto in the choir, Daddy,” Harold prompted him. “ He’s been there for years.”

“ They all look alike to me in the choir, Harold.’’

“ Ponto’s going to be a self-made man, Daddy,” Pauline plunged in, “he won a scholarship at the High School.”

“ And you fellows beat Christ’s College at football,” said Mr. Marsh, as if he had been talking to a fellow club-man. “ Better passing, better tackling, better dribbling. So they tell me. Well, when you and Harold meet in the future, I hope he’ll give you a good run for your money. Not that I think Harold will ever find his way into the First XV. He’s like his father, prefers to cultivate his garden.”

Harold’s camera did not come on view at all that evening. Mr. Burnaby was responsible for this eclipse. After supper, of which he ate the green appurtenances, being a vegetarian for the time being, he began upon Mr. Marsh’s cigarettes. He was a kind of rallying point for Harold’s and Pauline’s jibes, and for Mr. Marsh’s witticisms. He gave as good as he got. Ponto, replete with unwonted good fare was pleasantly titillated. He kept his laughter well within bounds, but Mrs. Marsh studied him from her place at the end of the table, and forgot Ponto’s obscure origins. It was so refreshing to contemplate

152

A POOR SCHOLAR

such ingenuous happiness. After all, his table manners were more considerate, if less knowledgeable, than those of her brother Gerard.

It was too bad of them at Home to foist Gerard on to her. If it had not been for the angelic disposition of her husband, the Gerard problem would have become acute. Pauline and Harold had no such misgivings. Uncle Gerard was like any stray cat that happened to wander in by the red gate. He amused them, and appealed to their protective instincts. They did not have to introduce him to the inquisitorial, as Mrs. Marsh was sometimes compelled to do.

To Mr. Marsh he was a man who had been brought up as a gentleman, and who should therefore be treated as such. Mr. Marsh had always been an advocate for the status quo. He had never quite acclimatized himself to the life of a colonial town. He had come out from the Old Country with his wife and babies to a well-nursed business which he had been representing in England. Gerard Burnaby had been pitchforked out by his embarrassed relatives. He was one of the Long Dick genus. He differed from Long Dick in this, that he had not been cut off with a shilling. A perverse old aunt had infuriated the other relatives by making Gerard Burnaby her heir. He had given his word to remain in New Zealand until a certain matrimonial entanglement had been set aright. Whether he would keep his word remained to be seen.

Harold and Pauline accepted him without question. The presence of a stray uncle needed no explanation. Mrs. Marsh, glancing from one of her guests to the other, may have mused upon the

153

OTHER WAYFARERS

inefficacy of the system under which she and her brothers and sisters had grown up. Her favourite brother had been expensively launched into a crack regiment, and had been killed in the South African war. Another sister had married a judge, and inflicted monthly bulletins upon Mrs. Marsh in which the phrase “ sticking it out ” frequently occurred. Another sister had scandalized the relatives by becoming a nun. A second brother was a clergyman in occupation of a family living, and then there was Gerard.

All the wealth that accrued from her father’s broad acres could not have bought her youngest brother that sterling something which she recognized in Ponto. It was a freshness, a native innocence that one may encounter on the faces of children who have not lived shielded lives. She had escaped from the thraldom of her own family to this young country where one might make a life for oneself. She had not found the place parochial because her mind ran upon parochial matters. An English “ season ” under the chaperonage of one of the aunts had never brought her that sense of release she had felt when she had left Southampton with her man and her babies. Then Gerard had cropped up. “ The call of the blood ” had claimed her again. There was no such thing as a fresh start. She envied the little parvenu his freedom from tradition. He might make what he chose of his life. Of course Mrs. Marsh was quite wrong. No man is self-made. Ponto had to carry the weight of heredity, just as she had. Still, that was an evening of illusion. Outside there was the promise of spring in the scents from the darkened garden. Within, there was the

154

A POOR SCHOLAR

promise of youth putting out of countenance the decadence of Gerard Burnaby. If Ponto grinned and shook at Gerard’s jokes, it was because he did not realize the secondary sting in many of them. Gerard always joked discreetly when he visited Hurzel. We have already mentioned “ the call of the blood.” His affection for Harold and Pauline was something akin to his pride in his own Latinity. It was one of the few things about which he seemed to be serious. Gerard’s knowledge of the ways in which Harold might go wrong was encyclopaedic, and he did not want Harold to go wrong. He would be prepared to exert himself to prevent his nephew from becoming the kind of person he knew himself to be, if such efforts did not interfere with certain basic habits of life and thought.

So those two oddly-assorted guests faced each other across the supper-table. Ponto had certainly never pictured such a Night’s Entertainment on the other side of the red gate. The voice that had yodelled from the green fastness had been “ a low voice calling Fancy as a friend to the green wood in the gay summer time.” Here was illusion and disillusionment in one, as it w'ere.

After supper Gerard Burnaby sat down at the Bechstein in the drawing-room. He played and talked by turn, and his play and talk exercised the same fascination over Ponto. They seemed like the opening of a series of doors, and every door disclosed some vista of travel and colour. Andrew Barrie talked like a stream, Mr. Burnaby talked like a cataract. It happened, oddly enough, that Mr. Burnaby talked of Oxford that night, a favourite topic of Andrew’s. I suppose there are as many

155

OTHER WAYFARERS

Oxfords as there are men capable of describing Oxford. Pauline and Harold interjected. Harold declared that he could remember Christ Church meadows, which would not be an impossible feat as he had been there as a child of six. Pauline wanted to know about Lewis Carroll. Ponto just listened. People w'ho had been in England always had a special significance in his eyes. Here was a room full of them. Harold and Pauline had been lifted up by the ship’s rail to say good-bye to the White Qiffs, like children in the story book. He, Ponto, had never been further than the site of Mooree’s camp in the course of his short life. It would not always be so. Some day he would go to the New Zealand Christchurch with the football team. Then, perhaps, he would go to Wellington!

“ I wish you’d talk while I play,” said Mr Burnaby. " You’re all looking so frightfully solemn.’

He rose at the end of a parody of one of Mr Littlejohn’s voluntaries which made everybody laugh

“ Well, I’ve monopolized the piano long enough,” he said. “ It’s time I was getting down the hill. Am I to have the pleasure of Ponto’s company?”

There followed the usual good-nights. Harold and Pauline walked with them to the gate. They stood together on the home side of it, the two spirits of the place that Ponto would have evoked on that afternoon he sat and waited for Long Dick. In an odd way, it seemed that at one and the same time they transcended and fell short of what Ponto had looked for. It is usually so when the spirits of our fancy become embodied. Human beings are more likeable and more perverse.

156

A POOR SCHOLAR

Ponto walked home with Mr. Burnaby. He racked his brain for something to say, for while it was natural to walk in silence with Mr. Barrie, it was excruciating to do so with Mr. Burnaby. “ I think Mr. Marsh is a very nice man,” he stammered out at length.

“ He can afford to be,” said Mr. Burnaby with a bitter little laugh. Ponto tried again.

“ I know a gentleman who’s been to Oxford,” he said.

“ I know several,” said Mr. Burnaby. “ You should always regard that as an extenuating circumstance. What are you going to make of yourself, eh, Ponto ? ”

“ I’m going to be a minister,” said Ponto

“What?” A Prime Minister?” Ponto chuckled.

“Well. Why not? You have the ball at your toe. You can do anything in this glorious democracy. I’ve half a mind to become Prime Minister myself. No, I’ll leave that to you. I’ll be Minister for Internal Affairs. I like the sound of that. It sounds like the quintessence of introspection. I hope you’re not introspective, Ponto.”

“ I don’t know what 1 introspective ’ means,” said Ponto.

“ Oh, happy Ponto,” said Mr. Burnaby, “ I shan’t tell you.”

There was another silence, which Ponto broke

“ I think Mrs. Marsh is very nice,” he said

“ That’s precisely what she is,” said Mr. Burnaby

“ Nice. All my people are nice. You should see mv brother, the parson.”

Ponto felt himself grow hot

157

OTHER WAYFARERS

“ I didn’t know she was your sister," he said

“ I wonder you didn’t figure that out,” said Mr. Burnaby. “ What has our glorious system of free, compulsory and secular education been up to? I am Uncle Gerard. I suppose you think I’m a very disagreeable fellow.”

“ Not at all,” said Ponto. He bit his tongue as soon as he had come out with this reassurance. It sounded incredibly “ cheeky,” and he had not meant it to be.

“ Thank you,” said Mr. Burnaby. “ You flatter me. I’ll come to you when I want a reference. In this young country, it’s wise to keep in with the rising generation. So you’re going to be a minister? So was I. Don’t let that unsettle you, though, Ponto. I don’t suppose apostasy interests you.”

“ I don’t know what it means,” said Ponto

“ Lucky Ponto again,” said Mr. Burnaby. “If I were you, I’d bury my scholarship under a gooseberry bush, and cultivate your garden like Mr. Marsh. I’d give all the brains I have in exchange for his temperament. Of course it would be awkward if he hadn’t a garden, damned awkward, and he knows it. Being the good Christian he is, he knows it. I’m sorry I said that just now about affording to be nice. It was silly. I’m boring you.”

Ponto could only think of “ Not at all ” again, and that would never do. He walked on in silence. He mentally chalked up “ introspection ” and “ apostasy,” and sought enlightenment of Andrew Barrie on the following Monday evening.

“ That’s a queer team of horses,” said the minister

how did you come by them ? ”

Ponto told him

158

A POOR SCHOLAR

Andrew looked down at the child asking for bread. How Ponto wanted to know things! The minister gave him the etymology of the two words with scrupulous accuracy. Then he stroked his chin, and continued to regard Ponto.

“ Qever people like Mr. Burnaby say odd things,” he said. “ I wouldn’t fash myself over it, laddie. You stick to your kirk.”

But Ponto did fash himself, and it was unfortunate that the minister went north just at the time to attend a conference—unfortunate perhaps, and yet it may have been just as well, for every vat must stand upon its own bottom, and Ponto gained in stature as a result of that period of green-sickness through which he passed alone. He encountered the legend of Faust among the minister’s books on the morrow, and asked leave to take it home. Mr. Barrie was in the throes of packing and gave a hurried assent. It would not be difficult to explain the associations between Faust and Mr. Burnaby in Ponto’s mind. The man had exercised a strange physical attraction over the boy, despite his unprepossessing appearance. It was probably the gentle cultured melancholy of his voice that worked the spell. Most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of a presence at the back of our mind as we read. For some occult reason we associate a particular passage in a book with a particular person. So it was that Mr. Burnaby dominated that eventful morning when Ponto read a Bohn translation of Goethe’s work. For the first time in his life problems of good and evil were presented to him outside an ecclesiastical context. Had he been walking with a man who had bartered awav his soul? A living,

154

OTHER WAYFARERS

laughing sentient man, not a corpse. He wondered what it would be like to walk about with that dead thing within one, with that nameless urmameable doom awaiting one at the end of the journey. Ponto was sorry for the crippled and maimed whom he had encountered in his short life, but this spiritual malady of Mr. Burnaby’s seemed at once more terrible, and, in a strange way, more august.

It was unfortunate for Ponto that at this time his mother took to singing hymns about the house. She generally favoured hymns of a debilitating funereal order, and she had a habit of scooping up from a lower note to a higher in a way that dragged at Ponto’s vitals as he listened.

" Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that great day.”

Preparation for the great day seemed to involve changing gears. Ponto set Mr. Burnaby’s quick dissolving laughter against his mother’s gurgitations, and a terrible doubt assailed him. Was it possible that there were really no background to the happiness he had known in Andrew Barrie’s room, that one simply went on finding out things and finding our things, and that it was only Mr. Barrie’s fond belief that God would be found at the end of all searching, that God would wipe away tears from all eyes. That was the sole hypothesis that made most of the books tolerable. He learned and learned what other folk had thought, what other folk had suffered because in the end one would know where they were wrong, and why they had suffered. It seemed a tremendous thing to laugh it all away as Mr. Burnaby had done

Ponto dreamed very vividly one night that Mr Burnaby was being carried off to hell. There was nc

160

A POOR SCHOLAR

pantomime horns and pitchfork business about the transaction. One seemed to reach hell by area steps. Area steps are uncommon in Dunedin. Ponto in his early childhood must have been impressed by the sight of someone descending below the level of the pavement. At any rate Mr. Burnaby went down into Hades or Limbo or Gehenna in his grey raincoat, and everything about him was grey. Everywhere there was that dreary horror of greyness. Ponto woke with the terror of that grey enigma upon him. The blind had come away from the one window of the room he occupied alone, now that Herby had gone. The stars looked in at him, those self-same stars that had looked down on him upon that night of impossible peace and happiness, the night he had walked home with Andrew Barrie. A piece of waterspouting seemed to throw out a beckoning arm cutting into the star-light. It pointed, pointed.

11 Then, O my Lord, prepare "

The incidents of the dream had been almost comically commonplace. When it is thought necessary to frighten a child an elaborate daemonology is employed. Often the child is forearmed against ghosts and goblins, and the terror that walketh b\ night does not walk in winding sheets, but is habited by a kind of dreary familiarity. In the same way the piece of water-spouting obsessed Ponto, stood more blackly against the stars than would a cross, or a gargoyle. The dream receded, but there remained “ the abashless inquisition of each star,” Life eternal? To go on and on and on. In his own little life there was sleep at the day’s end. But out there? The water-spouting beckoned irrelevantly. The stars

156

OTHER WAYFARERS

pulsed on. Ponto lay and stared back at them. No one could tell you really. Picture and stories there were. There was Christ blessing the children. But he was not a child in a picture. He was Frederick Hugh Battersby Lawrence, alone under the stars. There was Christ looking upon Simon Peter. Simon Peter denied him, and the cock crowed. He had to deny Christ because it was written. It was written that Judas should betray him. It all had to be. There would have been no story if the stars had allowed Judas another way. It was written and arranged. The reproach of the eyes under the crown of thorns, that unbearable reproach of which the reproach he sometimes encountered in his mother’s eyes partook, was something super-added to the cold scrutiny of those distant stars. When one did wrong, Ponto had been taught, one added a thorn to the crown. If one were good, there was the prospect of seeing the crown turned to a thing of unspeakable beauty, something after which his mother aspired in the hymn she sang about the house.

The reproach and the consummation both seemed alike unbearable to the boy as he lay wide-eyed. He got out of bed and knelt down to pray, but somehow the words he formulated seemed unreal. He pressed his knuckles against his temples in a desolation of spirit. There came no theophany, no voice from the stars. He went to the window, and stood there, looking up into the night. He shivered although the night was mild for the time of the year. Presently he heard the chime of the Town Hall clock. It was not often that the sound reached the confines of the block in Great King Street where the shop stood. It was the hour when slumber is deepest, when vitality

162

A POOR SCHOLAR

runs at its lowest. To Ponto it seemed that he had last heard that chime in some other life. If he could win his way back to the comfort of that past day. Then something in the hov asserted itself, a kind of horse-sense which was to stand him in good stead. Very carefully and noiselessly he lit the gas, searched for his schoolbag, and pulled out his manual of Geometry—it was still called Euclid in his day. He stood four-square, ?s it were, to that onslaught of fear and depression, and forced his mind to the contemplation of the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle. He flogged his brain along from proposition to proposition until a merciful drowsiness overtook him. He hardly looked up from his book until first cock-crow. The sound was infinitely heartening. He did not think of Simon Peter. He thought of Andrew Barrie. When he turned out the gas, he found that the way to his bed was lit by a faint streak of grey. The aftermath of his dream bad vanished utterly. He slept.

All this may seem much ado about very little, A bad dream, and a wakeful night are by no means unique experiences. But that night may explain the beaming smile with which Ponto greeted Mr. Burnaby when they chanced to meet a day or two afterwards. It was so very good to see Mr. Burnaby walking about in the sunlight, whatever one’s nightly fears might be.

Mr. Burnaby was walking the pine-needle strewn path hard by the spot where Myrtle had read Ponto Water Babies, and Ponto was bound on a message for his mother. He had chosen this sequestered route because it was the spring of the year, and he thought he might have sight of the daffodils on the

163

OTHER WAYFARERS

hill-side further on. Mr. Burnaby was walking with his finger marking the place in a small book. He was wearing a coloured college tie and a flannel suit that had evidently been exhumed from a travelling trunk. Ponto’s smile brought him up standing.

“ Well, here’s young New Zealand again,” he said

“ You’re looking peaky. What have you been up to ? ’

“ Nothing much,” said Ponto, “ it’s holidays.”

“So it is,” said Mr. Burnaby. He noted that Ponto’s eyes were on his book. “ Catullus,” he said.

“ I’ve been reading about Lesbia’s sparrow. Would you like to know about Lesbia’s sparrow? I suppose you know about John Keats’ dove. ‘ I had a dove and the sweet dove died, and I thought it died of grieving.’ ”

Ponto had heard of neither

“ It’s time you did,” said Mr. Burnaby. “ Where are vou off to ? ”

Ponto gave his destination

“ That will take you ten minutes there and ten minutes back. Would you take a dish of tea with me, and then I could introduce you to those two so sweetly lamented birds. I live in the red house at the corner of Clyde Street. I’ll look out for you.”

Ponto said “ Thank you,” and sped off. He hardly gave a glance to the daffodils. Mr. Burnaby

was playing the piano when he appeared at the gate of the red house. The porchway about the door was festooned with honeysuckle and passion flower. There was a circular bed of daffodils on one side of an asphalt path. The music floated out very pleasantly. Ponto was aware of a sense of adventure that would be difficult to define. It was an adventure of the spirit, an adventure fraught with a vague peril. At

164

A POOR SCHOLAR

the back of the sunlight was the impression wrought on his mind by that curious dream. Mr. Burnaby came to the door, smoking an Egyptian cigarette in a tortoiseshell holder.

" Here we are,” he said. " Now we’ll brew. I must apologize for the china cupids. They’re not mine. They’re mv landlady’s.”

Ponto found himself in a room that commanded a view of a flower bed sheltered by a laurel hedge. The china cupids swung from an overhead gas bracket. There was an overmantel of dark wood with a mirror, and a plethora of ornament on a par with the china cupid. Mr. Burnaby seemed to have cleared himself a space by the window, where his writing desk stood. The recess formed by a bay window was piled with books.

Ponto sat down on a plush-covered chair, while Mr. Burnaby disappeared into another recess, whence presently came the music of a kettle. In a few minutes Mr. Burnaby was standing with two cups in his hand and a despairing expression on his face.

“ You might clear that table,” he said, “ only don’t mix up those papers.”

Ponto attacked the problem of the table with the sangfroid of one well versed in the bestowal of stock

“ Wonderful,” said Mr. Burnaby, “ now we’ll take tea like gentlemen. Then having absorbed a little more tannin we’ll read about Lesbia’s sparrow. I have a pupil coming at five, curse him. Have you any Latin at all ? ”

Ponto gave the extent of what he had acquired during two terms at the High School.

Mr. Burnaby sighed

160

OTHER WAYFARERS

“ When I was your age ” he began, but did not wail to finish his soliloquy. Instead he lit another cigarette and attacked the heap of books in the bay window with grunts and whispered expletives. He finally possessed himself of a copy of Keats, and settled down in the most negotiable of the chairs. Then there happened to Ponto one of those pleasurable experiences which had their prototype in his discovery of the Pleasaunce from the seat of Long Dick’s cart —bewitchment, bemusement, what you will. He listened to the low musical voice with its inflexion of sadness and its fastidious enunciation, Gerard Burnaby took a sensuous delight in words. It was perhaps the one pleasure in which he had indulged without deterioration of his fibres. He caught Ponto’s ingenuous stare as he looked up from the book.

“ You like that? ” he enquired with a little frown.

“ We’ll have Lesbia’s sparrow.” He read the little poem through in Latin, and then gave Ponto a free translation. “He was a sentimental cuss, wasn’t he?” he said. “So vou like Latin?”

“ It’s pretty hard,” said Ponto, rubbing his knees.

“ Yes,” said Mr. Burnaby. “ They don’t catch you young enough out here. That’s the trouble. I daresay they’re quite right. So you’re going to be a minister?”

Ponto was silent. Being a minister, he imagined, meant making the Mr. Burnabys of life uncomfortable. It meant a return to that vigil he had spent on the night he had dreamed.

“ I’m a bit young yet,” he said.

" Yes,” said Gerard Burnaby. “ When I was your age, I wanted to be a railway guard. I never meet one now without feeling that I’m further off from

166

A POOR SCHOLAR

Heaven than when I was a boy. Now what can Ido to amuse you until my pupil arrives? Some more Keats ? ”

“ Yes please,” said Ponto.

Mr. Burnaby read him The Eve of Saint Agnes. Ponto felt the annodyne of the words fall, as it were, upon his spirit. Gerard Burnaby must have known that the child was not listening in a conventional attitude of mind. He had not allowed himself the luxury of a listener for many a long day. He banged the book to at the end of his reading. “So much for John Keats,” he said. “ Now I expect you’ve had enough. How did you and Harold come to foregather ? ”

“ He was nice to me when I joined the choir said Ponto.

Mr. Burnaby blew through his cigarette holder.

“ Harold’s a weakling,” he said, “ but he has manners. I would like to teach you Latin, Ponto. I’ll do it on the nod, as you’re Harold’s friend. Would you care to come to me for half an hour sometimes.

Ponto was quite frankly embarrassed. A slow red mounted up into his face. He cast his eyes distressfully at the china cupid. He was thinking of Andrew Barrie. How would the minister regard such a defection to the tents of Shem? Mr. Burnaby fumbled with another cigarette. For a moment or two he told himself he had brought a rebuff on his own head, and his smile was not pleasant. But some gentler counsel seemed to prevail, for when he spoke his tone was kindly.

“ Sleep on it, Ponto,” he said, “ the offer remains open. Half-hours are precious I know. They’re worth a good deal more to you than they are to me.

167

OTHER WAYFARERS

“ Could I ask my mother? ” Ponto petitioned.

“ Why, yes. I’ll ask her myself if you like. Well, so long. That’s New Zealand for au revoir isn’t it ? ” He walked with Ponto to the gate. Ponto in an agony of confusion grabbed his hand. Mr. Burnaby submitted limply to the salute. Ponto felt he had done the wrong thing again. Mr. Burnaby’s eyes looked down at him bleakly, but his lips smiled. Ponto was aware of a revulsion of feeling as he walked home. He felt a little sick. It had been such a curious encounter. He contrasted the overladen room with Andrew Barrie’s study with its plain chairs and its book-lined walls. He longed for the minister’s return. He wanted to be put right in so many matters.

Andrew Barrie did not return until after the last term at “ High ” was a fortnight old. He came into the shop one evening just on closing time. Ponto’s smile would have gladdened the heart of a less susceptible man. But Mr. Barrie made precisely the same remark that Gerard Burnaby had made.

“ You’re looking peaky, laddie. You’re working too hard.”

“ Not me,” said Ponto. “ Can I come with you, Mr, Barree?”

“ Why yes. Come along. You can help me put things straight. I’ve brought back a wad of papers and things.”

So they started off together, and Ponto walked with a spring in his step that had been missing of late. It was not till they were settled in two of those Thomas Carlylean chairs that Ponto spoke of what was uppermost in his mind. The minister tried not to smile.

168

A POOR SCHOLAR

“You thought I wouldn’t like it? Why, Ponto, you must think I’m a dour old stickler. I'll tell you what I’ll do. This is a matter for your own parson. You say Mr. Burnaby goes to All Saints’ sometimes. Well, now, that will be right into their hands. When a man like Gerard Burnaby makes such an offer, it shouldn’t be declined, for his own sake. You’re not afraid of him are you?”

Ponto looked up at the minister as he had done when he came for a definition of “ apostasy.”

“ Ponto, I’m only your friend,” said the minister,

“ I’ve no authority to say whether or not you shall have dealings with this man or that, I can only lay it down that it’s a good thing to help a man when you can.”

“ How d’you mean help a man ? ” asked Ponto

“ I think that Gerard Burnaby’s anxious to give something away, and rejected gifts go sour. He’s a fine scholar, and he wants to help you. That’s my judgment. You affected me like that yourself Ponto. You know it’s more blessed to give than to receive.” Ponto wrinkled his brow over this. It was the first time that Andrew Barrie had ever given expression to a sentiment concerning him. He wished he could speak of the other doubts that had assailed him, of that mood of desolation that somehow seemed only to be in abeyance, to be held at arm’s length with the aid of sunlight and work and play.

“ If Mr. Burnaby makes his offer again,” Andrew Barrie broke in, “ I would say ‘ Yes, please.’ But that’s a matter for your mother to decide.” It was due to Andrew Barrie that Gerard Burnaby repeated his offer, so he became another agency in the drama of Ponto’s progress.

169

CHAPTER XVI

TOGA VIRILIS

The Roman boy is said to have assumed the toga virilis at the age of fourteen. The equivalent of the ancient insignia of manhood in Ponto’s day and country was the first pair of long trousers: but accidents of build sometimes postponed this assumption.

Ponto was a scrum-half and a bantam-weight, and so it came about that while he consorted with hefty youths with incipient moustaches he still looked a boy in his third year at “ The High.” He went to Christchurch with the football team. His promotion had followed on a particularly serviceable game he had played for the second fifteen, so that the whole vista opened out very suddenly for him.

Mrs. Lawrence was in more of a flutter than on the occasion of Ponto’s first supper party. He was to be billeted with a College boy’s 11 people.” She had made beds in a Devonshire rectory and she knew how gentlemen went habited. Ponto carried a new pair of brushes and his first pyjama suit in a new hand-bag along with his jersey and boots. The outfit had been the joint care of Myrtle and his mother. If Myrtle had been collecting her own trousseau she could not have been more excited. The house of Lawrence had pride in its cadet.

Ponto was a favourite in the carriage-full of school-fellows. He looked eagerly out for the site of Mooree’s camp. The plate-layers’ hut from which he used to squeal for a paper had disappeared, but he could recognize the spot. He watched the long

170

A POOR SCHOLAR

arm of the Karitane Peninsula and the horsehoe bend of Waikouaiti Beach. The train came to the end of its sobbing climb and ran down the hill to Waikouaiti, and Ponto was in terra incognita. He was the least travelled of any in the carriage, and his companions took a delight in chaffing him. By the time they were racing across the Canterbury plains, Ponto was growing almost travel sick. They seemed to pass by an endless plantation of English trees, that skirted the railway line, feathery slender silver birches, planes, and sycamores. It seemed as if the wood were on the march, and when they came to Burnham, a red wooden station with a platform of river-bed shingle, one of the erudite quoted Macbeth.

Ponto arrived at his first new town when the shades of evening were falling. He was claimed by an immense youth in a suit of black with a black-and-white ribboned straw hat. The youth ushered him into a hansom, and they jingled off. Ponto had his first sight of the Cathedral. There was nothing so lordly and spacious in Dunedin.

The hansom pulled up outside a laurel hedge. Ponto was conducted through an iron gate into a garden upon which streamed the light from an uncurtained window. He had an appetising glimpse of white napery and silver, and a maid in cap and apron. His supper party at Hurzel had initiated him into certain mysteries. Ponto was apt to learn. The tall youth’s father was not so pleasant as Mr. Marsh, His idea of entertaining a schoolboy was to enlarge upon his own peccadilloes when at Uppingham or Aldenham or Repton—it matters not. The mother talked very rapidly, and her lace sleeves acted as a kind of drag-net to the peril of pepper pots and salt castors.

166

TOGA VIRILIS

which made Ponto think of the tower of his native town hall, whose chime was woven into his life. His host addressed the lady of the sleeves as “ Mater,” and back chatted his father in a manner that impressed Ponto with his virility. Everyone helped themselves from the dishes that the maid preferred without saying “ Thank you,” and Ponto was in an agony of indecision whether he should discard this formality when the sweets came round. He helped himself with deliberation to cream and sugar, and thanked his stars for the “ spoon and fork ’ drill his mother had put him through before he started on his crusade. He decided to say “ Thank you.” and covered it up with a sepulchral cough.

After dinner he played euchre with the tall youth, an indeterminate uncle, who dropped in, and the lady in the lace sleeves, stifling his yawns valiantly. The lady said that the oscillation of the train never agreed with her, and she seemed to deal out the word in the same brilliant haphazard fashion as she dealt out the cards.

Ponto was allowed to retire early in view of the ardours of the morrow. He found his new pyjamas spread out upon the pillow of a sumptuous bed, and his new brushes on a mahogany dressing table such as one might view from the other side of a window in George Street. He had never known such a caravanserai. Next morning there was his host’s papa reading a strange newspaper with his back to a fire of coals, and a coffee urn bubbling aromatically before him, by an array of blue cups. He was in a less frivolous mood than on the previous evening, and put Ponto through a little catechism, in the absence of his son. When he had elicited from his guest

172

A POOR SCHOLAR

that his father was dead, and that his mother had a stationer’s shop he went on to the question of Ponto’s aspirations. Ponto said that he hoped to go to the 'Varsity, at which his questioner lifted his eyebrows.

“ Well, that is hitching your waggon to a star,” he said. “Is it to be Oxford or Cambridge?”

Ponto explained that he meant the Otago University. One could win a scholarship at the High School which would take one there. There followed a morning of mild sight-seeing, and a foregathering with his fellow teamsmen. In the afternoon he compassed a meeting with Harold, who, not being a member of the college team, had been in duresse during the morning. They walked together across the expanse of park, entering by the gate that flanks the museum. Ponto had seldom seen so many English trees. They stood denuded in the winter sunlight. This park seemed to proffer a new sense of distance to the hill-bred Ponto. Though he lived on the flat his career took him up a respectable slope twice a day, and it seemed to him that Dunedin was compounded in the main of hills and sea. As he walked by Harold that afternoon —Harold, whose contentment he began to feel, was as illusory as the peace and permanence the park seemed to proffer—he was aware of something underlying the excitement and glamour of that, his first Odyssey. Of course he did not try to define that influence. They exchanged exactly the sort of commonplaces that one would expect from two conventional schoolboys. If there were thoughts for that language to conceal they were related to Hurzel. To the one the word spelt home, to the other it spelt the difference between doing and being. Ponto had been doing so much, accomplishing

173

TOGA VIRILIS

so much. Harold had just drifted with the tide. Yet Harold was something. He was one with the kindliness of that waiting garden. Ponto, healthy young gladiator that he was, was yet aware of that mysterious essence. For that very reason he talked the harder. Anyone but Harold would have resented his glibness, his exact and plentiful use of current slang. Ponto was uneasily aware that he was “ skiting.” He skited not from choice, but from necessity. He was aware, perhaps for the first time, that Herby had not a monopoly of the family feelings. They spoke not a word of Hurzel or of Pauline. The talk centred mainly on the match that afternoon. The statue of Godley prompted a brief incursion into colonial history on Harold’s part. He did the honours of Christchurch as he had done the honours of Hurzel in his easy almost casual way. After they had parted at the school gate Ponto was aware of an impulse to run after Harold, and do something demonstrative, he did not know what. What could he do? Insist on Harold’s inclusion in the Christ’s College XV? No, Harold had another standard of values. Was that it? Perhaps he was too lazy to strive after a tasselled cap. There was nothing that Ponto could give him. He turned away from that sunny enigma to the pleasant actualities that surrounded him.

Later came the match, which is a matter of history. To the boy who had learned his football on the “ Cally ” and the mudflats beside the route of the cable tramcar, the decorous surroundings of this playing-field made him feel as if he had walked into a chapter of Tom Brown’s School Days. Perhaps, too. there lurked fragments of Gray’s Ode on Eton

174

A POOR SCHOLAR

College in that part of the brain that was not occupied with the immediate problems of attack and defence. This matter of Ponto’s feeling for a setting would escape the mere chronicler. It has little to do with the career. Ponto’s side suffered defeat that afternoon, and were on the defensive for the greater part of the game. The heavier College forwards seemed to be constantly on top of him. The realization that his first big match was to go against him came to Ponto when most of his colleagues had franklyturned their thoughts towards the last whistle. It was not a pleasant realization. It was almost his first reverse. He was filled with a sudden detestation of the stately ground. There was a note of smugness in the cheering. Ponto was suddenly aware of passions that the “ Cally ” had seemed to stir in others. Was it possible those unamiable feelings were latent in himself ? He was heavily collared by one of those heavy-handed forwards. For one moment a blind fury possessed him. Then the angel who watched over Ponto’s career intervened. So it seemed to him in the retrospect. Ponto never again came so perilously near that point when a player is ordered off the field. He was very white when he rose from under his adversary.

The referee mistook his pallor, and asked him if he were all right. Ponto nodded and grinned. He was intact in every respect, but it had been a near thing. He joined in the cheers the captain of the beaten side summoned. It was almost his first lesson in the art of losing. On the way from the ground he caught sight of Harold ambling along with a mate, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. Somehow the sight of Harold recalled him to the suavity of

175

TOGA VIRILIS

his surroundings. Life was inexpressibly good, even though the score was against you. A man with a red nose and a clerical collar laid his hand on Ponto’s shoulder. “ A splendid losing game, my boy,” he said, “ I was watching you.” Ponto grinned. Howvery nearly it had been otherwise.

In the evening there was a dance. Here was a matter in which Mrs. Lawrence had fallen short. Ponto could stand idly with his back to the wall and grin.

Harold seemed to be booked up to the hilt. Ponto watched him intermittently. Surely there was no one better fitted to pass in a crowd. His partners found Harold attentive, but a little dull. They regarded his dance as an interval between dances with the Olympians of that afternoon. There was one little girl, however, who looked for his coming with an eagerness that Ponto noted. This may have been due to the paucity of other partners on her programme. She seemed to combine forlornness with a certain assertiveness. Ponto followed this little tragi-comedy with a kind of horse knowledge. He may not have known the phrase “ wall-flower ” or “ duty dance.’’ Somehow Harold seemed to convey the impression that it was not a matter of duty at all. He liked dancing with the wall-flower, as he liked befriending streetboys. Ponto made up his mind that he would learn to be an impeccable dancer, so that he might in the future remove flowers from the wall, and propel them into the vortex.

The foregoing may be regarded as a digression by those who demand the facts. Still, it may not be altogether irrelevant to remark on some aspects of Ponto’s life that would not find a place in Who’s

171

A POOR SCHOLAR

Who. A career so often connotes a certain ruthlessness, the ploughing of a lonely furrow. Ponto was too preoccupied with the business of life to speculate as to whether he was lonely or not. He had found two friends at least in Mr. Barrie and Harold, and as time went on he was to overcome a certain distaste for what were after all the somewhat tarnished wrapping which enclosed Gerard Burnaby’s treasures.

Ponto had instinctively turned to Mr. Barrie in his difficulty concerning Mr. Burnaby’s offer, and the minister had proffered sound advice. To reassure himself as to the soundness of that advice seemed a reasonable proposition, but Andrew’s dread of Pharisaism was his besetting weakness. It had probably kept him where he was. Some might say that he shirked an issue. Perhaps he did. Still Gerard Burnaby had been described to him as a “ rum bird,” and he had counselled Ponto to place himself under an obligation to a man about whom an indefinable cloud seemed to hover. He roused himself from his supineness in this matter, and sought an opportunity to take some tentative soundings. The opportunity presented itself in due course.

Andrew Barrie, for his own satisfaction, had brought Ponto on the carpet when the two men had met at a University social. Gerard Burnaby’s eyes usually took on a malevolent glint at the approach of a clerical dog collar, though he smiled with his lips. He did not know enough of Barrie to dislike him actively, but he w-as one of the tribe.

“ I hope you’re pleased with your pupil, young Lawrence,” Barrie said. “He happens to be what thev call here a ‘ cobber ’ of mine.”

177

TOGA VIRILIS

“ Our Mutual Friend?” Gerard had replied, “ Oh, he’s getting on like a house on fire. I don’t know what he’s going to do with all his book-lamin’. I sometimes wonder if it would be better to make an honest navvy out of him.”

“ He’s not the build for a navvy,” said Andrew.

“ No,” said the other, “ it’s a delicate piece of mechanism, a rum thing to encounter in the setting he comes from. I’ve enjoyed having him.”

He brought those curious opaque eyes of his to bear on the minister’s face. For once in a way it seemed that they lived. Andrew Barrie had slipped dexterously on to some other topic. He had learned what he wanted to know. All this is hardly apropos of Christ’s College, and of Ponto’s ignorance of the waltz and the Lancers. But still, we have him at a milestone, as it were, and so there should be word of the other wayfarers.

Ponto had an encounter on the day following the match which was to bear results in the future. He was returning from a visit to the Cathedral with his host, Chamberlain, when they ran into a young giant in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers and a felt hat. Under the hat was a head of luxuriant hair, and there was an array of medals upon the watch chain that protruded from his breast pocket.

“ Hallo, Skittles,” said the stranger.

“ Hallo, Snowy,” replied Chamberlain. “ Here’s one of the howling pack from Dunedin.”

The stranger shook Ponto’s hand.

“ I hope you like our city,” he said

“ It’s fine,” said Ponto, steering the happiest of means between “ foine ” and “ fayne.”

178

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ But it’s our country you want to see,” continued the stranger. “If you want to see Canterbury steadily and see it whole you should take a grass seeding contract on Bank’s Peninsula, as I do every New Year.”

“ I’d like to some day,” said Ponto

" Well, keep it in mind,” said the stranger. “ Write to Skittles here when you want a job, and I’ll include you in my gang. I saw you playing yesterday. You’re the right stuff.” With this the Norfolk jacket disappeared, leaving a gratified Ponto in the middle of the Cathedral Square.

On the return journey to Dunedin, the members of the team behaved with that somewhat hectic jollity which is always noticeable in a beaten side. Ponto was put up to sing “ I happened to be there,” which he rendered from the middle register with more force than finesse. The Canterbury Plains were less enchanting upon a second acquaintance. Someone compared the silver birches to ballet dancers as the train roared along between the ranks of the trees. Away to the right was the country of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a country of vast blue distances and white hills. Ponto sniffed the air of home after the train had left Oamaru. The site of Mooree’s camp was in complete darkness. There came the bitter pleasing wash of the sea air on the face as one stood on the little platform at one’s own personal risk, and looked out for remembered landmarks.

At last, Logan’s Point was rounded with a whistle from the engine such as had contributed to Ponto’s contentment on the night he had walked home with Andrew Barrie. He thought whimsically of the boy who had been himself, the bov for whom that whistle

179

TOGA VIRITIS

had symbolized the outer and the unknown, waiting upon his own little cosmology. Well, he had penetrated the unknown. He had slept more than a hundred miles away from home. To him, Harold’s black and white cap was no longer a matter of speculation but a matter of reminiscence. He had a traveller’s tale for his mother and Myrtle, when he arrived at the shop in Great King Street that evening.

cX 1 1 ivtu a L lilt oliup 111 vjltai UII V-V.I V,» In November that year, Frederick Hugh Battersby Lawrence was confirmed. Myrtle and Herby had been done the previous year. Uncle Herbert had secured Herby a place with a retail grocer in town, and so the little family had been reunited. It is in a piece with life’s crazy pattern that Ponto’s confirmation was attended by less searching of heart than he had known during that brief period of abnormality when he had been the prey of night thoughts.

He had regulated his prayers as he had scheduled the other departments of his life. The business of living was so engrossing that one must needs put aside obstinate questionings. If one were to keep one’s place in the First XV it was necessary to keep fit, and keeping fit meant living hard. There are all kinds of definitions of spirituality. It is not a quality that one associates with restfulness. Ponto’s spirit was at rest at the time of his confirmation. It was, as it were, lulled by the momentum of an ambition, and he was not at the time harassed with forebodings as to the desirability of the goal. Indeed as soon as one redoubt was captured another loomed ahead. He had won just such a tasselled cap as Andrew Barrie had won. He had tasted of travel. Now there arose a mirage of another sort. He

180

A POOR SCHOLAR

wanted to possess books of his own, and there were books for the winning. So it came about that he practised health and holiness as it were, without premeditation. Facts of life and physiology presented themselves in the light of some end which he was at the time pursuing. So it was by some consistently benign chance that Ponto extracted what was good from his sessions with Gerard Bumaby. He acquired without scathe some measure of what Gerard Burnaby had acquired at the expense of both health and holiness.

When Gerard Burnaby discussed Harold (and Ponto quite often quite dexterously prompted him in that direction) he always lapsed into the tones of one who judged leniently for affection’s sake; Ponto found this a little irksome, but the old attraction transcended any discomfiture.

He was glad to hear Gerard discuss his nephew on any terms, because it brought back the old odd bewitchment. That Sunday night when the moon had risen over the poplars remained in Ponto’s mind in an irrational way as a point in time more significant than the evening of his confirmation Sunday. So he found music in the melancholy note with which Gerard Burnaby invoked the name “ Harold.” He had a way of pronouncing the word that somehow seemed to atone for subsequent detraction.

“ You look before you leap, Ponto,” he might say in the face of a difficult passage in a Latin author his pupil was construing. “ I remember Harold taking a leap into the void.”

“Did he do the Metamorphosis with you, sir?

Then the way would be open, and Ponto, so to speak, would keep the gate ajar for the discussion of T-Tnrnl/t « n*

181

TOGA VIRILIS

“ Harold has plenty of brains,” his uncle once declared. “ The trouble about him is not lack of brains, but lack of guts.” The term had not become standardized in those days, and Ponto was quite frankly shocked as it fell upon his ears. Gerard’s voice assumed that flute-like quality, which always vaguely suggested Scylla and Charybdis to his pupil.

“ Out of consideration for your tender years, Ponto, we will substitute ‘ stamina ’ for that good Anglo-Saxon term.”

Whatever Harold might have lacked in this respect, it did not appear that he was immune from those ills that beset the source of energy. Ponto was returning from church on an early Sunday in January when he encountered Mr. and Mrs. Marsh, walking with Pauline. They had just emerged from the gates of a private hospital. It was odd that they had not been in church, he thought. Pauline’s habitual pallor was more pronounced. The eyes looked very large. Mr. Marsh’s eyes, too, were bleak and troubled. Ponto thought that they were going to pass him without recognition, but Mrs. Marsh took him in a sudden scrutiny.

“ Oh, Geoff,” she said, “ Here’s Harold’s Ponto.”

They pulled up, and confronted him. Pauline smiled and held out her hand. He lifted his cap, aware of a sudden foreboding.

" We’ve just come from the hospital,” said Mrs. Marsh. “ He would like to see you when he is better.”

“ Yes. When he is better,” echoed Mr. Marsh, and Ponto felt himself, as it were, bereft of the comforting circumstance of that last year. He felt a sudden and unreasoning resentment against Mr. Marsh. How could he stand there smiling when

177

A POOR SCHOLAR

Harold was dying. Of course Harold was dying— Ponto was visited by an intuition. The red gate of Hurzel guarded a mystery more august than the mystery of that far-off Saturday when little Ponto had waited on the seat of Long Dick’s cart. He divined what it was that held those three together. There only seemed to remain to him the essence of that period of desolation out of which he had emerged. He searched Pauline’s eyes, but her eyes were like the stars that had looked down at him on the night of his vigil. There was nothing to do, nothing to be said. He could only lift his cap again, and shamble off.

He tried to pray for Harold that night, but somehow it did not seem fair to pray. He did not believe that he could fend death off from Harold by praying. It was like joining in a conspiracy with the stars. The thing was simply a horror, an affront. How oddly he had seemed to be part and breath of the Pleasaunce on that first night of the choir. “Lo we heard of it at Ephrathah, and saw it in the wood." Harold had been of the bewitchment of the Pleasaunce. Despite a later light of common day in which his shortcomings showed, he retained an aura of the otherwhere in Ponto’s eyes, and that otherwhere was not among the cold stars, but in the sunlight and the comeliness of Hurzel, in the gold of the poplar leaves, in the music of a yellow wheel, as one mounted up out of the dusty tawdry streets into silence and seemliness and nameless expectancy. The toga virilis fell from Ponto. He was a child with no language but a cry.

178

CHAPTER XVII

YOUTH'S MANUSCRIPT

Intuitions are no more infallible than are the opinions of surgeons. The doctors had operated for appendicitis, but had found, or thought they had found, something far graver, the aftermath of a kick at football. Harold rallied slowly, and was taken back to Hurzel, presumably to die. But Harold confounded the doctors by continuing to gain in strength. His mother took him to Sydney for further advice, and he returned, a lanky emaciated youth with terrible arrears to make up, but with a clean bill of health.

Ponto first encountered him after church. With the beginning of the New Year he had said good-bye to the choir, and sat with Myrtle and his mother in the free seats.

Harold’s return almost synchronized with the arrival of the Christ’s College football team in Dunedin. Ponto was one of seven “ old caps.” Ponto had leisure to study the boyish profile. Harold was still the patrician. There was a suggestion of a pout about the mouth, and he kept his chin buried upon the breast of his well-cut overcoat. Pauline was beside him in her first coat and skirt with her black hair tied back, and a simple hat of some dark tnaterial turned up at the front. She was “La Belle Dame Sans Merci ” that morning. Ponto had never seen her in such wise. Pretty was not the word, she was too chiselled and pale to be pretty.

184

A POOR SCHOLAR

Ponto walked home with his mother after church, and they were overtaken by the Marsh’s motor car. Cars were just ceasing to be a novelty in Dunedin. Ponto took off his cap, and Harold waved his hand. The action was palpably inspired by Pauline. Harold was not wearing his school cap, but a tweed golf cap, which one could wear in those days. It made him appear positively venerable to Ponto. He was aware of a sudden inrush of desire for the days that are no more. He was too preoccupied with the forthcoming match to allow this mood to sit long on him. Andy had won a place in the team this year. He had left Ponto far behind in stature, but Ponto had increased otherwise. He could now dance, having been taken in hand by Mooree’s betrothed. She was a fluffy-haired blonde with a pair of beautiful legs, and a heart that overflowed with kindness. She always referred to Mooree as her fiance, which greatly impressed Ponto. Her speech bristled with drawled terminals. So many things seemed to be “ veree prettee ” or “ veree jollee.” She always addressed Mrs. M’Laughlin as “ Marmsie,” which the latter did not appear to resent.

She also fluttered over the piano and sang The Rosary and Sing me to Sleep. It was unfortunate that these were two of the songs that Gerard Burnabyparodied most effectually, so that Ponto was cheated of that satisfying sensation which Andy always enjoyed in the region of the spine when his brother’s betrothed sang. A great many of Ponto’s predilections were subjected to the solvent of Mr. Burnaby’s melancholy little laugh.

Ponto’s horse-sense came into play in this respect. It may have been that at bed-rock Mr. Burnaby was

185

YOUTH’S MANUSCRIPT

more of a vulgarian than Mooree’s fiancee. Most decadents have a streak of suburbia in them.

Ponto, innured to unseemliness by the use and wont of Great King Street, was yet never quite free from the recollection of that faint nausea that had overtaken him on his first visit to Mr. Burnaby. Yet as he developed he learned to delight in the play of his tutor’s mind, in the gentle maliciousness with which he hit upon other folk’s foibles. Ponto felt instinctively that Mr. Burnaby would have disapproved of his dancing mistress. It is probable that Mr. Burnaby would have disapproved. Yet this would not have prohibited philandering, if Mooree’s betrothed had put the opportunity in his way. So Ponto progressed along the track of the career, acquiring a sense of values which, if they were false values, stood good in the world that Ponto was to capture.

Mboree’s Doris taught him to dance, and Gerard Burnaby taught him to discriminate between The Rosary and Lesbia’s Sparrow. Only Pauline taught him nothing that helped him to seize and utilize what lay ahead. She called him back to that remote world where achievement counts for nothing, where there is only promise and vague longing. Ponto had a breath of that world, as it were, when he was introduced to Pauline at the football dance. Neither of them thought it worth while to inform the kindly chaperone that they had met before. Ponto said “May I have the pleasure of a dance?” according to the rules laid down by the fiancee. Pauline’s frock was a very soft green. Had Ponto possessed the requisite knowledge he would have described it as an accordion-pleated crepe-de-chine. Not being so

186

A POOR SCHOLAR

equipped he merely thought of the Pleasaunce and the recesses among the trees on the far side of Hurzel lawn. Pauline was still a “ juvenile.” It would be some time before she would be “ out,” but she had ceased to be a romping party child, if she ever had belonged to that species. Her eyes were no longer like hard stars as they had been when they had met on the morning of Harold’s operation. They sparkled with a quiet amusement.

“ How nice of you, Ponto,” she said, as the chaperone moved on to another errand of mercy. “ I was beginning to wonder if anyone was going to ask me for a dance, except our two footballers, and of course they had to. Harold couldn’t come.”

“ I’m an awfully bad dancer,” said Ponto. “ Can I have the pleasure of more than one, Miss Marsh?"

“ Ponto, if you talk to me like that, I shall begin to think I’ve hurt your feelings. Look.” She held out her programme and he took it. There were only two names scribbled upon it. “It will have to be the first half,” she said, “ Daddy’s coming for me at ten o’clock.” Ponto wrote his name opposite two waltzes. When he came to claim the first, she was chatting with a magnificent being in a dinner jacket. She looked up at Ponto’s approach, and he was aware of a falling away from him of all his new trappings. Her smile piqued and reassured him at the same time. He was aware of an odd sense of truce in the warfare of etiquette. It was useless to dissemble with Pauline.

He had not been very successful with his previous partner. He was also terribly aware of his white cotton gloves. Pauline put herself into his arms, and

187

YOUTH’S MANUSCRIPT

they started off without a word. They both concentrated upon Ponto’s paces. It was not necessary to make small talk. Pauline had ruled out “ May 1 have the pleasure, Miss Marsh.” I am wrong in saying that she never did anything to accelerate Ponto’s progress. She completed the good work of Mooree’s fiancee.

" Oh, I wish Harold could have come,” Pauline said as they sat down at last.

Ponto said that he wished so too, and felt abashed because he had nothing more enlightening to say on the matter. He supposed that Harold was not strong enough to go to dances.

“ I came with the two College boys who are staying with us. Harold doesn’t like them, and he feels awkward about next term.”

"Next term?” Ponto queried

“ Yes. Harold isn’t going back to Christ’s College. He’s going to England next year, if he’s still well. It’s very important he should pass his matric., and so he’s going to the High School for the last term of this year. I want to know if you’ll be his chum.”

“Me?” echoed Ponto. He had forgotten for the time being the progress he had made. Harold was still an Olympian in his eyes, albeit a fallen Olympian.

“ Yes, you,” said Pauline in her queer incisive little way. “ Harold’s like little Bridget. When he came back, his friends were all gone.”

“ But he has lots of friends,” said Ponto in wonder, " He’s the kind of chap ”

“ That’s just where you’re wrong,” said Pauline. “It just happens that he’s lost his friends. It will be funny for him starting again at school. He’s going to swat with Uncle Gerard. He’s just going to

183

189

A POOR SCHOLAR

stuff himself like a goose, he says, so that he won't seem too silly when he goes to England. I can’t see Harold turning into a bookworm, somehow. I’m afraid he doesn’t understand.”

Ponto wondered what it was that Harold did not understand. He was too polite to ask, but Pauline must have read interrogation in his face.

“ I mean that he can’t live exam, for three months. He doesn’t understand how much he’s been nursed and petted. Then school isn’t just a cramming machine. He’ll have to belong to the place, though he’s onlv there for a term.”

Ponto wondered at Pauline’s grasp of essentials. He was also flattered and touched that she should make a confidant of him.

“ I want you to be his chum. If he were to get ill again. If he couldn’t go to England after all.” Pauline looked into Ponto’s eyes with a frank friendliness that made him feel that she regarded him as under some special bond to Hurzel. In a curious way he felt that the house with the red gate, that had once seemed so remote and majestic now stood in need of him. “ It won’t matter that you are poor when you’re above him in the school.”

Ponto stiffened a little at the word “ poor.”

“ That isn’t my fault,” he said.

Pauline smiled.

“ And it isn’t Harold’s fault that he’s been ill,” she said. “ It’s so good to have him back that we just musn’t mind. But I’m sure you could help him to remember, Ponto. He never really forgets the things and the people he loves.”

YOUTH'S MANUSCRIPT

Ponto’s eyes narrowed, as they had done at the time of Herby’s rehabilitation on Christmas morning when the gifts lay by his plate. Pauline was one of those persons who seem to have a prescriptive right to plain speech. None but she could have called Ponto “ poor ” as she had done, and given so little offence. She had simply been quoting from the inscription above the chancel. When she spoke of the people Harold loved, she was simply quoting from St. Paul, On the lips of most other folk the word would have sounded insincere or gushing.

“ I hope he’ll like it at the High,” said Ponto laconically.

Then the music struck up for the next dance.

“ That may depend on you, Ponto,” said Pauline, as she turned to greet one of the Christ’s College boys, who was bearing down on her for his dance.

Ponto had no partner, and he wandered out into Arthur Street, and so to the head of Albert Street. A cable tramcar crossed the way, and dipped down towards the town with its thousand lights. The school building reared up behind him. It seemed to Ponto like an old man in a frivolous mood with its unaccustomed lights and music. It was his arena, the place where his progress was being registered. Beyond the muted voice of the town he could hear the insistent voice of the sea. What a little matter it all seemed. If, a day or two ago, he had been told he would have so regarded that afternoon’s victory (the school had avenged their defeat of last year), he would have laughed the teller to scorn. What were those triumphs compared to the great things, love and pain and the sight and sound of the beautiful? It

190

A POOR SCHOLAR

might be that Harold had learned more in the sickroom than he, Ponto, had learned on the field or in school. It might have been that Harold had not evaded the inquisition of those cold bright stars as Ponto had done. He turned back to the improvised ballroom with a little shiver. When he claimed his next dance from Pauline he was aware of a sense of something that was almost like home-coming.

She greeted him with a smile that seemed plainly to say, “ This is the real business of the evening.” However, they hardly spoke of Harold again. Pauline disappeared after the supper interval, and Ponto was mated to other young ladies of the chaperone’s choosing.

Andy and he walked home in the dead of night by way of Queen’s Drive. Andy whistled the Jolly Student song vociferously as they passed under the poplars. But Ponto was thinking of the Yellow Chariot. It was not the tangible things, such as football caps, and scholarships that really counted. The only thing that was worth the wear of winning was the love of friends. And how rich he was in this respect. There were the two Andrews and Mr. Burnaby. There were his fellow teamsmen and classmates, and, in a remoter region where the dreams counted, there were Pauline and Harold.

At the beginning of the last term Ponto was aware of something other than diffidence when it came to the point of making Harold welcome at the High. He felt something that was almost reluctance. This was not clue to any fear that the presence of Harold would militate against his own prestige at the High. The source of his shrinking lay further back. Truth to tell, he had been a little afraid of Pauline when

186

YOUTH’S MANUSCRIPT

she had made her appeal on behalf of her brother. Pauline was uncompromisingly of that other more shadowy life of his, a life in which there was no measuring of progress. Harold belonged to that life too, though he was less beholden to the Pleasaunce than was his sister. It would be like mixing one’s Sundays with one’s week days to encounter him daily. So Ponto, contrary to his usual wont shirked the issue, and it fell to Harold in the end to make the first advance.

Ponto encountered him as he was emerging from a shop in the Octagon which dealt in photographers’ requisites. He himself had come down from the High by way of Stuart Street to change a book for his mother at the Athenaeum. Harold was wearing the ribbon of his new school upon a straw hat of a quality foreign to the High School boy. His grey flannel suit made him look like a visitor to the town. Ponto had noted this element of the exotic in him. and this, perhaps, had further retarded advances. However, there was nothing exotic in his manner of greeting Ponto.

“ Hello, I was wondering when I was going to get a chance of a word with you. You’re such a big gun nowadays.”

Ponto replied with one of the silliest lies of which he ever was quilty.

" I didn’t know whether you’d remember me,” he said.

Harold smiled the lie out of countenance with that old indolent smile. Whatever he had passed through during his illness, it was certain that there had vanished from his eyes all trace of that expression which Ponto had surprised on the morning they

187

193

A POOR SCHOLAR

had met outside the milliner’s. Harold seemed more at rest with himself, though he had lost something of that earlier freshness of face that had made him appear so attractive to little Ponto at their first meeting.

“ Will you have time to walk home with me by way of the Drive ? ”

Ponto replied with another fib and they set off by way of Stuart Street, passing by the red rails that bordered the grass plot in front of old St. Paul’s.

The Town Hall chimes gave out a quarter to six. “ When I was away I tried to remember that “ quarter to ” chime, but blessed if I could,” said Harold. A little dog yapped at them through the vicarage fence, and Harold, with his disengaged fingers, snapped back defiance. “ Little Prince Charlie is snarling,” he said. "He isn’t a Prince Charlie, but no matter. You should have seen the spaniel in Sweet Nell of Old Drury," and forthwith he embarked upon a traveller’s tale which lasted them until they reached the red gate of Hurzel.

There was irony in the fact that Harold’s mischance had given him this pull over Ponto, who had outrun him in every other respect. Harold had dilated chiefly upon the theatres and concerts and the picture galleries. His mother and he had attacked life from the shelter of Mr. Marsh’s banking account. Nothing could be too good for Harold now that he was restored to them. Under these conditions the boy had laid hold on life with a will. He had no talent of his own, as Pauline had, but he had developed his faculty for appreciation. He had very definite views as to the pictures and the plays and the books that he liked.

YOUTH’S MANUSCRIPT

Photography was the nearest approach he had made to creative art. He had photographed copiously, and it was chiefly about his photographs that he chatted to Ponto. It was more natural, then, that he should stay Ponto by the red gate with a bidding to come and see his trove. So again, Ponto found himself within the circle where enchantment had once reigned. He was aware of a sense of unfulfilment similar to that which he experienced when he first went by the way that the Golden Pirate had gone. The tiger grinned up at him from the polished floor of the hall, as of old. Even the tantalus seemed to bid for his wonder. But Ponto had stayed with the Chamberlains of Christchurch. Only in Pauline’s eyes did he encounter something of that which was gone. He met her on his way down from the room which had been Harold’s sick-room, and was now converted into a kind of snuggery. It was a very pleasant demesne. Harold had left no question in Ponto’s mind as to what he thought of it.

“ Home! ” he had said as he showed Ponto in, and he spoke like a fugitive who had reached sanctuary. Ponto had been given his choice from a set of reproductions of pictures from the Sydney Art Gallery, and he had chosen Millais’ Captive. He was tucking this among his school-books when he encountered Pauline at the foot of the stairs. She looked from him to Harold, and the smile in her eyes made Ponto feel himself an imposter. He had not exerted himself in the least to befriend Harold. He was to encounter that smile again and again, and it always seemed like a reproach on account of some disloyalty on his part. He could not define wherein lay his recusancy. It was associated in his mind with that sense of relief

194

A POOR SCHOLAR

he had felt, so long ago when it had appeared that Long Dick had decided not to return by way of the Pleasaunce. Fairyland seemed almost too beautiful.

Pauline only said, “ Good afternoon, Ponto ” at that encounter. Ponto was grateful for her “ nous.” Any other than Pauline might have rushed in with “ So you’re cheering Harold up,” or something of the sort.

Ponto started off for Great King Street with the Captive in captivity between the pages of his Hall and Stevens. How incredibly mean and small the shop and dwelling looked as he entered. Myrtle was in charge of the counter.

“ Hallo, Ponto. How’s things ? ”

For the first time in his life Ponto wished that Myrtle might have been other than she was. At the back of all their sparring there had always been the tacit understanding that Myrtle was at foundation the most desirable sister a boy could wish. Only that afternoon she seemed in a piece with the hicketypickety little shop. Ponto did not give expression to this sudden revolt against environment. He was far too fond of Myrtle for that. Still, there it was, and it vaguely troubled him. Ponto’s progress involved growing pains, it seemed.

“ Oh, not too dusty,” he replied. His finger hesitated at the Geometry book. He ought to show Myrtle the Captive. No. He couldn’t. It would spoil it somehow. He went upstairs with his possessions.

So Hurzel itself joined in the general conspiracy to make Frederick Hugh Battersby a man of parts. Harold played a subsidiary role to that of Gerard Burnaby in fostering the cosmopolitan spirit. Pauline

190

YOUTH’S MANUSCRIPT

may have wondered whether Ponto had helped Harold to remember things. She always greeted him upon his visits with the same welcoming smile, and always there was that troubling suggestion of a reproach behind the smile, a reproach that was utterly unconscious on her part. It was a reproach because it postulated something in Ponto which he knew in his heart was not there. Pauline never troubled him as he began to be troubled about this time with the insistent appeal of seemliness in face and form both in life and in art.

Ponto, with the teaching of his confirmation and his own sound sense to guide him, dealt with this trouble. He did now allow himself to be held in captivity by Millais’ Captive.

Pauline disturbed in Ponto a faculty which he would have eliminated from his make-up, since it stood in the way of other things that seemed to be of more immediate moment. She wanted Harold to remember things, and they were just the sort of things it were better to forget if one were to arrive anywhere in the race of life.

Ponto was still a boy. It was with youth’s sweetscented manuscript that he was concerned. Pauline stood for something anterior to that. She was concerned with the manuscript of childhood. In her fierce love for Harold she had made of him, in her mind, something that he really was not. She had not understood how one-sided had been their games of make-believe. She had made an earthly paradise of Hurzel out of which Harold had walked. She could not understand how impossible it was to recall him.

196

A POOR SCHOLAR

She was at war with progress because she had never had to take recognisance of any other than her own small world. For her, Great King Street was as remote as a street from a page of Dickens. Out of it Ponto had come, like a being from another world. He had brought with him some talisman which Pauline could not have defined to herself. It may have been his native honesty, that attribute which is not necessarily indigenous to Great King Street. Pauline herself was possessed of a like ingenuousness. Then there was the suggestion of a career in the making about Ponto, a forcefulness that was in no way aggressive, that excited a sympathetic response in Pauline. Pauline was like Francesca in the play of Stephen Phillips. She had viewed the windy world through glass. Ponto was of the world without. Harold and Ponto had assisted at the striking of a mutual chord on the evening of Ponto’s initiation. Harold had come home from choir practice that night in one of those good moods which his sister was always quick to recognize. She was tenacious of anything in Harold that was other than worldly-wise. He was usually armed with all the conventional panoply of boyhood. Depreciation of himself, and of the general scheme of things, was a habit which he had assumed after he had exchanged from nursery lessons to Mr. Lorrimer’s academy.

Pauline was too wise to protest against Harold’s disavowal of old loyalties. She bided her time, and was rewarded on such occasions as that on which Harold had returned with word of a newcomer in the choir. It seemed that her brother came that evening with the old bewitchment of the Pleasaunce upon him. Ponto had made the other chaps laugh.

192

YOUTH'S MANUSCRIPT

but he had touched some secret spring of tenderness in Harold of which Pauline only had news from his smile. If Harold had thought she deemed as much, he would probably have assumed the cynical habit, but he had little notion of gauging Pauline’s watchfulness. So when Ponto and she encountered, in that period of tutelage at the High, her smile was an acknowledgment of services rendered. Ponto was helping her brother to remember the Pleasaunce, though it would appear that it was Sydney rather than the Pleasaunce which loomed largest through the retrospect.

198

CHAPTER XVIII

DUX

Towards the end of Ponto’s last year at the High, Uncle Herbert was called into counsel. Much ground had been covered since that day of unrealities, when he had talked things over with the widow Lawrence, that day which had seemed to Ponto like a Sunday gone wrong. Ponto himself had, as the phrase has it, “ made good.” Herby had not. Myrtle’s position would not be easy to define. As a matter of fact, Myrtle had played her part valiantly in the economy of the microcosm which was Mrs. Lawrence’s all in all. Uncle Herbert summed up with very proper perspicuity, and Herby’s feelings were not unduly lacerated. Herby was getting into his stride in the grocery business, and he had also put himself in the way of repeating his father’s good fortune by securing the devotion of the small, staid young woman who kept his employer’s books. The small staid young woman was also persona grata with Mrs. Lawrence and Myrtle. Herby had had his fill of outlawry. He found alleviation for the monotony of parcels and orders in the cinema and in scenes with the small staid person. They quarrelled on an average once a week, but the little clerk knew her man. Herby was of age by this time, a tall, slouching lout with the eyes of a brooding Gabriel, and the temper of a cat. However, it was not Herbert’s future that Uncle Herbert had been called in to discuss. It was Ponto’s.

There seemed every likelihood that Ponto would win a Junior University scholarship at the end of

194

DUX

the year. This would provide him with money for fees and equipment for the Otago University, but he would have to consider some way of augmenting this hypothetical largesse.

Uncle Herbert was judicial on the matter. He exhorted Ponto to take a long view, and cited Emerson and Samuel Smiles. Ponto said he didn’t believe in counting chickens before they were hatched. However, if he got to the ’Varsity, he would want to be at something that would allow of his giving as much time as possible to study. He asked leave to talk with Mr. Barrie. Leave was granted, and the house rose. Everyone was impressed with Uncle Herbert’s magnanimity in granting the necessary leave.

“ You’re perfectly right, Fred, my boy. In the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom.”

For once in a way, Uncle Herbert did not call on his audience for a citation from ’Erbert Spencer. Ponto took his problem to the minister as a matter of habit. Andrew Barrie seemed a little startled by his request for direction.

“Why, Ponto, has it come to this?” he said, "Must I cease to think of you as a laddie?” You know you shouldn’t have come to me.”

Ponto grinned at the old scruple. “ I haven’t come about my religion, Mr. Barree,” he said.

Andrew Barrie told the story of the London boy who declared that he wanted to see his pastor " spiritual ” and stated that he wanted a pair of trousers.

“ You’re going to the other extreme, Ponto,” he added. “Isn’t your life your religion?”

200

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ I suppose so,” said Ponto, “ but I want worldly advice, Mr. Barree, and I trust your judgment. I was thinking of trying for a teaching job. I’m set on going to the ’Varsity, and getting my degree. When I’ve got that, I can make up my mind what I’m going to do. But I want to look round in the meantime.”

Andrew Barrie considered. He was adopting Uncle Herbert’s expedient of taking a long view. His view extended beyond the Cyclopean clock tower by the younger Water of Leith. The terms of the Rhodes bequest had lately been published. He looked at Ponto. What were the essentials of a Rhodes Scholar? Scholarship, athletic prowess, the power to lead men. What had Oxford to offer Frederick Lawrence, and what had Frederick Lawrence to offer Oxford? That would depend very greatly upon the next three years. If Ponto were irrevocably caught in the system then in vogue in New Zealand, if he were to become a pupil-teacher and a student simultaneously, he would be, in a sense, returning to the mill that had minted him.

Andrew Barrie remembered the part that Hurze! had played in the boy’s development. He noted how something in this child of poverty and drabness had responded to the influence of something so elusive that one cannot define it without incurring the danger of being reproached as a snob. Andrew Barrie had in mind an encounter of some days back. He had entered a tram full of small boys on their way to cricket practice at Carisbrook. They represented an outpost of the minute army which was holding out against the system which Gerard Burnaby had gently derided on his wav home from Hurzel with Ponto

201

DUX

that queer Sunday night. They were the members of Mr. Lorrimer’s Preparatory School, of which Harold Marsh was one of the alluminati. Andrew Barrie had introduced Gerard Burnaby to John Lorrimer in the hope that they might make common cause from the fact that they were both from “ The House,” but, for once in a way, Andrew Barrie had blundered. A reminiscent light was discernible in the eyes of Messrs. Burnaby and Lorrimer when they were introduced. However, Andrew Barrie did not like to lose a friend, and had managed to keep on good terms with either party. Mr. Lorrimer was emphatically a gentleman, and there was no cause for him to explain how he came to be teaching small boys in the antipodes, instead of occupying a college living or sitting in Westminster Hall. Andrew Barrie thought instinctively of Mr. Lorrimer when he took his long view.

‘‘When would you want a job, Ponto?” he asked

“ Oh, after the holidays. I met a chap when we were in Christchurch with the team. He put me on to a good thing, grass seeding on the Banks Peninsula. He takes a contract every year. If I can get my fare up, I’m going to see if Andy M’Laughlin will come in. It will be quick money for a start.”

“ Good,” said Andrew Barrie. “ I have something in my mind to follow, Ponto. I’ll tell you more when I’ve written a letter and had an answer. But first of all, you have to get the scholarship, haven’t vou?”

“ I’ve got to try, Mr. Barree,” said Ponto. “Then vou’ll let me know. Mr. Barreh ? ”

Involuntarily the minister smiled, as Ponto switched off from the King Street to the Hurzel style

202

A POOR SCHOLAR

in the pronunciation of his name. He saw the influence of Gerard Burnaby in something further than Ponto’s speech, and wondered at the native “ nous ” of the boy. There was a new deftness in his very manner of entering the room.

“ Well, good-night, and good luck,” said the minister; and when Ponto was gone he sat down and wrote the following letter to Mr. Lorrimer:

The Manse,

October 9th

My dear Lorrimer,

If it is true that you are losing your assistant at the end of the year, I hope you will consider the case of young Lawrence, whose game against Christ’s College we united in admiring upon that very cold afternoon. He is sitting for a Junior University Scholarship this year, and I think there is every possibility of his pulling it off. Your first objection to Lawrence will be that he is not a gentleman. To this I reply that you are, and he is a very acute and observant lad. If you can get over this initial difficulty—and I admit it is a grave one—l think I may promise that you will have played a part in the formation of a career. I do not think your clients will go in a body to see what kind of house your new assistant comes from. I can answer for it that your youngsters will derive great profit from being associated with young Lawrence. I am taking up this matter from a deep sense of responsibility, and I assure you I am not looking at the matter solely from the lad’s point of view. I have known him ever since he was a little fellow, and I know that he is a force for good in the world. He has asked my advice as to securing a job that will be compatible with his

203

DUX

University work, and I can think of no happier arrangement from the point of view of you both. Will you give me authority to send Lawrence to see you?

Yours very sincerely,

Andrew Barrie.

The first indication to Ponto that the minister had been moving on his behalf, was a letter from Mr. Lorrimer suggesting an interview, and naming a time. The result of this was a provisional appointment for Ponto as assistant in The Melrose Preparatory School for Boys, John Lorrimer, M.A. (Oxon.), Principal. The appointment was contingent upon Ponto’s winning a scholarship.

F. H. B. Lawrence justified his backers, not only by winning a scholarship, but also by pulling off the medal as Dux of his school.

Mrs. Lawrence occupied a seat in the gallery at Ponto’s last prize-giving at the High. Myrtle was keeping the flag flying at the little shop in Great King Street. Her mother entered the school grounds on Andrew Barrie’s arm. It was an occasion for Mrs. Lawrence, and she might have dressed for it had not so much gone in the buying of Ponto’s new suit of dark blue serge.

Ponto’s reception as he returned to his seat with his embryo library, was indicative of something more than mere recognition of attainment. There was underlying the applause, a certain note of banter which is vouchsafed only to one who is something of a pet as well as hero. His smile, as he led the School in three cheers for the visitor who had come to distribute the prizes, was too propitiatory for a Napoleon among young New Zealanders. Andrew

204

A POOR SCHOLAR

Barrie noted it from his place by the side of Ponto’s mother. He wondered what place Herby was holding in her mind—Herby, her first-born and her beloved. Mothers are notoriously perverse. Andrew guessed aright that she would have had this triumph for him.

A dux of the High School wears his honour for a brief hour, for with the prize-giving, the School disintegrates. In a short while there only remains the janitor to meditate upon the passing of all triumph and the obliteration of all token of disaster in the impartial process of time.

As Ponto walked down the hill, sharing his burden of books with Andrew Barrie, and supporting his mother upon his arm, it was difficult for him to believe that he was turning his back upon the grey tower which had focussed his energies for the last five years. Since the anodyne for life seems to be more life, he did not waste any time in vain repining, but set his face steadfastly towards that other tower where the clock should have been. He had good hopes that he would win a place in the scholarship list, and in the meantime there was the little gathering behind the shop with the red blind.

Myrtle had all things in readiness. He was visited with some compunction when he recalled certain secret thoughts concerning his sister. She had stood out in such sharp contrast to Pauline —Pauline, who never expatiated upon the obvious in a piercing twang, as Myrtle was wont to do—Pauline, whose very name was a synonym for that otherwhere of which the grey tower of the High was the antithesis.

The two Andies were of the party, and later they were joined by Herby, who stood awkwardly at the

205

DUX

door to let his girl pass in before him. Later Uncle Herbert appeared, and was “ prevailed upon to make a speech ” —to quote his own words. Truth to tell, Uncle Herbert required very little pressing to get upon his feet. The presence of the minister at the party put him on his mettle, and he ransacked the strongholds of Free Thought for his most telling quotations. Andrew Barrie smiled. He was recalling the admonition which had come to his mind on the night he had walked home with a young and somnolent Ponto, and had been bidden to come in. It was very good to be there.

Ponto set his medal among his other treasures in a deal box he had made for himself. It was a very tidy sanctuary. Harold’s letters occupied one corner, and bound with them by an elastic band was Millais’ Captive. He wondered, as he put the medal there, how much longer his box would have house room above the little shop. He had recently hit his head upon the slanting roof of this compartment, and this little accident had brought him suddenly to a knowledge that he was outgrowing his quarters. For the second time, the King Street shop had seemed cramped and stifling. The first occasion was that far off Saturday when Long Dick had set him down on the pavement after his excursion into Fairyland. He wondered if he had outgrown Fairyland, too, now that he was Dux.

201

CHAPTER XIX

A SUNBURNT SICKLEMAN

Ponto stood waist high in the tall feathery cocksfoot grass. The tent where he camped with his mates was visible in the gully below. He could just catch the aromatic breath of wood smoke from the cook’s fire. The “ poisoner ” was preparing something specially choice for that day’s meal, for the party had been making good time.

Ponto bent to his task again after his brief respite. He was armed with an implement as primitive as that which Boaz must have issued to his men, a conventional sickle which must have come as a Godsend to some ancient poet in search of new analogy for the waxing moon. From a short distance came the monotonous thud, thud of the flails, instruments as primitive as Ponto’s sickle. The grass seed was being beaten out on floors of canvas situated on the most negotiable spots on the hillside. The grass seeder, like many another, gambles on the weather. If the elements are kind, and he be diligent, he can make a good cheque in the course of a day or two. If, like Ponto, he took a long view, the grass-seeder would entrust his cheque to the squatter on whose station he harvested. If he followed the promptings of Omar, he took the cash in hand and blued it at the local hotel. Grass-seeding is conducive of a princely thirst.

Ponto’s appetites were all in the direction of achievement. He had won his scholarship. His billet with Mr. Lorrimer in February was assured. He

207

A SUNBURNT SICKLEMAN

wanted to begin the year with something in hand. The railway fare would eat into his cheque, but he was taking back with him an asset not so simple to compute, the inspiration which comes from a break with the old order. When he went back to Great King Street, he would be as swarthy as Long Dick himself, and, unlike that pathetic figure, the possessor of an excellent pair of lungs.

So Ponto’s sickle went singing through the long grass, and it bowed before him as he hoped would all else that lay between him and attainment. His gang worked on till after sunset, and a girl sat on the verandah step of a homestead on the other side of the valley and listened to the rhythmic fall of the flails softened by distance.

“ That party of Merrick’s are hot stuff,” said a man, pausing in a promenade of the lighted verandah. He might have been pacing the deck of a liner that had come to rest in some semi-tropical port. His dinner jacket suggested east of Suez in some indefinable way. The girl continued to caress the head of a collie, to the peril of her white evening frock.

“They’re a party of students, aren’t they? Students are always the best. They don’t drink their cheque. It makes you think of the Scottish students with their bag of oatmeal. You didn’t live on oatmeal at Cambridge, did you, Uncle Mart?”

“ Oh, yes,” replied the man, “ oatmeal, and other things. Two of the chaps in Merrick’s gang have come all the wav from Dunedin.”

“ Dunedin,” echoed the girl, “ there you areoatmeal students! I’d like to see them.”

“ You shall,” said the man, “ I’ll ask them to tea when they come for their cheques.”

208

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Tell them not to dress up,'’ said the girl. “ I think it would be jollier to have tea with them as they are.”

“ Well, I daresay they’ll give us a pannikin We’ll ride over to their camp to-morrow if you like.’

“ I should love to. I don’t want to go back to England and have nothing to tell about but Rotorua. Everyone in England knows about Rotorua.”

“ I’m sorry you didn’t come in time for the shearing. However, grass-seeding is rather characteristic of these parts. You ought to see something of it. Now let’s have a bit of your England. The oiano waits. I’ll sit here and smoke, and you will transport me to Hampton Court, or St. John’s Backs.”

The girl pushed the collie gently away and stood up on the step.

“ Hampton Court will be under snow now, I daresay,” she said. “ I suppose you want me to play something wintry. Man never is but always to be blessed. For my part I'd rather listen to the ’possums. Isn’t it a funny noise they make. It’s like the mainspring of a watch breaking.”

There came the melancholy cry of a morepork, and the eirl shivered.

“ It makes you quite glad to hear the flails going, doesn’t it ? ” she said. “ They must be keen to keep it up so late. I’ll sing you a setting of Ye Sunburned Sicklemen of August Weary. I suppose this is your August ? ”

She went inside and sang, and while she sang. Ponto turned in at the white gate, an emissary from the gang on a matter of business. Uncle Mart was accustomed to receive visitors on his verandah at all hours of the dav or evening during grass-seeding.

209

A. SUNBURNT SICKLEMAN

Sometimes the Maoris, from whom he leased certain paddocks, would appear in quest of their rent. He recognized in Ponto one of the young fellows from Dunedin. He also noted his quick appraising scrutiny of the house, with its festoon of electric light and its open front door, from whence issued the closing strains of Ye Sunburned Sicklemen. Ponto stated his business, and Uncle Mart led him round to his office at the side of the house. When they reappeared the girl was once more caressing the collie on the verandah.

“ Here’s one of the men from the south, Dot,” said the man in the dinner jacket. “ Would you like him to give you a short lecture on grass-seeding? In the meantime, I’ll get him something to drink.”

Ponto stared very straight at the girl. She stood in an aureole of light, a fair slim figure, exquisitely delicate. He had never seen such golden hair. It was a provocation to any man who had spent a week of strenuous labour in the open air. Out in the garden a ’possum whirred. A swan screamed from the lake below. The morepork whimpered further afield, and the flails beat on from the other side of the valley. This was no bewitchment of the Pleasaunce that had overtaken Ponto. Pauline had never made the blood pound in his head as did this fair slim creature. He was aware that she had put him a question, and that he had not taken the drift of it. He said, “ I beg your pardon ” very awkwardly.

“ I wonder if you were at school with Harold Mhrsh ? ” she repeated. “He used to talk to me about Dunedin. My name is Dorothy Winter. I met him at Mr. Burnaby’s. He’s Rector of Surlow. I’ve not been out long from England.”

210

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Yes,” Ponto replied, "he wrote to me for a bit How’s he getting on ? ”

He felt he was making as poor a show at conversation as he had done on the occasion of his talk with Gerard Burnaby on the queer Sunday. He was a little stunned by the double impact of the girl’s beauty, and this sudden lifting of the veil that had lately fallen upon Harold.

“ Oh, Harold’s still dilettanting, I believe. He means to go to Cambridge. I’m never surprised at the most outrageous coincidences, but it is rather remarkable that two of Harold’s acquaintances should meet here in the back of beyond. He must have been a friend of yours if he wrote.”

She looked a little sharply at Ponto, as he smiled

“ I believe you’re Ponto,” she said.

J “ “ That’s me,” replied Ponto. He was struggling with the problem of how to convey to this girl the place that Harold had held in the forefront of those influences which were not concerned with his outward fortunes. Then he thought of Pauline, and somehow it seemed wrong that he should confide in this stranger. Her beauty had taken him unawares. It was also a little flabbergasting to be hailed as

“ Ponto ” by a total stranger, thus far away from his own native Great King Street.

“ I had a dissertation upon Ponto one wet Sunday afternoon. Harold was showing me his photographs, and he came across a snap of you in a fez and baggy trousers.”

Ponto laughed. “ I remember,” he said, “we dressed up one day at Hurzel. Well I never!”

And here Uncle Mart arrived with his housekeeper in tow. Ponto was duly refreshed, and sent on his

211

A SUNBURNT SICKLEMAN

way. Thereafter, a new element played its part in the general conspiracy of Ponto’s progress. The adventure of the grass-seeding contract had suddenly developed into an idyll. He could not define to himself the difference that lay between this new discovery and the discovery of the Pleasaunce. The difference was there, and it vaguely troubled him, even while he rejoiced at the new sense of the fulness of life that this late encounter had brought him. The thought that he might never meet Dorothy Winter again was not to be entertained. If she were Harold’s friend, then somehow and somewhere Ponto should meet her.

When he returned to Dunedin, the disturbance she had caused in him detracted in some measure from the benefits of the holiday that were not purely financial. She had appeared on the morning following that first encounter, riding beside her uncle, on a sure-footed hack, well used to the hills of Banks Peninsula. Ponto had endured his measure of chaff when the little cavalcade moved on. Dorothy Winter had greeted him with “ Good-morning Ponto,” and it was said that he had not let the grass grow under his feet at the homestead. Ponto grew red and plied his flail. He was not sure whether he resented the chaffing, or whether it was a tribute to the reality of Ponto’s progress. The encounter on the verandah had a cameo-like quality. He had come out of the dusk and the rural quietude of the station upon that scene of colour and daintiness. It had been like a direct assault upon his senses. The supper party at Hurzel had been an Aladdin’s affair, a sheer bewitchment. This was something different. The longing for its recurrence sometimes came upon Ponto like

212

A POOR SCHOLAR

a physical thirst. He had been thoroughly and honestly tired that night, and never had he enjoyed a drink such as the sparkling cider which Uncle Mart had proffered. Here, as before, when there seemed a danger that Ponto might be pulled out of his course, the career reasserted itself. He had to make a “ do ” of his apprenticeship with Mr. Lorrimer, as he had made a “do ” of the grass-seeding contract. So it was a very brown and alert Frederick Lawrence who took in hand the lower portion of Mr. Lorrimef’s academy upon a morning in early February.

213

CHAPTER XX

CHEZ LORRIMER

Life consists of a series of sensations repeated under varying circumstances. So it was that when Ponto confronted a first detachment of Melrosians at the tea table on the eve of a new term, he was essentially the same Ponto whom the deaconess had led as her one ewe lamb, up to Mr. Littlejohn’s piano on the evening they had sung of Ephrathah. It is probable that, with the exception of two or three of the older and more sophisticated, the Melrosians recked not of the new master’s inward qualms. There was something rather eerie about the whole assemblage at this neutral hour, which belonged neither to holidays nor school time. Mr. Lorrimer spread a kind of twilight jocosity from his end of the table. His laugh had a spectral quality which did not deceive those older and sadder members of his academy, who were taking such merciless stock of Ponto. There was menace and exhilaration in the scrutiny of those sixteen pairs of eyes. The boarders of the academy arrived in detachments from various quarters, and at nine o’clock prayers were read, and the academy went to roost.

Ponto was billeted in a little room which commanded a strategic view of the main dormitory. He went to bed with a kind of composite portrait of the Melrosians before his eyes. There was also with him that sense of caste which Turnbull, the gardener’s remark, had aroused. Only the trees of the Town

214

A POOR SCHOLAR

Belt and the Queen’s Drive divided him from the house whose fence had guarded a secret. He had never been sure whether that secret was his or not, and here in the eyes of some of these young exiles was that indefinable note of allegiance to some such place as Hurzel, which Ponto seemed to divine by some sort of intuition. It was something more than mere clothes that differentiated a Melrosian from a native of Great King Street.

Ponto had put an end to a fracas in the box room, and it was the protagonists in this affair who may be said to have dominated his composite portrait. A boy called Forrister had brought back with him in his “ tucker-box ” a silk cap, such as is worn by the stage gondolier. The train of tender associations with this cap was Forrister’s secret. He certainly had not intended that it should be worn by himself during the term, far less by any other member of the academy. But another, named Haviland, had ravaged Forrister’s box, and was discovered pirouetting about the box room with the cap on his head. Forrister was a small sallow boy with a certain cat-like gracefulness of bearing, and a pair of very dark and resentful eyes. Ponto had seldom seen a face so transformed with rage. Haviland was large and lumpy, with a fictitious air of benignity, and a powerful frame. The casus belli seemed such a trifle to evoke the terrific “ row ” that Ponto had to quash. Mr. Lorrimer had taken delivery of Forrister from Pontb’s arms, and had dealt summarily with the case. Ponto had noticed Forrister at tea. He was the one Melrosian of more than five minutes’ standing who had not bothered to be inquisitorial. He was evidently too preoccupied with his own thoughts. Ponto had

215

CHEZ LORRIMER

thought him rather like a figure in some Italian picture. He certainly had in his eyes that elusive light of Quality Street, which Ponto recognized in the majority of the company.

Whatever patrician qualities Forrister may have possessed, self-control was not one of them. Haviland’s offence seemed so very mild to provoke such a murderous attack. However, it was refreshing to find that there was someone capable of secreting something other than food, or ammunition, or livestock in his “ tucker-box.”

Forrister seemed to be a boy of ideas, if “ idea ” is a strong enough word for that which provoked such a nerve storm.

Ponto awoke early next morning with a sound in his ears, which he recognized with a curious thrill. It was the birds singing in the Pleasaunce at the breaking of the day. The sound came to him with a curious effect of remoteness, a remoteness in time rather than distance. There was he on the threshold of life’s adventure, and there, but a few hundred yards away, the other adventure had taken place. Whatever his apprehensions for the coming day (and they were manifold), it was certain that the place of his care-freedom still remained. It was somehow more of an adventure to have slept within sound of the Pleasaunce, than to have become a self-supporting unit in the community.

Ponto dressed, and went down to the business of coping with the resurgent academy.

That first morning in the sun-lit classroom was more pregnant with possibilities of triumph and disaster than any moment of Ponto’s life. The grassseeding contract had been in essence a holiday,

216

A POOR SCHOLAR

despite the attendant cheque. Here he really was embarking upon the adventure of making his way through the world, and it was not to be supposed that the average small boy who comprised his class in the main, was going to stand by and applaud the occasion. The small boy had his own career to consider, and Ponto was merely a milestone on the way. Still, there they were, thrown together by the caprice of circumstances, and who was going to have the best of it?

Certainly it did not appear that the stars in their courses were fighting for Forrister. Ponto blundered rather badly by “ making an example ” of Forrister, who appeared to be at the centre of a disturbance in the back benches.

“ Now or never,” was the phrase that rose to his mind, as it became evident that Melrosians of a year’s standing and upward, intended “ trying it on ” with the new master.

Forrister was sent up to Mr. Lorrimer for the second time within twenty-four hours. Ponto might have had his own experience to guide him. He had not been the moving cause of the disturbance which had ended in his being called out by Miss Struthers at the “ Geordy.” But he acted on a panic impulse, and sent up the wrong boy without going fully into the matter. It demonstrated the fact that he meant business, but it made him an enemy.

Forrister’s method of displaying his hostility was as unusual as his penchant for fancy millinery in his " tucker-box.” He became excessively suave and polite to Ponto, while reserving the right, as it were, to regard him with a critical and disapproving eye on all occasions. Ponto would encounter Forrister’s

212

CHEZ LORRIMER

reproachful stare at every turn, and it began to obsess him, as the phantom curate obsessed the bishop in the Bab Ballads.

It fell to Ponto to conduct a party of Melrosians to Carisbrook for one of the few remaining cricket practices. It was an occasion on which he might have justly hoped to “ make good,” for he was filled with the same sense of an adventurous quest as elated the normal Melrosian. It was somehow vaguely disquieting that, whereas every pupil save Forrister, barged into the tramcar ahead of him, that enigmatic child remained with his hand on the rail throughout the melee, and gravely motioned Ponto to a place with “ After you. sir.” Ponto was in two minds. If he bundled Forrister in by the slack of his jacket, he would be discountenancing an act of courtesy. Yet there was that curious glint in the boy’s eyes. “ War to the knife,” thought Ponto, and accepted the preferment with “ Thank you, Forrister.”

At Carisbrook, Ponto converted that much prized outing into something more than Mr, Lorrimer ever made it. Mr. Lorrimer was never more pedagogic than on the cricket field. Ponto became a boy among boys. Also, it is to be recorded, that his vowel sounds suffered a relapse. He referred to “ the beoundree ” with the nonchalance of a Cocky Middleton, and most of the Melrosians liked him the better for it. Only Forrister’s lip curled.

Forrister dressed for cricket much more effectively than he played it. He had Harold Marsh’s knack of wearing the most ordinary clothes with a certain elusive distinction, which in his case, ran almost to dapperness. But however pleasing a figure he may have made in his immaculate flannel shirt and shorts,

218

A POOR SCHOLAR

his habit of falling into a resentful reverie at mid-on, militated against his effectiveness in the field.

A few days after, Ponto had need of a pencil during class, and Forrister sprang to his assistance with an implement striped like a barber’s pole. It happened that Mrs. Lawrence had opened a “ line ” of these quite recently, and had been “ featuring ” them in her window. A reminiscent light came into Ponto’s eye. He looked up to meet the sorrowful and candid scrutiny of Forrister.

“ I bought it at Lawrence’s, sir,” he said. Ponto felt the blood surge up to his head as the titter went round the class.

“ Thank you, Forrister,” he said, with that grin which a knock always called forth.

He mentioned the incident to Andrew Barrie at the first visit he allowed himself to the Manse after taking up duty at Lorrimer’s. The minister smiled. “ I have an idea,” he said, “ that such ingenuity ought to be diverted to better uses.”

“ It was easy enough to find out that my mother kept a shop,” said Ponto. “ What worries me is that I blushed.”

" That wasn’t because your mother kept a shop,” said the minister. “ You blushed because the laddie had scored, and it was such a poor kind of score.”

“ It hardly seemed the right kind of recompense for having been hammered unjustly.”

“ Why don’t you put that right ? ” asked the minister.

" How can I? ” asked Ponto. “It would upset any authority 1 have.”

219

215

CHEZ LORRIMER

The minister rubbed his chin, “ I don’t know,” he murmured, half to himself, “ people who are capable of showing stamina in resentment, are often capable of showing stamina in friendship.”

“ I don’t call sulks stamina,” said Ponto.

11 They are a symptom of character sometimes,” said Barrie.

Ponto got up and regarded the football group steadfastly.

“ I don’t like making enemies,” he said, “ and 1 like that nipper. I don’t mind if he thinks me a larrikin, but I wouldn’t like him to think I’ve a set against him. What had I better do?”

“ Really, Ponto,” said the minister, “ your trust in me is very touching, but you do put me some posers.”

“What would you do, Mr. Barrie? You see what’s happened. They’ve discovered I’m not a gentleman.”

The statement was made so naively that Andrew Barrie’s affection for the boy welled up from his heart, so that his eyes were suddenly dimmed.

“ You’ll get this little snob on your side one of these days, Ponto,” he said, “ he’s been doing some muddled thinking on his own account. I like the sound of him. Some people manage to be devious and attractive at the same time. Why not tell him you’re sorry you weren’t quite square with him ? ”

Andrew Barrie’s method of displaying affection was irregular. It isn’t usual to do so by administering a blow to the object of one’s affection, but that was exactly the effect of his last words upon Ponto. As always, Ponto took the blow with a smile.

“ Where would my authority be ? ” he demanded evasively.

A POOR SCHOLAR

Andrew Barrie lit a pipe. “ I don’t want to be parsonical,” he began, “ but it seems to me that one of the parables would be apposite here. You make sure of your disgruntled sheep, and the ninety and nine will be all right. However, I fear I am being high-falutin’ and theoretical. Only I do think it an occasion for a very difficult kind of frankness. No doubt these boys will talk among themselves and write to their parents. You’ll encounter snobbery all along the way, Ponto. I don’t think that will matter in the long run. What will matter is that this nipper will go on expending his energies and his undoubted talents in carrying on a kind of blood feud. He’s adopted a very novel form of persecution. Make him feel it’s not worth while.”

“ I’ll think it over,” said Ponto

Ponto did think it over. He rehearsed a very telling scene in which he addressed the assembled class in this wise: “ When I started to teach you something happened to one of you which happened to me when I was a youngster at the George Street School." Here was to follow a brief and frank biographical sketch ending with a touching reference to his mother. Then he would name Forrister as the aggrieved party, and the latter’s proud reserve would completely break down. The actual culprits would display a sudden thirst for self-expiation, and the emotional atmosphere would be electrical.

However, in the light of morning, Ponto’s sense of humour came to the rescue. He came to the conclusion that Forrister must be “ lived down.” After all, there had come no round-robin from the parents asking for the immediate withdrawal of the pretending underling. The University classes began,

216

222

CHEZ LORRIMER

and Ponto’s sense of proportion was regulated by a realization that the academy was only a jumping-off ground for the career proper. And with the football season came Ponto’s opportunity of deleting the stigma of the coloured pencil. Ponto was included in the ’Varsity Second XV, and played his first game on the North Ground against the Union Second, included in whose pack was Andy M’Laughlin. As a result of two games with the Second XV he was promoted to the First, and from that time the soubriquet “ Ponto ” began to have a provincial significance.

Lorrimer’s academy began to form a sort of contingent of claquers at the Saturday afternoon performances. Spectators came to expect that shrill threefold acclamation of “ Pontoin the course of the game. The assistant master became like the sexton and the beadle in the already quoted Bab Ballads. “On Sunday they were good. On week days they were minions.” On week days the house master was Mr. Lawrence to his face, and “ Ponto ” behind his back. But on Saturdays he was “ Ponto ” to all men, whether Greek or Barbarian, bond or free.

It was due to his coming to the academy that soccer was abandoned for Rugby football before the season was out. The academy held aloof from any league or combine, but managed to arrange a series of friendly matches with some of the local school teams. After witnessing Ponto’s first game for the ’Varsity the Melrosians were fired with a desire to take the field fifteen strong, and for a time were a kind of hybrid, fulfilling old soccer engagements, and entering upon engagements to play certain teams at Rugby. It was a difficult matter to produce an opposing side of a just size and calibre, but Ponto

A POOR SCHOLAR

enlisted the services of Andy M’Laughlin in this matter.

Mr. Lorrimer witnessed this revolution with mingled feelings. He could not but be aware of the new spirit that Ponto was breathing into the Melrosian games. Keenness was always to be encouraged so he put no difficulties in the way, after he had assured himself that M’Laughlin’s side did not harbour any undesirables. The change in atmosphere from Carisbrook to the North Ground was one of the disadvantages attendant upon winter. As for the Melrosians themselves, Ponto’s antecedents mattered not a whit. He was, as Andrew Barrie had foretold, becoming an institution. Then, as if the fates were conspiring on Ponto’s behalf, Forrister broke his leg in a very simple and foolish way, while running down the steep asphalt path from the school. It just happened that Ponto was at hand, and in the course of getting him indoors the two of them were so preoccupied that there was not much time to bother about the old feud. The leg was duly set, and in a very short while Forrister’s mother arrived on the scene. She encountered the junior house-master as he was returning from a lecture. It was quite dark, and she was standing in the rays of the hall gas-light talking with Mr. Lorrimer. Ponto realized from whom Forrister had inherited those dandified ways. He had never seen anyone so exquisitely dressed. When he came upon Rupert Brooke’s sonnet in which occurs the line “ touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended,” he had a retrospective glimpse of Mrs Forrister’s sables as she stood in the garish light of the hall. She was not a beautiful woman, but she had set herself out to the very best advantage.

218

CHEZ LORRIMER

Dorothy Winter’s beauty was of the careless lavish order. Mrs. Forrister’s elegance was deliberate. Her whole appearance seemed somehow to explain that exiled preoccupied look in her son’s eyes. It might almost explain that unaccountable outburst of rage on the occasion of the coloured cap. She was a woman who would make her home magnetically attractive to her husband and her children.

Mr. Lorrimer introduced his assistant. Ponto felt himself blushing a furious red. What had young Forrister written home about him? But Mrs. Forrister was not to be drawn. Her eyes had that starry appearance he had noticed in the eyes of Pauline when Harold lay at death’s door.

“ I have to thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. “ I hope you will find a little time to see Tony. Six weeks. Isn’t it hard luck? I’m staying in Dunedin for a time, but he will get tired of me. Is there one in your family who is always in the wars, Mr. Lawrence?”

Ponto thought of Herby’s peccadilloes. He did not know whether he would be justified in bringing him forward as an instance.

“ I’ve been pretty lucky myself, Mrs. Forrister,” he said. “If Tony would like to see me I’d be only too pleased.”

Ponto paid his visit to the sick room on the following day. Forrister and he met as two who had passed through an ordeal together, for that short journey from the school gate to the school door had taxed them both. Such a bond is a great destroyer of old prejudices. Ponto’s protective instincts had been aroused by the sight of that shapely little body crumpled and beleagured with pain. Now, as he

224

A POOR SCHOLAR

looked upon Tony Forrister’s head and shoulders decorously set at the opposite extremity to the hummock under the counterpane, he was beset with a kind of whimsical wonder at this child’s faculty for looking picturesque under all circumstances.

Forrister’s smile was innocent of any malice as Ponto opened with a conventional, “ Well, how goes it?”

His magnanimity did not extend to relieving Ponto of the onus of the conversation, and the latter shortly found himself with his back to the wall, so to speak. Ponto had not been in such a quandary since that evening he had walked home with Gerard Burnaby. Life, as has been sapiently noted at the beginning of this chapter, is a series of impressions repeated under varying circumstances. Ponto dragged in a third party, as he had done on the occasion of that former “ dry up.”

“ I think your mother is very nice,” he said abjectly.

“ Yes,” assented Forrister, and a smile came into his brooding eyes, “ I was glad to see her.”

Then Ponto found himself in the midst of that so often rehearsed scene. The circumstances were all wrong, of course, but the undeniable fact remained that he was burbling of his own mother in the most approved Sunday School story manner, and that he was holding his audience. He had never indulged in such a rush of reminiscence.

Forrister listened with the avidity of one who loves a good story. Whatever compunctions may have visited him, he did not allow them to appear.

So it was that the feud petered out without a single word or look from either to testify that the

220

CHEZ LORRIMER

feud had ever existed. Forrister was taken home at the end of the prescribed six weeks, and that is the end of him, so far as this portion of the story is concerned. He seems to have occupied a disproportionate space in this chapter. Of other phases and tendencies during Ponto’s stay at the academy, much might be written. One might trace the concurrent influences of Barrie and of Burnaby in the government of his reading and thinking. One might mark the day when he first discovered some author for himself, when he acclaimed something as true and lovely in the teeth of Gerard Burnaby, as it were. He became more and more sensible of his indebtedness to that strange being as he coped with his pupils, and pursued his own studies. Subconsciously he called in Gerard Burnaby whenever he was confronted with some problem of taste, just as he went to Andrew Barrie with his ethical problems. The former influence acted as a sort of break to his own receptivity.

Now he was passing through a phase when he dared to think and feel for himself. Whatever his loyalty to the home in Great King Street, he knew in his heart that Myrtle and his mother were the high priestesses of a certain cult which stayed people in a kind of trance of garishness It was a far more deadly thraldom than that which Pauline had represented in her play. Gerard Burnaby had shown him the way of escape, but Ponto was coming to realize that Burnaby, like the rest of us, had paid the price of escape from any one set of standards. One did not escape by a wholesale condemnation of a certain series of conventions or tunes or modes or even comestibles. The idea of escape from environment

226

222

A POOR SCHOLAR

had underlain Ponto’s reactions to life, since that day whose echo recurs throughout this narrative like a bourdon. Long Dick might be cited as the unwitting agent of that entity to whom so many names have been given.

Side by side with the multifarious incidents of his progress there was that one incident which seemed to belong to all time, and to no time. The speech of Polonius was not one of the literary milestones which Ponto passed at this time. He had rubbed acquaintance with it as far back as “ Geordy ” days. It may have been at the time that he acknowledged to himself that “to thine own self be true,” meant, not the intellectual consent of Gerard Burnaby, nor the kindly approval of Andrew Barrie, but the ratification of the child in whom consciousness had been born upon that distant blue Saturday. Of the incidents of his stay at Lorrimer’s that which deserves more notice than the neglible matter of Forrister, is Ponto’s second encounter with Dorothy Winter. It is so notable a matter that it should have a chapter to itself.

CHAPTER XXI

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

It was at the close of what had perhaps been his most notable game in the football field that Ponto had an encounter which brought on him a sudden sense of changed values. He was in the flood tide of his first term at the University, and so effectually caught up in its momentum, that he was little more than a cheery automaton. Such moments of introspection as he may have indulged, were coloured by that mood of which I have written in the foregoing chapter. He had, as it were, allowed the splendour of that remembered setting in which Dorothy Winter had shone, to take rank with the things he had discovered for himself—things that transcended the approval of Gerard Burnaby or Andrew Barrie. But Ponto did not live by emotions alone, and so the Dorothy Winter pastorale had been subjugated by the insistent marching song of a career in the making.

His game that afternoon had been sufficiently absorbing to seem the be-all and end-all of existence. As he rattled over the asphalt in his studded boots at the close of it, it is probable that his preoccupation was with his body’s grosser needs, rather than with the nameless aspirations of the heart. Then someone in an overcoat that exhaled the authentic breath of opulence, hailed him, what time he placed a detaining arm on the sleeve of Ponto’s royal blue jersey.

“ Hallo, Dunedin. There’s someone here who wants to renew an acquaintance. I hope you haven’t forgotten an evening you spent at Five Ngaios ? ”

228

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ I haven’t,” Ponto replied, “ I suppose you havn’t any of that sparkling cider about you? ” Then he was aware of Dorothy Winter, standing at some distance, apart from the hurly-burly.

Her furs were less costly than those of Mrs. Forrister, but she seemed richer in every other respect. Her exquisite colouring, and the golden largesse of her wonderful hair, rendered her a kind of embodied challenge to the drabness of that grey winter afternoon.

“ She was wondering,” continued Uncle Marl, “ if she might be granted the high privilege of driving you back to town. Can you give your companions the go-by, and come with us ? ”

Such an invitation partook of the nature of a royal command. Ponto went off in search of overcoat and muffler, resigning his seat in the communal char-a-banc which had taken the place of the old-time drag. In Ponto’s boyhood these drags had plied between Manse Street and the Caledonian Ground proper, with their freight of betasselled gladiators. Somehow the slogans they chanted sounded more gladiatorial to the accompaniment of horses’ hoofs. Such things belonged to the halcyon region wherein the Golden Pirate dwelt.

For Ponto that afternoon, there was no repining for vanished pomps. The Golden Age, like the Kingdom of Heaven, was within him. For the second time he encountered Dorothy Winter at the close of a strenuous day, and her beauty seemed like the fairest concomitant to that pleasing sense of having expended himself valiantly.

“ Uncle Mlart was not persuaded it was you, till half way through the first spell,” said Dorothv

224

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

Winter, as she led the way to the abiding place of the touring Renault in which she had driven her uncle, by easy stages, from Christchurch. I became reminiscent as soon as you came on the field. ‘ Where have I seen that face before?’ said I.”

“ Then it all came with a flash, I suppose,” said Uncle Mart. “Now, where can we drive you?”

“ That all depends where you’re putting up,” Ponto replied.

“ We’re putting up at the Grand,” said Dorothy Winter.

" Or putting up with it,” interposed the sybaritic Uncle Mart.

“That’ll be splendid,” said Ponto. But before they had gone very far, they had elicited from him the fact that such a journey’s end would be the beginning of another journey, and became set with that commendable determination which is sometimes to be found in motorists, to make a complete job of transporting their fare. Dorothy Winter explained that she wanted to try the Renault on the hills, and that they had simply nothing to do until dinner time. So Ponto surrendered to the intoxication of the Renault’s purring action and the gaiety of the driver. It was still in the days before the mastery of a car had become as ordinary a feminine attribute as the mastery of a piano or a perambulator. The girl at the wheel was still looked upon with something of the questioning reverence with which the conservative of the ’nineties regarded the girl on the wheel. At any rate, it was a complete novelty to Ponto to be so charioted. It was novel, too, to find himself, as it were, caught up into that exotic world which he had

225

A POOR SCHOLAR

glimpsed on such occasions as his visit to Christchurch and the supper party at Hurzel, and to feel, for the first time, that he was not so palpably there as a stranger. He found himself exchanging repartee with his charioteer without misgiving or that haunting sense that he was apeing somebody in some novel he had read. He had acquired Gerard Burnaby’s Autolycian eye for oddities and inconsistencies in persons and institutions, without that melancholy gentleman’s fundamental bitterness. He had acquired, too, something of his picturesqueness of phrase, so that Dorothy Winter found him a most entertaining talker on that homeward journey. Then, too, Ponto’s talk was fortified, for her, by the game she had seen him play that afternoon.

It was inevitable that they should make common cause over Harold. Ponto gave an account of his first meeting, and found himself launched upon just such a bout of autobiography as his visit to Forrister had called forth. There was this difference, that the play of Dorothy Winter’s mind, and her ready laugh, were an incentive to paint the whole picture with the comedian’s brush. It happened that Harold’s two oddly assorted acquaintances had lit upon the same characteristics in him, that he had endeared himself to both by that self-same indolent good humour.

“ He was always a kind of Sunday best to me,” Ponto said. “ I don’t know if that will convey anything to you. I’d never seen a silver spoon till I went to Hurzel. But it wasn’t merely a matter of spoons.”

“ Harold hasn’t been put on his mettle,” said Dorothy. “ And talking of spoons, isn’t he a lamentable cricketer? I wonder how he would justify the

231

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

noblesse oblige theory. Do you believe in an enlightened aristocracy ? ”

“ Yes, I think I do,” Ponto answered. “ It’s always nice to think you may meet a lord some day. But why do you want Harold to oblige ? I want him to be happy.”

“ Well, he won’t be happy till his steel is proven,” said Dorothy, as she negotiated a difficult corner. Ponto was not sure whether her stem expression was intended for the corner or Harold.

“ And I won’t be happy till I get it,” said Ponto.

“ I’m like the baby in the bath.”

“ I wonder what it is you want to get,” mused the driver. “ That is what I notice on the faces of so many of you young people out here. I’m talking as if I were a nonagenarian at least.”

“ Well, I want to get Home for one thing,” said Ponto.

“ I don’t think that sounds very polite,” said Dorothy.

“ You couldn’t very well drive me to England,” Ponto laughed. “ That’s what I mean by Home.”

“ Isn’t your own country good enough for you?

“ It will be good enough for me when I’ve seen what it comes from. I don’t suppose you can understand what it is to have all your thoughts turned to a place you’ve never seen.”

“ I shall begin to sing T hear thee speak of a better land ’ in a moment.”

Ponto laughed.

“ Yes, but before I go there I want to see Oxford and Lord’s and Westminster Abbey. I want to see that garden where Harold is sitting in that photograph.”

232

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ I’ve had that thrill,” said Dorothy. “ I assure you there’s nothing in it.”

“ That’s because you’re English born,” said Ponto.

“ I suppose it’s thrilling to be bom anywhere, but you take it for granted in the course of time. You take England for granted. I don’t.”

And here Ponto was recalled from the speculative region into which he had wandered, by the necessity of acting pathfinder to his companion.

The route to the academy was as devious as one of those ways by which Virgil is said to have conducted the melancholy Florentine. In due course Dorothy’s powerful headlights picked out the details of the Pleasaunce. Ponto scarcely recognized the place. He had surrendered to another and a totally alien bewitchment. When at last they halted outside Mr. Lorrimer’s gate, Dorothy Winter seemed loth to allow that they had come to an end of their meeting.

“ I should like to continue this discussion,” she said, as Ponto manipulated the catch of the motor door.

“So should I,” said Ponto, as he straightened himself with a gesture usually associated with a yawn, but sometimes indicating a general state of physical and spiritual well-being.

“ To-morrow then,” said his charioteer, and then they were made suddenly aware of the presence of Uncle Mart.

"Yes, to-morrow, will you dine with us?’’

“ I’m sorry, sir. Fm on duty all day, except between two o’clock and six.”

“ Then you are free for the best meal of all,” said Dorothy Winter, “ Come and take a cup of tea with us.”

228

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

“ Thank you very much,” said Ponto. “ Gerard Burnaby always used to call it a dish. It used to impress me mightily. I should like to come, and thank vou ever so much.”

That evening, Ponto was greeted by a salvo of spoons and knives upon china, and feet upon floor boarding, as he entered the dining room for tea. Those of the boarders who had not obtained exeats, were endeavouring to make the best of their duress. Ponto was aware of premonitory flutterings of conscience as he made his way down to the Grand Hotel at about half-past three. His mother and Myrtle always entertained him of a Sunday, unless he forewarned them. He had been occupied at the academy up to the moment of starting. Perhaps there would be time to drop in at Great King Street between tea and evensong. He was not in a mood for very lucid thinking. The intoxication of the game and the drive, and of Dorothy Winter’s presence, had wrought upon him, so that life seemed to lie before him, a glorious prize for the winning.

He was dismayed to find Dorothy Winter alone, when he was shown into the sitting room, from whose window one had an occasional view of a tramway trolley pole passing and repassing in a kind of Sabbatical trance. The Salvation Army band was playing one of Mrs. Lawrence’s favourite hymn tunes. The strains of it were softened, but not palliated, by distance. It was quite the wrong setting for Dorothy Winter, but she triumphed over it. Ponto still seemed to be assisting at a masque of youth and laughter, despite the Salvation Army Band.

Uncle Mart has gone to see a man about bulbs,” said Dorothy Winter, as she did the honours of the

229

A POOR SCHOLAR

third floor front. “It seems a curious thing to do, but Uncle Mart is given to the curious. He wants to cover Five Ngaios with daffodils.”

“ They grow by the acre in the town that’s named after me,” said Ponto. “ Lawrence was once a goldmining town.”

“ And now the gold grows on the hills for anyone to gather, I suppose.”

“ I suppose so,” said Ponto. “My brother Herbert could tell you. When I passed through Lawrence the daffodils were all gone.”

“ What took you there ? ”

“ Fruit-picking,” said Ponto. “ Fruit-picking is not so strenuous as grass-seeding.”

“ Nor so lucrative. How did the daffodils get there in the first instance ? ”

“ I believe some one in my profession went there to give a lecture on bulbs, and took some specimens with him in his portmanteau. As a matter of fact he was my Headmaster.”

“ Did he propose to plant you out too. What’s that line from The Prelude, ‘Left the name of Wallace like a flower on every hillside,’ or words to that effect. What does he propose to do with the name of Lawrence ? ”

“ I think it would be more accurate to say,” said Ponto gravely, “ What do I propose to do with it ? ”

“ Ah, yes,” said Dorothy, as she poured out the tea. “ The man of destiny. I’ve been wondering, too. You know it isn’t everyone who would be as frank as you have been to me about the small beginning.”

“ I’m glad you know' that verse of Belloc’s,” said Ponto. Then he seemed to recall himself. “ I’m

235

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

sorry. I’m afraid that must have sounded rather presumptuous. Of course you know it.” Dorothy Winter’s laugh was a more efficacious solvent than Gerard Burnaby’s, Ponto felt that, with her at his side, difficulties in the path of the career would vanish as if by magic. He laughed, too. “ I suppose the most important thing about culture or intellectuality, or whatever you like to call it, is not to be acquisitive about it. I’m made that way. I like to chalk up my gains.”

“ People would be frightfully dull if they weren’t. We’d soon grow tired of joining hands and dancing ecstatically round a kind of communal golden calf.”

“ Harold’s not acquisitive,” said Ponto. “He likes collecting things, but they don’t really hold him.”

“That’s because he has never had to go without things,” said Dorothy Winter.

“ He had to go without his health,” said Ponto.

“ Yes,” reflected Dorothy Winter. “ I suppose he has been an enforced ascetic at times. I’ll say this much for him, he hasn’t made a virtue of necessity. He can be pretty crabby when he likes. I wonder why it is we’re both under his spell.'”

“ Under his spell ? ”

“ Yes, he’s something more to you than just Sunday best, or a kind of measuring instrument to gauge your progress by. For me he’s something else than a kind of gratification for my protective instincts. My pleasure in your company is frankly pagan. I delight in your strength and dexterity. I could see myself falling in love with you, but with Harold it is different.”

It will be reassuring to note that at this point Dorothy Winter did not light a cigarette, and regard

236

A POOR SCHOLAR

Ponto through half-closed lids. She passed him a German biscuit. Ponto took it as if he wished to justify the attribution of dexterity. He was marshalling the aggregate of such wisdom as he had acquired in the course of his progress. What did one do when a beautiful girl indicated a disposition to fall in love with one, and this under the surveillance not even of the bell boy? Ponto had no precedent to guide him. There was the aggravating circumstance that her beauty was the swiftest intoxication he had ever known. In the height of that moment he was visited by the old pagan distrust of the lavishness of the gods. He took refuge in that kind of crass banality that only such occasions permit.

“ I suppose we’re both in love with life,” he said

“ I want to make the most of it, I know. Anything I get will have to be off my own bat. You have to administer your good fortune; I have to win mine. That’s the difference between you and me.”

“ I fancy you will get what you want,” said Dorothy Winter. “ The question is, how will you feel when you’ve got it? That’s where Harold has the pull over you.”

“ Do you want me to get it? ” asked Ponto. “ Mr. Barrie hopes that I’ll find my way to Oxford.” Then it was necessary to launch into a character sketch of the minister. Ponto did this with finish and enthusiasm, a kind of fervour which seemed to inform his face with a happiness, singularly winning to the sophisticated girl who was studying him.

“ You’ll have to go as the scholars went in the old days of the Friars,” she said. “ And that reminds me of The Prelude again, though Wordsworth was writing of Cambridge.”

232

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

“ I shall be a Rhodes Scholar, not a poor scholar,” said Ponto.

“An obolus for a poor scholar,” Dorothy murmured. “ That’s somewhere in The Prelude. I think I ought to give you an obolus to cheer you on your way. What form shall it take? I know. I’ll give you one of my scarabs. It will do to pawn when you’re on your uppers or your beam ends, or whatever uncomfortable protuberance it is that poor scholars get on to.”

She was out of the room before Ponto had realized her intention. In a very short space of time she was back with the gee-gaw in her hand. Ponto was on the brink of a confused speech of thanks when Uncle Mart entered. Thereafter talk turned upon bulbs. In the end, Ponto found he was too late to pay that visit to Great King Street. He made all speed back to the academy with his talisman in his waistcoat pocket.

“An obolus for a poor scholar,” he laughed to himself, as he sprinted up the Nevada path.

The poor scholar found the whole academy assembled and waiting for him. He had not felt so like Ponto of Great King Street during the few last hectic days. He conducted his party of Melrosians to the red wooden church on the hill, where the academy attended for evensong. Somehow the processional hymn seemed irrelevant. He was not sick or sad. He waited at no Bethesda pool for healing. He had been caught up in the great adventure. It was for people like Harold to consider the consolations of such a hymn. What had Dorothy Winter meant by the spell which Harold cast? He was simply a pleasant, lethargic fellow who lacked the

238

A POOR SCHOLAR

ability to get on. He could imagine no one who would scout with more derision the idea that his presence in the world had any influence on his fellows, one way or another.

Ponto allowed himself a nocturnal walk after the academy had been finally settled. As was natural, his way took him past Hurzel. There was a light in the window which he knew must be Pauline’s, unless the Hurzel menage had been indulging in one of those periodic general posts to which most families are prone. He tried to get Dorothy and Pauline into some sort of relationship. They seemed at the time to dominate respectively those two parts of him, the dynamic and the static.

Time did not allow a belated and propitiatory visit to Great King Street, but he traversed part of the way he had gone with Gerard Burnaby on a Sunday night, how long ago. Since Harold and his uncle had set sail for England, it seemed that Ponto had outgrown much that differentiated him from the company about that supper table. Reading and observation, and latterly his association with Mr. Lorrimer and his boys, had made him free of a world of which he had caught but passing glimpses as a boy. His visit that afternoon had its after-effect in an elation to which the frosty night probably contributed. The town winked up at him as he came to the wooden fence at the summit of the steps leading down into Queen Street. Dunedin was abed for the most part, but there were enough of lights remaining to render the prospect homelike. He paused for a while by the railing. The hospital below him was the largest contributor of light. There was a centre of wakefulness and pain, amid the sleeping city. The words

239

AN OBOLUS FOR A POOR SCHOLAR

of that evening’s processional came back to Ponto:

“At even, ere the sun was set,

The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay; i i • • .1

Oh, in what divers pains they met! • . . . • ... I »»

Oh, with what joy they went away! ”

He had felt rebellious against that hymn, coming as he had, out of the sunshine of Dorothy Winter’s presence. At this later hour, however, life appeared in a different perspective. Hurzel stood behind him. the house whose mystery he had penetrated. Ahead there lay a greater mystery still. Harold, it seemed to him, had gained by that incursion to suffering. Ponto wondered how he would have faced the knowledge that Harold must have recognized in the eyes of doctors and nurses and his own folk. He felt so magnificently alive that night that the thought of decrepitude or cessation was difficult to entertain. He could not have re-entered the mood of that vigil following the Gerard Burnaby nightmare, had he wished. Yet there the mystery lay before him. A belated pair of wooers stood out from the shelter of the hawthorn hedge which surrounded St. Hilda’s School. Ponto hurried on down the steps. No one would ever get anywhere if they stopped to consider. He half envied the wooers their close companionship. The folk who went furthest went alone.

On his way back to Melrose he fingered his scarab. An obolus for a poor scholar. It was foolish to entertain this distrust of happiness. Let him work while it was yet day with him, and when the night should come, when no man may work, he would try to meet the last mystery of all in the spirit of the child who had once waited by the red gate, past which he was then speeding.

240

A POOR SCHOLAR

Mr. Lorrimer regarded his assistant somewhat quizzically when he admitted him. “ Well, I hope you’ve benefited by your breather?”

“ Oh yes, sir, thank you, it was good of you to let me go, after this afternoon.”

“ To-morrow will be Monday,” answered the pedagogue succinctly.

Ponto acquiesced in the septimal system, and at the same time acknowledged the implied exhortation. Monday found him, if anything, better prepared than Mr. Lorrimer.

241

CHAPTER XXII

ALMA MATER

When Ponto attended his first lecture at the Otago University, he had as neighbours in English, a law clerk, who took copious notes in shorthand, and a student destined for the Knox Theological Hall. The hour was one at which the pulse of life beats swiftly and easily, the late afternoon when brains that have been at work all day seem to acquire what is analogous to the athlete’s second wind. After exercising authority for the greater part of the day, Ponto found the role of a pupil both restful and stimulating.

The subject of the first lecture for the day was English, and the lecturer alternated between rhetoric and general literature. He had assisted hundreds of men and women towards the goal of a bachelorship in Arts, and in the course of so doing, had evolved a mechanical survey of his subject, which for purposes of cramming was very effective. He was the one professor who proclaimed his calling by the wearing of a gown, and the lecture always proceeded with a decorum which contrasted with intermittent rowdyism in some other lecture rooms. Ponto would be scribbling down a dissertation on Elizabethan dramatists or Georgian novelists, while a few doors away his own exploits in last Saturday’s football match would be acclaimed in lieu of less interesting facts of chemistry. Especially was this the case on Monday afternoons when Black Beard of olden times, now somewhat grizzled as to the beard, but with a

242

A POOR SCHOLAR

marching step no whit impaired, would substitute an analysis of Saturday’s play for the prescribed chemical analysis, to the accompaniment of applause. Football was a religion to Black Beard, and he preached his religion out of season, as preachers are exhorted to do.

Ponto would sometimes rely upon the law clerk’s shorthand to fill the lacunae in his note book at some later time, and allow himself a glance out of the darkling window. With the closing days the view of the entrance under the tower, which he was allowed, grew more and more cloistral and suggestive of studious shades. One went that way to the librarv and the registrar’s room and encountered emblazoned windows as one mounted the stairs. It was the one part of the University buildings where one had any sense of inheritance. Everywhere else there seemed to reign a preoccupation with the future rather than the past. The roomful of scribbling men and women were, it seemed, untouched by their environment. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they brought their environment with them. The women were for the most part, teachers, like Ponto, and like Ponto, they were immersed in the detail of a distant enterprise.

At the close of the lecture there would be a scurry of feet upon the screenings and asphalt, a swift exchange of badinage, and then a dispersal as complete as if the class had been an audience at a concert. Ponto would hurry back to the academy, it might chance with an old High School companion as fellow for some of the way. He missed the sense of initiation which he had felt during his first days at the High.

243

ALMA MATER

It never seemed that he was made fully aware of his election and calling. His place in the football team should have ensured this, for it was about the ’Varsity XV that legend and tradition were beginning to gather. But Ponto’s appearance on Saturdays was a matter of civic rather than academic moment, despite the Monday’s clamorous retrospect in the chemistry lecture room. The need of his presence at the academy forbade the kind of social round by which some of the students sought to increase their knowledge of men and things. There was no great opportunity for busy and, for the most part, penurious men, billeted in lodgings, whose proprietors were in no way beholden to the ’Varsity authorities, to cultivate the social graces.

There existed the rival factions of the Medical, the Mining and the Arts schools, and Ponto belonged to the last and the least homogeneous group of the three. The Medicals were, on the whole, the aristocrats of that loosely-knit commonwealth. This was due, in part, to the fact that Otago was the one medical school for the whole Dominion, and drew the flower of its youth from other centres. The course was protracted and expensive, and was not to be lightly embarked upon.

It was not till the close of his first term that Ponto began to feel himself caught up in what there was of the stream of communal life. He made a first appearance at the debating society where his reputation at football ensured a hearing. Then he found himself requisitioned to represent a youthful member of Parliament to whom he bore a superficial resemblance, in the waxworks at the Capping Carnival. He had also collaborated with an old High

244

A POOR SCHOLAR

School mate in the concoction of two lampoons which were rehearsed, along with a dozen or so other numbers, in the chemistry classroom for several evenings. The training for the chorus for this annual “ beano ” was a rough and ready business. The lampoons were distributed on large proof sheets, to any who were willing to come and swell the throng. Then they were chanted in unison to some wellknown tune under the leadership of some local musician whose susceptibilities were not over-nice.

Ponto enjoyed quite a proprietary thrill as he felt the words of his skit catch on with the casual choristers distributed upon the forms and desks. There was less tendency to disperse at the end of the rehearsal, than was the case at the close of a class.

Mysterious objects began to group themselves about the far entrance of the ’Varsity buildings, in front of the temporary structure of corrugated iron which housed the mining school, and had been temporary for an inconscionable time. These included a dragon in canvas and an auctioneer’s rostrum. In Ponto’s first year, they were properties contingent upon the Capping Procession which went its way through the town, to the bewitchment of the townsfolk and the demoralization of the children at the Union Street School, which was one of the first points the procession passed. Ponto went on horseback dressed as a pierrot. At the eleventh hour he was required to fill a breach in the cast of the farce which concluded the evening’s entertainment. His performance as a French waiter was a triumph in nimbleness of tongue and of hands and feet.

After the show came a dance in the rooms adjoining the theatre, a strangely heterogeneous revel in

245

ALMA MATER

which the unwearied mummers consorted with girls in party frocks who had sat through the entertainment in the dress circle. Ponto had the same sense of beginning the night again as he had known on the occasion of the supper party at Hurzel. It was odd that his mind should have travelled back to that evening.

As if to fortify the association, Pauline disengaged herself from a little group of professorial folk by the musicians’ platform, and greeted him with a kind of proprietary smile, which he was not sure whether to regard as flattering or slightly humiliating. It was as if she penetrated, not only the make-up of the French waiter, but the accretions of manner and knowledgeability which differentiated him from Turnbull’s street-boy. It was not that Pauline looked like a patroness. She looked like a sybil. It was an old enigma of the Pleasaunce again. Pauline looked frail and inadequate in that boisterous setting. She had put up her hair, and was wearing a simple white frock. She was not officially “ out,” for this nondescript rout was not an occasion for a debutante.

Ponto seemed to be in two minds. Either he should lift her up in his arms and bear her to a place of safety or else he should flee from her intolerable despotism and all this pother because a young lady was merely trying to be friendly to the friend of her brother. For Pauline, as soon as she had ended with her praise of Ponto’s French waiter, which she quite sincerely considered worthy of Hugh J. Ward or Percy of the Pollards, opened up the comprehensive subject of Harold with citations from his latest letter.

246

A POOR SCHOLAR

Harold it appeared, was going up to Cambridge next October, and was cramming for his Little Go with Uncle Gerard. He was going to take the Mediaeval and Modem Languages Tripos, and had been to Tours because of the purity of the French accent there, and to Heidelberg because of the purity of the German accent and the lager. She rattled off name after name, and each one sounded like a dream come true to the book-bound student by her side. He found himself wondering a little resentfully on Pauline’s behalf, why Harold should be having all the fun, and managed to express this wonderment when Pauline paused for breath. Talking and dancing simultaneously taxed her frail strength. Ponto had compromised between flight and abduction or forceful rescue by asking for the next waltz. Pauline’s eyes clouded.

“ I think you would have got more out of it all than Harold,” Ponto said.

“ Oh, I’m getting more out of it than Harold as it is,” she had replied, “ I’ll have my turn some day I daresay.”

“Don’t you ever think about yourself?” Ponto blurted out, and he could have hidden his face from Pauline’s look of child-like wonder.

“ Think of myself ? I should think I do. What made you say that, Ponto?”

“ I don’t know.” he replied lamely, “it was a silly thing to say. You always seem to me to l>e thinking about something or somebody else. I’m afraid you will think I’m a little daft this evening. Miss Marsh.”

“ I think you’re delightful, Ponto. I haven’t been hauled up for absent-mindedness, like that, since 1

247

ALMA MATER

was at school. You must regard my absent-mindedness as an excuse for forgetting to call you Mr. Lawrence. I must remember that we’re grown up.”

To Ponto it seemed that she indicated a way out of the enchanted wood by that last announcement. La Belle Dame stayed no one against his will. What a troublesome person she was, continually belittling him and at the same time doing him honour as the knight of the Yellow Chariot.

He returned her to her professorial party almost with a sigh of relief. His next partner penetrated no further than the disguise of the French waiter. She was one of the young women who sat in front of him at the English lecture, and was quite ready to subscribe to the convention that Ponto was a brilliant man of parts, not a bewitched child. Their talk was very flippant and literary, but Ponto felt that he for his part was apeing Gerard Burnaby, and that she. for all he knew, had some exemplar in fiction or in real life. What mattered it? She conspired with all the others to further that illusion of progress, or acquisition, which was the way of escape from a far more subtle thrall.

Ponto avoided the desultory drinking in which some of his companions indulged, it may be, through the same motive of escape which turned him to the pursuit of a phantom culture with the girl from the English class. He assisted some of these fugitives to bed in the small hours of the morning, and was at his post at Mr. Lorrimer’s on the following morning at breakfast-time intact, but inclined to yawn.

For the rest, his career at the Otago University may be traced in the Review and the daily prints. The object of this work is not to furnish a chronicle

248

A POOR SCHOLAR

of events, but to reiterate a truth. Progress is a relative term. If it be measured by the reactions of a spirit, then the child, who is father to the man, may fare further in a single hour than a man may fare in a lifetime.

249

CHAPTER XXIII

"AS ONE THAT MOURNETH FOR HIS MOTHER "

Ponto had kept his first year’s terms at the Otago University when there befell a thing which brought sharply to a close an epoch in his life. Mrs. Lawrence died quite suddenly while engaged in arranging stock against Christmas. For some time Myrtle and her mother had been waging that ineffectual warfare, which is continually being carried on in every grade of home. How far could she allow her mother to retain her hold upon the management of things, and at the same time retain her hold upon life. The doctor was inclined to saddle the daughter with responsibility for that closing incident. Myrtle accepted the responsibility with a narrowing of the bright green eyes. Herbert was inclined to second the doctor. Only Ponto set her forbearance and her wisdom at their true value. Myrtle had spoken to him on the occasion of one of his week-end visits.

“ It’s better to let her do things,” she said, “ that’s where I’ve been wrong lately, checking her. It won’t be for very long.”

Ponto had felt an unreasoning resentment against these fatalistic words. Myrtle had no right to talk like that. Myrtle was a harpy, a familiar whose parents were the dirges his mother sang. But in the hour of catastrophe, Myrtle had proved herself a champion of sanity and compassion. Herby’s behaviour was not so enlightened. He sought relief for his feelings in a kind of tearful officiousness. His grief was sincere, but abounding. Ponto kept a stem rein upon himself. It appeared that all his schemes and hopes were turned into sudden nothingness. It was as it had been when it seemed that Harold lay

245

A POOR SCHOLAR

dying. Death was merely an affront, a hideous irrelevancy. His mother’s best and sanest thought had been concentrated upon the governorship of that enterprise whose scene was the little shop where now she lay bereft of thought, of everything. How tenaciously she had clung to those manifold actualities, despite the sentiments of the hymns she sang. Mr. Battersby’s successor came, and the comfort he proffered sounded to Ponto like some kind of formula addressed to a being other than himself. Of course it was all very edifying and very true, but somehow it had little bearing upon the fact that confronted him. Andrew Barrie came, and his presence seemed somehow to reconcile that day’s desolation with the idea of taking up life again on the morrow. Ponto remembered how his visits to the Manse had provided him with escape from that mood which had so often beset him in the Great King Street shop. He supposed it was a mood engendered by the facts of heredity - . His mother had been, it sometimes seemed to him, beset by the plumage of angels with whom he had no desire to consort. They oppressed him with a sense of asphyxiation, just as did pictures and music in which his mother seemed to find greatest satisfaction. He had often been troubled with a sense of secret disloyalty when he made this escape from environment. Even in the midst of his grief this sense of escape came unbidden to him.

There came another besides Andrew Barrie to the house of mourning. He came at the close of the day which had witnessed the final act in the drama of Mrs. Lawrence’s enterprise. Ponto was helping Myrtle in the heart-rending work of setting things in

>46

"AS ONE THAT MOURNETH FOR HIS MOTHER”

order upstairs, when a knock came on the door of the closed shop. Ponto went to open it, and discovered upon the threshold a tall gaunt figure in an old-fashioned Ulster overcoat. Dunedin was enjoying a typical pre-Christmas day. The torn streamers on the hoarding opposite were soaking in the drizzle.

“ You won’t remember me,” spoke a voice which sent Ponto’s mind back in search of some forgotten day’s essence. “ I wonder if you’re the nipper I took for the ride in the bread-cart? You won’t remember.”

To Ponto memory came like a wave upon the breast of the swimmer. He had not wept that day. but at that moment his manhood stood imperilled.

“ Oh, yes, I remember,” he replied with what appeared to be a nonchalant little laugh.

“ I only read of it yesterday. I wasn’t in time to be one of the mourners, but somehow I had to come. You won’t remember this.” A lean arm shot out from under the voluminous sleeve. A half-sovereign winked upon a lean brown palm.

" Oh, yes I do,” said Ponto

“ I don’t believe it. How could you remember such a trivial thing as that ? ”

“ I suppose everybody remembers one or two trivial things. I remember wondering why it made her look so angry.”

“ She looked angry ? ” said Long Dick.

“ No. That’s not it. It’s all so long ago. How can I say how she looked ? ”

“ Well, I’ve kept it anyway,” said Long Dick. “ It was hers. I’ve never thought of violating it. Now I reckon it’s yours. Take it, boy. Let it be a talisman. I’ve no need of it now. I’m free—as free as she is. Won’t you take it?”

247

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ How can I take it ? ” said Ponto

Long Dick made a sound that might have been interpreted as a cough or a sob.

“ How can you refuse it? ” he said. Before Ponto had realized what had happened, he found himself standing with the coin in his hand, while the footsteps grew fainter on the wet pavement.

“ An obolus for a poor scholar,” Ponto half murmured to himself as he turned back into the dreary shop.

Thereafter he kept his two mascots, the scarab and the half-sovereign, and it was as if they stood for the two elements in that curiously dual adventure upon which he seemed bound. The readjustment of the shop to new conditions did not involve a great deal of labour. Myrtle had the whole business at her finger-ends. It was the disposal of their mother’s own personal belongings that involved the children in such searchings of heart.

I have already mentioned the exercise book with the orange mottled cover. It fell to Ponto to peruse this in search of any expressed desire on his mother’s part concerning the personalia she left behind. But in this day-book of hers, Mrs. Lawrence had trafficked only with incommunicable things, with secrets of personality in the more spiritual sense of the word.

Ponto was at the same time curiously attracted and repelled by the journal. It did not occur to him to resent the disproportionate place which Herby seemed to hold in his mother’s thoughts. He realized how it is possible for a woman to be utterly alone in the midst of a family. The diary is usually the refuge of the anchorite, or the poseur with an eye

248

254

“AS ONE THAT MOURNETH FOR HIS MOTHER ’’

upon Posterity. His mother had been neither of these. He felt that he was guilty of a secret treachery in following the journal to its end, but even that thought could not withhold him.

He encountered the Melrosians on the morrow with his travail of spirit well masked. The clamour of a rising class as he entered the lower class room, was like the clamour of a covey put up by the approach of a sportsman. Life went on. Ponto was thankful for the sound of it.

Furthermore, there was nothing sinister in Forrister’s deference as he stood aside to let him pass in a passage way. There was the limpid commiseration of a child by whom the thought of such a loss as Ponto’s was not to be compassed.

And here we have reached a stage in the story of Ponto’s progress, in which those two so often quoted influences seem conjoined.

The chronicler of “ the Career ” would certainly give space to the fact of his mother’s death. We, who are concerned less with “ the Careerthan with the small beginning are brought to a standstill with Frederick Hugh Battersby Lawrence at the contemplation of a still white face from whose lineament have departed all word of hope or misgiving or desire. There was no suspicion on that face of resentment against Ponto’s instinct to escape. Every extension and convolution of “ the Career ” had its prototype in that first ride out of the environment of the King Street home. All enterprise provides us with the same illusion of escape. We are concerned with the result rather than the facts of the enterprise and of the result we can only write in part, for here we see but in part.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE DARLING OF THE GODS

The three years of undergraduateship at the Otago University witnessed the growth of the Ponto tradition into something more than the fancy of a Saturday football crowd. His terms extended over a period when Dunedin was awakening to a consciousness of herself as the University town of the Dominion, and in the light of that recognition, the students themselves were feeling after a fuller sense of corporate life. This was not easy to attain, because of the general preoccupation with the extension on the purely utilitarian side. The problem of adapting and increasing the teaching capacity of so young an institution precluded, to a large measure, the cultivation of a ’Varsity spirit. The typical student was in too great haste to pass his examinations and be at the business of earning a livelihood to trouble greatly about establishing an inheritance of passwords for posterity. He did not look forward to the day when he should say “ My son, if you would be known as an Otago man you must conform to the following canons.” Men have always expressed their love for their foundation by the establishment of all manner of arbitrary and unwritten codes. The greater their veneration, the more grotesque, to outward seeming are these prohibitions and obligations.

The student at this young seat of learning was bound by no other than the ordinary civic code, but there w'as slowly growing a predisposition to be bound. There is, however, no such thing as a readymade tradition, and this disposition manifested itself in a half-hearted tendency to be facetious.

250

THE DARLING OF THE GODS

There was the old-standing feud between Miners and Medicals. There arose an Evangelical and antiEvangelical party. There was also a recognition of the student’s duty, the world over, to ridicule authority. On ceremonial occasions, there was always a gallery full of wits and boo-ers, but one usually felt that these reprimanders of authority were merely trying to reproduce a Senate House rag, and rather dismally failing. There was so little in the way of pomp and circumstance that they could decry. Despite this outward-seeming amorphousness, there was slowly being evolved some kind of tonal scheme by which an Otago man might come to know himself. As the University became more and more the source of the town’s vitality, the right of the student to take possession of the town for one day in the year was joyously conceded. The Capping Carnival gradually crystalized into a tradition as infrangible and individual as the tradition of the battle of flowers at Nice or the Lord Mayor’s Show in London. It was something which had no counterpart at Oxford or Cambridge, and for this very reason, it offered the true lover of his Alma Mater an opportunity which neither scholarship nor athletic prowess afforded. To be President of the Students’ Association on the day of the Carnival was to stand sponsor for the newly born spirit of comradeship between the University and the town. The Chancellor presided over the distribution of degrees, but the Students’ Association ran the Capping Carnival, and it was the latter event which drew the town.

In his last year at the Otago University, Ponto was elected President of the Association. His selection was a triumph of personality over the spirit of

256

A POOR SCHOLAR

faction. After his mother’s death, he had flung himself into every form of University activity which offered him scope, seeking relief from a haunting depression by filling every nook and cranny of his mind. Few would have suspected the agile debonair comedian and scrum-half of any great depth of feeling. He gathered men about him by the force of his concentration upon any matter he had in hand and by his lambent humour, which was free from any taint of malice. But he formed no friendship which went below the surface. He held tenaciously to his objective, which was to test for himself the efficacy of that spell which Dorothy Winter had belittled when he spoke of England. England, his mother’s country, the land whence had come the Home papers, and whither her homing thoughts had always turned. Pictures and books were of little avail to satisfy that inherited homesickness of his. They only aggravated it. Wisely or unwisely, Andrew Barrie had sedulously fostered that imperial spirit in him. What do they know of England, who only England know? Ponto kept this aspiration of his jealously to himself. His popularity would not have been so great, had it been otherwise. His vision did not preclude a very deep affection for his native town, and so it was that even in the frivolous matter of the Capping Carnival he expended himself freely in encouraging this rapprochment between the town and the ’Varsity. He was no light-hearted pierrot on this occasion, but a combination of pageant-master, librettist, comedian and theatrical manager. He went soberly attired in his well husbanded every day clothes, marshalling the lorries at the Union Street rate with the help of a megaphone, superintending

252

THE DARLING OF THE GODS

preparations at the theatre. It was not till the evening that he appeared in motley, and then it was motley in the strict technical sense of the term. He appeared as a jester who had been projected out of the Elizabethan age on to the steps of the Town Hall in twentieth century Dunedin, and encountered various celebrities of the city.

It was a typical Capping sketch, with just a tincture of literariness superadded, which rather flattered a certain section of the audience. Ponto danced and postured and punned with agility and abandon, but it is probable that only his fame as a footballer saved him from unfavourable comparison with last year’s showman. He had not the matter of a true satirist in him. Pauline watched him from her place by her father in the dress circle.

“ I believe he feels like Jack Point inside to-night, Daddy. He shouldn’t.”

“ Why shouldn’t he feel like Jack Point if he wants to ? ”

“ Because Jack Point was pathetic and Ponto’s the darling of the Gods. Listen to them.” The Gods were acclaiming Ponto at the end of the turn.

“ Who do we want, oh

We want Ponto.”

The whole house shook with the slogan. Ponto came out and took his call, smiling in the old propitiatory way he had smiled when acclaimed Dux. Another redoubt captured in the course of the career. He looked down at the indistinct sea of frocks and shirt fronts. There was no time to see himself as a figure of romance, as he had seen the Golden Pirate. He was too near the scrum for that. Only his heart

258

A POOR SCHOLAR

expanded as it had done when he had looked at the mothers and children on St. Clair Beach. How jollypeople were.

He continued with Mr. Lorrimer after taking his degree, with the intention of reading for his Master of Arts, but before the year was out, Andrew Barrie’s fanciful prophecy was fulfilled. F. H. B. Lawrence was elected Rhodes Scholar.

Ponto encountered Pauline a week or so after his election. They met in the midsummer quietude of the empty ’Varsity grounds. Pauline had been attending classes in languages during the recent term, which justified her use of the right-of-way. Ponto wondered why she had not beat a Decameron retreat to some seaside spot for Christmas, but did not care to ask her. He had been secretly amused at this mild assumption of the blue stocking on Pauline’s part, in the light of what she had said concerning her father’s determination to make her a lady of fashion. So much she had let fall at the Capping Dance when she had spoken of the horrors of " coming out.”

It seemed that she must appear as a dilletante among the other women students to placate her father. On that particular morning she looked like a trespassing princess, a kind of pretty irrelevancy from that shadowy world of Ponto’s, which of late had receded so into the distance. Pauline really did look pretty. There was an unwonted colour in her cheeks, and the sunlight conspired with her green linen frock to render her more than usually gracile. She congratulated Ponto, and his success seemed to have been a kind of vicarious triumph for herself, or for Hurzel. which was the same thing. Hurzel, hv the way, was to be let to a tenant who had solemnly

25 4

THE DARLING OF THE GODS

undertaken to watch over the garden. Mr. and Mrs. Marsh were setting out for a twelve-months’ European trip with Pauline. That explained her attendance at the language classes. She announced the impending trip as casually as if she had been announcing a forthcoming visit to St. Clair, so light a matter did it appear, set beside Ponto’s great enterprise.

“ Of course we shall be back within the year,” and her eyes wandered from the foliage of a battered willow which stood near the site of the present Mining School, to the green line of the Town Belt, lying along the western slope like a gemmed girdle. Hurzel formed one point of colour in its midst.

“ I shall come back, too,” Ponto had blurted out. They both laughed. It sounded like an assignation. Pauline’s laugh did not embarrass Ponto. She was not laughing at him.

“ I suppose you’re meant to come back,” she said

“ Wasn’t that Cecil Rhodes’ idea. You’ll come back trailing clouds of Oxford, so that everyone who meets you will start thinking Imperially.”

“ Do you want to come back?” Ponto demanded. He was a little surprised at his temerity in making this frontal attack. Pauline brought her gaze back from the green line of the hill.

“ I don’t think I want to go away very much,” she said. “Of course I shall come back, unless I catch typhoid or get kidnapped. I should refuse to budge—if it weren’t for Harold; and Daddy and Mum, of course. They’ve made up their mind to go, and someone has to look after them.”

Ponto felt a little chilled by Pauline’s lack of enthusiasm for foreign parts. He felt certain that this was no mere affectation. She really did find

260

A POOR SCHOLAR

fulfilment in the daily round of Hurzel. Such an attitude of mind amazed him. Yet Pauline was merely being consistent to that first conception he had had of her, the child in the house.

On the day of his departure there was one document among the sheaf of valedictory letters and telegrams in his coat pocket, which he was to consider often in the course of the voyage It was from Pauline, Pauline who seemed always to be standing unconsciously in the way, that way which led to achievement. It always seemed that she conceded him the fairway with a frank good humour, and then it was that he felt himself deprived of any desire to escape. He could have wished that Pauline was obvious and provocative like Dorothy Winter. No. He could not have so wished it. That would be like wishing that he had never come upon the Pleasaunce. He re-read Pauline’s letter as his liner dipped to the first of those league-long rollers, to whose insistent call he had listened as a child. His send-off had been a vociferous business, involving the endless chanting of hakas and slogans. A Maori haka is rendered all the more fearsome when the performers are clad like clerks rather than warriors. Ponto had watched the sea of straw hats with their varying coloured ribbons recede as the liner pulled away from the wharf. He had stood by the bulwarks and acknowledged the tribute of affection and goodwill. He must not fail the trust they reposed in him. Out of that crowd one figure had seemed to stand, and it had seemed to Ponto that Andrew Barrie’s unspoken admonition was really grander and more terrible than all the hakas and the shouting. The minister had made the journey expressly to

256

THE DARLING OF THE GODS

assist at this first stage in the enterprise he had foreseen. He represented the one link with Great King Street, for Myrtle and Herby had both made their farewells in Dunedin. The minister had been consistent in his role of friend rather than pastor up to the very end. He did not allow himself so much as a “ God bless you,” but a sudden yearning had leapt into the quiet eyes as he shook Ponto’s hand. Thereafter he had stood amid that harlequinade of youth, an isolated figure, the burly form in the black reefer jacket suggesting a kind of forbidding pugnacity, which was all at variance with Ponto’s knowledge of him. This impression had been one with the feverish unreality of those parting scenes. It was almost with relief that Ponto turned away from that dissolving charade to the little immediancies of the voyage, the allotment of a place in the saloon, the choice of a site for his deck chair. It was in the comparative privacy of this latter sanctuary that he re-read Pauline’s letter.

Dear Ponto (it ran),

I am not going to wish you success for I know that you will succeed. Here is something I have copied from Browning. It comes from the poem which gave me my name. I hope it will not seem to you like something from Jeremiah or Ecclesiastes. It is for you to read when England and Oxford and everything seem to be sitting on top of you. I don’t suppose it will often be like that with you. Dear Ponto, of course you will come back, and when you do, you must not let it worry you to find that the trees have grown. They will really be the same old trees. I shall always remember the first day you came to Hurzel. Vale iterum, iterumque vale. That’s about all the Latin I know.

262

A POOR SCHOLAR

Here are the lines from Pauline.

“ As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil

Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees

Which grew by our youth’s home, the waving mass

Of climbing plants, heavy with bloom and dew,

The morning swallows with their songs like words,

All these seem clear, and only worth our thoughts."

He read and re-read the quotation. It did seem a curious message to proceed from a girl upon the right side of twenty-five, and within calculable distance of a European trip. Of course he was well fortified with reflections upon the vanity of human wishes as a result of his reading for his Arts degree. It may have been the league-long rollers combined with the after-effects of a farewell dinner, which induced that sudden nostalgia for the decorous paces of Long Dick’s mare, and the green steadfastness of that set scene. It may have been something deeper in his nature. At all events it seemed for the moment that Pauline’s wisdom was more terrible than the wisdom of Solomon. Then, in replacing the letter with its companions he came upon a small object in his waistcoat pocket. It was Dorothy Winter’s scarab. He rose from his chair, and accepted the challenge of a red-bearded bagman to a game of bull-board. Dorothy’s message would have run Avanti.

258

CHAPTER XXV

MACAULAY'S NEW ZEALANDER

When Ponto’s ship reached Plymouth, there came news of a late heat-wave in southern England. So it happened that while the last stage of the voyage was made up the English Channel, the passengers witnessed the setting of the sun under circumstances which seemed to conspire for that evening’s reprieve. All day the southern coast had lain shimmering in the unwonted warmth, and with its close had come a pageantry of slow-changing colour such as Ponto had never looked upon in his own land of crude skies, and landscapes of hard and vivid greens and browns. He had never seen a day die so majestically, and the thought that behind those dissolving ramparts of amber and red and grey another English day had been lived out, even as a day from the Canterbury Tales, with all those centuries of effort and hope superadded appalled and elated him at one and the same time. He had very little sense of his mission, of the tiny part he had been sent to play in the evangel of Empire. The morrow would find him occupied in a mere blind strife for survival, he supposed. He read this anticipation in the faces of his fellow-passengers about him and in a panic moment he could have wished that the voyage might continue indefinitely.

The little cosmology of the ship’s company, on the eve of disintegration, seemed fraught with a sudden pathos. There were sporadic attempts among some of the more determined to keep alive the spirit of the voyage by the repetition of catch-phrases and

264

A POOR SCHOLAR

the bandying of references, which already seemed to have grown meaningless. Ponto stood at his place and shivered despite the leniency of the weather.

A sheaf of London newspapers had appeared in the saloon, and these seemed like sudden concomitants to the railway time-tables and hotel guides which Ponto had studied from time to time when he had grown weary of the Sophocles he had been reading on the voyage against Responsions. These crisp sheets seemed to thrust word of an immediate England into which he should be precipitated on the morrow.

Behind that curtain of fire the King had been shooting grouse, and a Nottingham postman had shot his sweetheart. Ponto’s eye had been caught by headlines oddly incongruous in their juxtaposition. Stonehenge and Pimlico stood side by side at the head of parallel columns. Harry Lauder and St. Augustine were both the subject of special articles. In that timeless country one was co-citizen with the Danes who invaded Athelney, and the Jews who invaded Whitechapel. Ponto remembered Gerard Burnaby’s citation of Oscar Wilde in the matter of sunsets, and that queer garish Sunday seemed like a bright pin-point in memory, in the face of that overwhelming present. He stood an utter bankrupt in the light of this later sunset, and there was no one with whom he could share the reassurance that “ The day Thou gavest ” had rendered him on that night of discovery. He was visited by the conviction that, had Pauline been by his side, her face would not have been strange, as the faces of the passengers had grown. Then, just as upon the night of his vigil, his horse-sense came to his rescue. If the automaton

260

MACAULAY’S NEW ZEALANDER

were to function efficiently on the morrow, he must secure it the requisite meed of sleep. He turned in, and on the morrow it was as he had anticipated. He was close up to the scrum again.

The frozen trance of the previous evening gave way to the little urgencies of a day in which there was time only for the consideration of persons and personalia. It is true that a kind of aura seemed to cling about the shipping clerk who boarded the liner from the company’s tender. He had been part of that day which Ponto had seen die along the southern coast, an English day, and this fact seemed to differentiate his very ordinary flannel suit and sunburned straw hat from the clothes of Ponto’s fellowpassengers. Macaulay’s New Zealander found that the England which presented itself to his immediate ken was a replica of his own native land, with certain differences that thrilled him with a sense of recognition, His first English policeman, for instance, sent his mind back to an oleograph which had hung in the room on the other side of the glass door in the Great King Street shop. His first English railway carriage, with its door opening outwards and flush with the platform and its little gallery of coloured photographs under the rack intended for light articles only, awaited him like an old friend, for so he had seen an English railway coach depicted in some story from his mother’s shelves. It was the infinitely little things that seemed significant.

On the way to Fenchurch Street he had sight of fields which seemed deliciously green to his sea-faring eyes. They delighted him so that he felt constrained to point them out to his solitary fellow in the compartment, a disillusioned-looking individual in a fawn

266

A POOR SCHOLAR

frock coat and braided top hat, who had come down from the city to take delivery of some important package, which he nursed upon his knees. The messenger smiled wanly at Ponto’s enthusiasm.

“ Seems to me to be terribly dry, sir,” he said. “ We’ve had what they call an Indian Summer.”

Dorothy Winter might have cited the messenger’s whiskers as proof positive that there was such a place as England.

It was not very long before they were among the chimney pots. Ponto’s mind sped back to the Great King Street home at the sight of Dr. Barnado’s Homes in Stepney. The messenger seemed to recede into the distance where he sat. At length the train came to a final halt, and Ponto once more girt up his loins for the scrum. London acquiesced in his ultimate passage in a four wheeler to an hotel off the Strand, with his needments perched upon the roof of the growler. The incidents of that kaleidoscopic drive he recounted in a long letter to Myrtle. Mappin and Webb’s and St. Paul’s Cathedral filled him with the same sense of awe and wonderment. He saw his first messenger boy, who might have posed for Jaggers in Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne’s story in Pearson’s Magazine. He saw bare-headed clerks hurrying along the pavement, and any one of them might have been Charlie Mears in The Greatest Story in the World. He saw his first Guardsman, his first flower girl, his first A.B.C. restaurant, and he longed with an aching longing for someone with whom to share this orgy of recognition. He passed the LawCourts and the site of Temple Bar, and noted the change in the policemen’s tunics and helmets. He was out of the City of London and into the Citv of

267

268

MACAULAY'S NEW ZEALANDER

Westminster. The hotel had been recommended by one of his professors at the Otago University. The growler turned out of the roar of the Strand into a quiet backwater. Ponto engaged a room and then ate his first meal on English soil. He had a view of the Embankment. Two hansom-cab drivers were feeding the pigeons at their stand by the railings which led to the Temple Metropolitan Station.

His meal over, Ponto turned out into the cool narrow street, with its concluding vista of endless traffic. The painted boards of the omnibuses flashed and were gone, but were ever replaced, so that a continuous ribbon of colour seemed to be drawn across the bases of the buildings in the Kingsway. Ponto paused for a while in the sanctuary of that sheltered slope, as a bather might pause on the brink of a flood. Then he decided that the only way to exorcise his dread of those processional dragons was to sit upon one, and let it bear him where it would. So he boldly faced up the street, and presently boarded one of the surviving horse omnibuses that held out an offer to take him to Piccadilly. It also flaunted the name of Harry Lauder in large red letters, and this somehow seemed an antidote to last night’s season of panic. The driver of the “ knife board ” at whose shoulder Ponto found a seat assumed the aura of the shipping clerk. London appalled him no whit.

Ponto secretly stored his obiter dicta for use in that letter which he meant to write to Myrtle when, or if, he returned to his hotel. The bus driver was the first human soul with whom he had passed other than the bare words of necessity since that morning, a thousand years ago, when he had landed at Tilbury.

A POOR SCHOLAR

Eventually he regained his hotel, and indited his letter. The only way to combat the intolerable loneliness was to register and recount impressions. Having in measure unburdened himself to Myrtle, he set about the serious business of finding his way to the office of the Rhodes Trust. Next morning he profited by his catechism of the bus driver, and reached Paddington in triumph. There awaited him another English railway carriage, more English and more grandiose than the carriage of yesterday. He felt himself drawn away from that vision of Vanity Fair which the yesterday had borne. It was as if he passed from a fevered dream wherein all the history and story books he had ever read, all the pictures he had ever seen, had risen up and demanded recognition. The warm weather persisted. Oxford lay dreaming in her hollow and was not visibly agitated at the arrival of her poor scholar. There was a conspiracy of melodious chimes as he walked down the High. Ponto had his talismans with him. He had found on his visit to the office of the Rhodes Trust that his choice of colleges had narrowed. His destination was St. Mary’s, and he had been advised to make himself known to his tutor-presumptive, if he happened to be in residence. As he went past the porter’s lodge into the quadrangle, where the unusual sultriness seemed to have stayed all life for the time being, it was as if his London fever were succeeded by an Oxford coma. The latter was preferable, for it did not allow of a sense of loneliness. There was no one to whom he could strive to communicate the incommunicable. Even a later sight of Christ Church Meadows did not provoke a desire to tell Pauline about it. The spirit of the place seemed to

264

MACAULAY'S NEW ZEALANDER

descend upon him, so that while his mind worked efficiently for the dispatch of such business as he had in hand, he registered no impression save a general impression of escape from London.

The dinner which he ate at the Mitre seemed to be served with all the circumstances of some decorous ritual. It was impossible that there could be such a waiter outside the pages of Dickens. He returned to London by a late train, and at Paddington surrendered himself utterly to a cabby, proffering the address of his Thames-side hotel. He was completely taken by surprise when his chariot jolted out of the Strand into his quiet street with the publisher’s house at the comer. His topography had become completely demoralized.

There followed two or three days of sightseeing, some in solitude, some in company with a brother of one of his professors, on whom a letter of introduction (one of Ponto’s considerable bundle) acted with galvanic effect. Ponto had posted it from the office of the Rhodes Trust, and it had brought the recipient down from Hampstead to the Thames-side hotel. For reasons he could hardly explain to himself Ponto had abstained from making himself known to Harold. This tremendous abnegation may have been due to a secret dread lest Harold should prove himself in league with those other millions to make Ponto feel his utter nothingness. Harold would have changed, and Ponto, in the midst of that intolerable loneliness found a certain spiritual companionship in the recollection of the boy with the indolent smile who had befriended him upon the night they sang of Ephrathah. It was better to entrust oneself to a complete stranger like the professor’s brother than to

265

A POOR SCHOLAR

seek reassurance and welcome from a hypothetical Harold. Besides, Harold was probably abroad or in the country, so he had turned down the page in his address book whereon Pauline had written directions to find her brother.

One excursion which Ponto made alone would have puzzled the professor’s brother, had he accompanied him. It occupied an odd two hours between a tailor’s appointment and an engagement to dine with his new-found friend at Hampstead. It included a visit to the National Gallery, and to the shop of a small stationer in Pimlico, which Ponto discovered with the assistance of the orange-covered exercise book, and at least two score of the Metropolitan police. It bore his mother’s maiden name above the door. Ponto had not ventured within. He thought it wiser to be free of the trammels of kinship, until he had tried England. But the sight of the name had increased a hundredfold the eeriness that beset him.

The visit to the National Gallery was paid as a kind of pilgrimage to the memory of the Devonshire maid who had made one of a party under the Rector’s leadership nearly thirty years ago. Ponto had also walked through the rooms on his own account. He discovered that Reynolds’ Heads of Angels had gained rather than lost in reproduction. Still, if there had been no original there could have been no reproductions. His host at Hampstead was not quite so overwhelming as his tailor, whose manner oppressed Ponto more than the antiquity of Westminster Abbey.

The lady of the Hampstead home smiled inwardly when Ponto paid his duty call after the dinner. He looked like a lay figure from Saville Row. She had

266

MACAULAY’S NEW ZEALANDER

been secretly disappointed in Ponto from the outset, as her conception of a Rhodes Scholar had been largely inspired by a perusal of Downey V. Green, the up-to-date paraphrase of Verdant Green which had recently appeared.

She had been prepared for a voice like the snap of a fiddle-string, for wild western clothes and wild western manners, and was a little disappointed in the propitiatory little man in the undistinguished suit of blue serge, precise of speech, and punctilious in his table manners.

Ponto had paid one visit to the theatre before going up to Oxford in sober earnest. He selected the St. James’ because Gerard Burnaby had always said that George Alexander gave you illusion more effectively than Maskeleyne and Devant, and Ponto had arrived at a state of mind in which the only anodyne for a general sense of uneasy illusion was more illusion. The play was His House in Order, and it was more interesting even than the incidents contingent upon getting in and out of the theatre. He felt secretly disturbed that he should have been so carried off his feet by Pinero’s play and Miss Irene Vanbrugh’s mercurial acting, with George Alexander’s quietivist manner as foil. He was far more real than anyone he had met in the course of those last few fevered days. The remaining weekbefore the Michaelmas term flickered out in more sightseeing and outfitting, and Ponto found himself upon the threshold of the greatest adventure of all.

272

CHAPTER XXVI

“TO MEET MR. LAWRENCE”

Harold Marsh was in his last year at Cambridge, when F. H. B. Lawrence became a member in statu pupilari of St. Mary’s College, Oxford. Ponto was picked to play in the Freshman’s match, and at once found a place in his College XV. St. Mary’s paid an annual visit to Cambridge, to engage in combat with the team representing Harold’s College. These intercollegiate fixtures were always the occasion for festivity, the trip usually being regarded as of more moment than the match. Ponto, in the midst of the overwhelming interests and accidents of his new life, looked forward to this journey to Cambridge with mingled feelings. Would it bring him respite from a certain feverishness of spirit which had overtaken him since he landed in England, or would a meeting with Harold only intensify his feeling of eeriness?

Those early weeks were so fully charged that Ponto’s form at Rugger was affected. He was something of a disappointment to those with any knowledge of the reputation that had preceded him from New Zealand. He, however, retained his place in his College XV, and made the journey to Cambridge, aware of mingled elation and reluctance at the prospect of meeting Harold. Would the meeting aggravate that bout of home-sickness which had him in thrall, or would it alleviate the trouble. Perhaps Harold would have developed into a second Gerard Burnaby and would greet him in the icily regular manner in

268

“TO MEET MR. LAWRENCE"

vogue with some of the second and third year men of his own University, who had called upon him, and bestowed upon his coffee glances akin to those of the guests in the Punch picture concerning smoking chimneys and bad cigars. Perhaps he would greet him with a fusilade of jargon peculiar to Cambridge alone. Perhaps he would make him horribly aware of incongruities in the make-up of the Rhodes Scholar. Harold had invited him to tea, proffering a sprained angle by way of excuse for not meeting him, and supplying him with elaborate directions to his College. Ponto followed these latter, and was handed on from a top-hatted and beery lodge-porter to a kitchen-man in baize apron, whose business took him to rooms adjoining Harold’s. Presently the Rhodes Scholar found himself standing on the top of a flight of dark wooden steps, facing a door, which looked invitingly accessible to the practised eye of a University man. The oak was hooked back, and from within came the sound of voices and laughter. Ponto was seized with an odd instinct to cut and run. He was visited by a momentary memory of Turnbull’s hostile glance as the street boy passed through the red gate. Clearly Ponto was out of form. Oxford was the first redoubt he had not scaled at the first attack. At length he pulled himself together with a little forward jerk of the head.

“ Come in.”

It might have been Gerard Burnaby who called. Ponto entered. Harold had hobbled to the door at the sound of the knock. There eyes met in a level gaze. For Ponto the old bewitchment had gone, but in its place there was something better. “ There’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and

274

A POOR SCHOLAR

the love of friends.” Harold had not invited a posse of mildly bored undergraduates to meet Mr. Lawrence of St. Mary’s. He had invited a middle-aged and benign-looking don, and—Dorothy Winter. The don had been in the midst of one of his stories when Ponto knocked, hence the talk and laughter. He was the kind of raconteur who always laughs at his own stories. It is unlikely that Ponto had any very definite impression of the don’s features. He was 100 much occupied with the phenomenon of Dorothy Winter. She did not challenge the drabness of the winter day, as she had done on the occasion of their second encounter. Harold had effectually banished that other winter from his rooms. Ponto had recognized some of the penates from the snuggery at Hurzel, with a little sigh of satisfaction. Harold had not changed an iota. And Dorothy? She was a provocation to be off with that mood of doubt and self-depreciation that had so unaccountably fallen upon him. Ponto wondered whether Harold had read something of this in his eyes. He had evidently taken such pleasure in this little piece of stage management. It may be that he had not been prepared for any but a man of destiny in Ponto. Dorothy Winter’s talk may have led him to believe that F. H. B. Lawrence had acquired the grand manner in the intervening vears.

Ponto looked Mongolian beyond his wont, which always portended what would have been tears in the case of Herby. He had been prepared for anything in the shape of Harold, save Harold himself. Dorothy look from one to another, the analyst alert for emotional nuances. How very' interesting and attractive these male spirits were.

275

“TO MEET MR. LAWRENCE”

“ Why, Ponto,” Harold had said, clasping the brown hand, that was still a boy’s in size. Then there had fallen a silence, which Dorothy felt it incumbent upon her to dispel.

“ I am the sprained ankle,” she said. “He wanted to be found in a proper setting. That’s why he didn’t come to meet you.”

“Really, Dorothy. Your powers of invention, Dobbin, will you certify that my ankle is sprained ? ” This to the benign don, who replied that he could not tell a sprained ankle from a petnphimimeral caesura, and begged to be introduced to Macaulay’s New Zealander.

Harold introduced him as Dr. Frayling and turned his attention to the tea. Dorothy submitted to this abrogation of the woman’s right, supposing it was part of the University tradition, and proceeded with the business of making Ponto feel at home.

“Well, now you know there is such a place,” she said. “ It’s not just a kind of conspiracy against the laity overseas. There really is such a place as England.”

“ There certainly is,” said Ponto, but his manner lacked the buoyancy which she had felt upon their drive home from the football match.

Ponto had found that there was such a place as England, and the discovery had left him in a condition which might almost be described as “ fey.” It was this which had caused in him that nervous apprehension upon seeking a reunion with Harold. He knew that he had fallen below his form as a scrum-half, and he wondered whether this depreciation extended to his manners and his appearance. He had looked into Harold’s eyes for some reassurance

276

272

A POOR SCHOLAR

on this matter, and had found it there. In Dorothy Winter’s eyes he read a new appraisement, and was not so reassured. During the rallies of small talk that followed the immediate introduction his mind seemed engaged upon a dazed retrospect, covering the period that began with his first sight of an English sunset.

Odd as it may seem, Harold once again made Ponto at home in a new environment. That which Ponto had half dreaded did not occur. Harold was not in the conspiracy to enhance that fever of the mind, which had preyed upon him since that last evening of the voyage. The quiet of the room did not benumb him as it had always seemed the stillness of his own room at St. Mary’s benumbed. But for one brief moment of awe and ecstasy as he walked the High for the first time, it seemed that he had lost his power to enjoy, while his power to register and remember seemed enhanced. Dorothy Winter followed his gaze as it went from one familiar object to another.

“Do you remember how we once agreed that Harold wasn’t the slave of his possessions. I believe you’re coveting that little Whistler.”

“ I’m not coveting it,” Ponto replied, “ I’m recognizing it. It’s an old friend.”

Harold looked up from the floor where he had been concentrating upon a tea pot of blue delf.

“ Oh, yes. Same old Whistler, Ponto. I don’t know what you’re talking about Dorothy. You pinch one of my pictures, and see what happens.”

Then the don was launched upon an anecdote concerning Christie’s and Scotland Yard for which Ponto, at least, was grateful. It postponed the delivery of

■TO MEET MR. LAWRENCE”

his own story. In due course Harold put his catechism concerning Hurzel, and Dunedin. This was Ponto’s first speech with a fellow citizen since his arrival in London, or at least his first with any whom he felt to be a fellow citizen. How Harold managed to induce this sense of home-coming was his own secret. His hospitality might have seemed almost casual to an onlooker, such as Dobbin aforementioned.

It just happened that Ponto for the first time since he had left it, felt at home. And in that short space of half an hour a more observant than Dobbin might have noted a subtle change in Dorothy Winter’s manner towards Mr. Lawrence of St. Mary’s. She had made the journey to Cambridge in response to a dual invitation. The first had come from her widowed brother-in-law, the don; the second had come from Harold. She was familiar with the place during May Week and the Long Vacation, but this incursion in the midst of the Michaelmas Term was the outcome of two unusual requests. The don had sought sanction for a new piano. Harold had sought sweet influence for his Rhodes Scholar. There was also that instinct to share his finds with Dorothy Winter on whose companionship he set such store. He had forgotten, apparently, that Ponto was not his find alone. At least he chose to let it appear that he had forgotten. He had not quite known how to interpret to himself Dorothy’s talk of the Man of Destiny. They had discussed Ponto in the intervals of the College concert last May Week. Harold had, greatly to his own surprise, pulled off a third in the first section of the Mediaeval and Modern Languages Tripos. That was one of the finds for which he

273

A POOR SCHOLAR

wanted her applause. It was pleasant to reflect that he was not such a Juggins after all. Dorothy had been perverse, both about the Tripos and about Ponto. She had treated them both as a joke. However, it would have been difficult to be other than facetious on such a night. She had gone home in the dawn from two College balls in succession, and had spent a sunburned afternoon at Grassy Comer where Harold’s College Eight had valiantly staved off a bump. She had come in the same unchastened spirit to meet Mr. Lawrence of St. Mary’s, it seemed.

Instead of the Man of Destiny there had appeared a subdued and dapper boy who might have come from the cloistral precincts of some English Public School. Ponto had quite misinterpreted Dorothy’s misgiving at the sight of him. It was not because his clothes were all wrong that she smiled so. It was because they were so horribly right. Ponto, it appeared, had failed in the first requisite of a Rhodes Scholar. He had not invaded Oxford. Oxford had invaded him. It may have been her recognition of this that made her such an effective seconder of Harold in his unofficial campaign to make Ponto feel at home. It is very certain that Ponto rediscovered New Zealand for himself in that odd half-hour between the match and the dinner, and had he paid the visit before the match it is probable he would have played a better game.

274

CHAPTER XXVII

ACCLIMATIZATION

Numbered among Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s works is a diary of impressions and ideas in which he described how he went for a holiday to Battersea, which happened to be his home at the time. There is truth in the paradox that the surest way of discovering a place is to leave it. It was something in this manner that Ponto discovered Oxford on his return from the trip to Harold’s college.

He entered his rooms for the first time as the master of his demesne, not a phantom called up by that silent and omnipotent djinn his scout. At such a comparatively late hour that functionary was not present, but he had left a banked fire in the grate, and had placed a batch of New Zealand letters on the table. The sight of the familiar stamp bearing the miniature of the lady scattering the benefits of penny postage to a grateful world, was to Ponto like an enhancement of the welcome he had received from Harold. He realized that, in Pauline’s words, he had allowed Oxford to sit on him.

Now, for the first time there was something other than the suave menace of the ages in the sound of the chimes as they told out the passage of another hour. He had been too fearful of his inheritance heretofore. The first letter he picked up brought an odd smile to his lips. He recognized the precise and rather effeminate handwriting of Forrister, whose essays he had so often annotated at the academy. At the time of his departure the Melrosians had supplemented the civic purse of sovereigns with a filled

280

A POOR SCHOLAR

sovereign case, and there the entente between pupils and pedagogue had ended, he had imagined. He had not looked for a letter from any of the youngsters, least of all Forrister. This advance from the one enemy he had ever made strangely touched him. The letter was a very punctilious affair. It was not what Forrister wrote, but the fact that he had written which filled Ponto with a quite incommensurate sense of gain. He read between the stilted lines something more than an easy good will.

Andrew Barrie had been right when he had said that stamina in resentment might portend stamina in friendship From Andrew himself there was a fat dispatch, which Ponto decided to keep for the morning. Myrtle’s letter was concerned mainly with Herby’s baby, and the disposal of the little business in Great King Street. Myrtle was being taken on by one of the warehouses which had done business with her mother, and was learning shorthand and tvping. There were other letters from old fellow-students of Otago.

Ponto decided upon a morning of truancy on the morrow. He wanted to get a seal upon this sense of home-coming, to take Andrew Barrie’s letter with him, and go off. like the Scholar Gypsy in search of enlightenment, but not, like the Scholar Gypsy, to come to Oxford and his friends no more. Accordingly, he came away on the following morning, from breakfast with two of his companions of the previous day, and discarding flannel bags and Norfolk coat for sweater and shorts, set off in the direction of Shotover.

Having gained his eminence, and with it a sense of happy detachment, Ponto bent to the perusal of

276

ACCLIMATIZATION

Andrew Barrie’s letter, walking as he read. The minister had received Ponto’s first English letter, and this carefully considered treatise was by way of reply. It is probable that the minister had been a little disturbed by the hectic note of the London letter. He was, in some measure, responsible for the implanting, among the small beginnings, of that ambition of which Oxford was to be the consummation. Like Carlyle, who once wrote a lengthy book in praise of silence, Andrew Barrie covered the first page of his screed with reflections on the vanity of giving advice, and the succeeding sheets with minute and considered counsel in all sorts of matters from the management of a coffee-machine, to the management of a scout. Ponto ran over the carefully written pages in search for something that should ratify this new sense of home-coming as he turned once more towards Oxford. He came upon it in the last page.

“ I wonder if you remember the vowel-drill I used to give you ? Well, try to forget that I ever was such a boor. You are such a mimic, Ponto, that lam half afraid lest you should give them a facsimile of my ideal Oxonian, who, by this time, is no doubt as extinct as the Dodo. Do you remember how they chanted ‘ What do we want, oh! We want Ponto ’ at your last capping? Well, they want Ponto over there, too. Keep that as the first article in your credo.”

Ponto thrust the letter into his belt, and started for home. Yes. It was home. Until he came to a realisation of this, he could do nothing aright. To be at home, one must be oneself. He had been like the man who cut off the rim of his hat to please one friend, and then disposed of the crown to please

282

A POOR SCHOLAR

another. He must have a hat of his own even if it were the wrong hat. His fellow-undergraduates had found him dull because he was presenting to them someone who was other than himself. One must save one’s soul, even if it involved committing solecisms. He trotted contentedly towards the tower of St. Mary’s, which stood out black against the lowering grey sky. Great drops of rain began to fall. He would be drenched before he reached home. His scout would consider him a disciple of some new cult, or some very old one. Well, so he was. He was the disciple of the child who had driven through Fairyland on a baker’s cart.

178

EPILOGUE

“ Dot, I insist that you put your feet up for at least an hour.” Sir Frederick Lawrence regarded his wife with an expression that was intended to be Napoleonic. Lady Lawrence was not impressed by the expression, but she obeyed nevertheless. The civic reception, following upon the journey had tired her, and she wanted to appear at her best when feted by the Ladies’ Club. The ladies of Dunedin were scheduled to fete her in an hour’s time.

“ Have you observed anything peculiar about this room, Ponto ? ” she inquired, as she reposed her members upon the plush-covered sofa.

Sir Frederick looked up from the rug he was spreading over the feet, and watched the trolley-poles cross and recross the space of window.

“ I believe it’s the same room where we once discussed destiny and daffodils,” he said.

“ It’s a different paper. Do all mayors mix their metaphors? He said you had gone further on grit and scholarships than many had on a silver spoon.”

“ I heard him,” said Sir Frederick. “ I suppose it’s better than mixing one’s drinks.”

“ It must all seem very queer to you, Ponto.”

“ Deuced queer. Now, what can I get you to read?”

“If you look in the pig you’ll find an anthology of New Zealand verse.”

“ That’s a very obvious selection.”

" Yes, Harold gave it to me.”

Sir Frederick’s eyes went from the window to those of his wife. In a brief moment it seemed that a tribute was paid, and an old sorrow revived.

279

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ That was before I met you, and just about the time I first heard of you,” said Dorothy Lawrence. “ Harold was always very circumspect in the things he gave.”

“ Yes,” assented Sir Frederick. There fell another little silence.

“ What are you going to do now ? Look at a dental school, or a chocolate factory ? ” It was the wife who broke the silence.

“ No. I have a complete hour to myself,” said the visitor. “ I angled for it. Fm going up to Hurzel.”

“ Why aren’t you taking me ? "

There was silence again

“Would you come?” questioned Sir Frederick dubiously.

“ You don’t want me to come

Sir Frederick assumed that Mongolian cast to which I have already referred.

Dorothy Lawrence laughed. How often had he occasion to be grateful for that laugh in the course of “ the Career.”

“ Dear Ponto,” she said, “ I quite understand. He was vour Harold long before he was mine.”

“Will you come?” reiterated Sir Frederick

“ No, I will not. Get me my book.”

Sir Frederick went out of the room with an unconscious little sigh of relief. His manner of retrieving the volume was in a piece with everything else that he did. He went for it silently and deftly. A chamber-maid disturbed him as he unbent with the book in his hand. She was duly impressed with the appearance of this dapper little man whose opportunity the Great War had provided. It had

280

286

EPILOGUE

killed her own brother, as it had killed Harold Marsh, of whom she had never heard. Harold had left no mark behind him. His only immortality was the vignette of him that Ponto and a few others carried about with them, and would carry as long as they lived. The athletic little man returned with the volume to his wife.

“ There you are dearest. I wish you would come, but of course it’s wiser to rest.”

“ Diplomacy,” said Lady Lawrence, as she took the book. Sir Frederick kissed her, and was out of the room in another second. He had planned to pay that pilgrimage alone, and he wondered at himself for having done so. Perhaps all pilgrimages should be made alone. Eluding his wife was an easier matter than eluding a well intentioned public, but he managed to jump off the Roslyn cable tramcar at Arthur Street, and thus break short a conversation with an old schoolfellow, who had been present at the civic reception, and had quoted Hilaire Belloc. Ponto sped on his way, past the High, and so up into Queen’s Drive. As he rounded the well remembered red scarp, just after the junction of the two roads, the Town Hall clock chimed a quarter to four. He remembered how Harold had spoken of the elusive quality of that chime. The sound of it now seemed to reduce him from the compass of Sir Frederick to the little patch of a boy who had once driven through Fairyland. In a short while he was in the Pleasaunce itself. He halted in the shade of one of the poplars. It appeared that they had gained prodigiously in girth since the day when the yellow chariot had driven through. This saddened and puzzled Ponto. He had not thought it would have been thus. There

A POOR SCHOLAR

scarcely seemed room for the company of his elect to congregate. They should all have been there from Alice and the White Rabbit to Launcelot and his charger. A yellow Packard whirled past the disused quarry, and was gone. How folk sped through Fairyland in these days. It had taken Long Dick’s cart at least three minutes. He stood for a while as still as the poplars themselves, tempting a desolation of spirit as a man will tempt Providence on a cliff’s edge. He had known promise and fulfilment, but the promise of this place remained unratified.

With an effort he faced back towards Hurzel, and thither bent his steps. The red gate had disappeared, making way for a higher and more substantial portal of green. " Hurzel ” was now emblazoned on a small brass plate. It almost seemed to justify the assumption that the Marshes took in pupils or lodgers. He pushed the gate open, and found himself facing the lawn that had once been darkened by the avenging shade of Turnbull. Here, too, he noted the aggrandisement of the trees at the expense of the dryads. There wasn’t room for things to happen, as they might have happened when he was a boy. He went on up to the steps, and rang the bell. A maid with an Eton crop and silk stockings came to the door. She seemed to be the first young thing that Ponto had encountered for centuries.

Miss Marsh was at home, but Mrs. Marsh was in bed. She had not been so well for the last day or two. The maid stepped aside, revealing the glassy stare of the tiger. Ponto entered, aware of that old panic desire to justify himself in Pauline’s eyes. The drawing room had undergone changes, but the two portraits and the tea table were still extant, and these

282

EPILOGUE

were the things that mattered. Presently Pauline came in, and the years fell away from Ponto as if by magic. Her pallor had turned to a slight sallowness, and her movements were the movements of a woman, but La Belle Dame was unconquerably herself. There was no shadow of turning from that quest on which she had always seemed to be engaged. She was still engaged upon correlating the witchery of her environment with the hard facts of life. She had remained steadfast to the Pleasaunce. It was he, Ponto, who had been the renegade. For him there was only escape by way of those multifarious interests contingent upon his public life. He had not the stamina to make a place grow in his likeness. That was what Pauline was doing. To outward seeming she was slipping precipitously into spinsterhood, spending her days in attendance upon two elderly valetudinarians. What an incomplete, unsatisfying life it appeared. Yet it was the life she had chosen, and in her eyes there was no doubt as to the validity of the choice she had made. Once more Ponto felt stripped of his trappings as he encountered that friendly quizzical gaze.

“ I have to apologize for Dot,” Ponto stammered “ She has to be at the Ladies’ Club.”

“ I should be there, too,” said Pauline, “ but mother has not been well. I half expected that you would come. Well? Have you forgiven me for that first gaucherie ? ”

“ What gaucherie ? ”

Pauline smiled. It might have been the pixie in the smocked frock who confronted the man of attainment.

283

A POOR SCHOLAR

“ The rich and the poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of them all,” she replied. “ I wonder if vou remember.”

“ Perfectly,” said Ponto. “It never struck me as anything but a ready joke.”

“ Harold didn’t think it a joke

There fell just such a silence as had befallen at the mention of the anthology an hour back.

“ I never wrote,” said Ponto presently, “ I simply couldn’t.”

Pauline was looking out of the window. A light breeze was stirring the macrocarpa at the end of the lawn. The sound of children at play came from the direction of the Pleasaunce.

“ Some people might say,” she said slowly, “ that that was one of the few r duties you ever shirked. I understood. Do you know, I’ve followed “the Career” with a kind of double proprietary pride. It’s part of my theory that one should hold on tenaciously to life even when the best has gone out of it, for the sake of those who have gone. That's how they would have it, isn’t it? And you’ve been one of the pleasant phenomena. I was quite right when I asked you to be Harold’s friend. I make mistakes so often, that I like to think of the times I have been right. Now I’m going to get you some tea.”

Ponto watched the swift deliberation with which she set about this task. The little maid with the Eton crop seemed the merest ceremonial appendage to the rite. He was struggling against the feeling that he should justify himself in the face of that smiling silent inquisitor, who seemed to treat him with something of the maternal consideration with which she treated the maid. When at length they were

284

285

EPILOGUE

alone together, she turned upon him the old frank and friendly gaze.

“ I feel it is part of my trust to Harold that you should find Hurzel the same,” said Pauline as she sat down. “Do you find it the same ? ”

Ponto considered. He wanted to be honest with Pauline, honest with himself.

“ It is I who have changed,” he said at length.

Pauline pondered, her chin on her hand.

“ Yes. I suppose so,” she said, “ one can’t have things both ways. I wonder if it would have been wiser not to come back ? ”

“ Do you think I would ever have known any rest if I hadn’t?”

“ I suppose not. At any rate you owed it to the place.”

Ponto struggled with a difficult thought. He wanted to ask Pauline if she were contented within that narrow circle, but such a question might seem an unwarrantable impertinence. He supposed that Pauline’s was the typical lot of a post-war gentlewoman. Her seeming acquiescence filled him with a quite unreasoning kind of shame. He felt that he somehow shared in the responsibility for this halflife she seemed to be leading. It seemed that she had allowed the current to pass by her. She belonged to a prior age. As a sign of this he noted that she had not even thought of shingling her hair. It was parted in the middle, as was the hair of the pixie child in the picture. Her jumper and skirt had about them that indefinable air of severity and fastidiousness which he had always noticed in her dress. Pauline, it appeared, had got nowhere. There was no outward ratification of that early promise. He supposed that

Books of Distinction and New Zealand Interest

Any three books ordered together will be sent post free , ” U “ If .arty wonders all mak. and ulwioiuriM, Its natunj IndeeTerwr TSJJ* * New Zealander, and Us tod are nu u. tS' o “ d lUtely t0 m bar. been o. the world could this be done better.

TAL ft ,°Li TH £, MAORI BUSH James Cowan. 7/(post on.). It may safely be predicted that Mr. S J lat ' st boolc Wlll find an honoured place on the bookshelf of every student of Maori lore and legend I , „ *°y er of this very beautiful and mysterious land. —( The Dominion).

ADVENTURES IN GEYSERLAND. Alfred Warbrick. "***“ b y J ames Cowan. Dedicated to Lord Bledisloe. Well illustrated. S/. (post 3d.). "Of great interest." (Auckland Star). “The book has a pleasant format” (Otago Daily Times). “We have thoroughly enjoyed reading this little book, admiring again and again its fine photographs. It is well printed and beautifully produced—a joy to handle.’’— (The Outlook)

• \ 1 nc wmtt/PKj. EARLY MAORILAND ADVENTURES OF J. W. STACK. Edited, with a Memoir, by A. H. Reed. 7/6 (post 6d.). De luxe edition, extra illustrated, numbered, and signed by Canon Stack’s daughters, 15/-. With interesting notes contributed by Bishop Williams, H. D. Skinner, Johannes Andersen, H. Fildes, and other authorities.

J awiuviavu, i uut3, dim UUICI dUUiUI IUC3. A TRADER IN CANNIBAL LAND. The Adventures of Captain Tapsell. By James Cowan. 160 pages, crown Bvo. Fully illustrated. Frontispiece in colour. Price 6/- net. This memoir of a boldly dramatic figure in New Zealand’s history is an authentic Odyssey of searoving and shore-trading adventure. It is a record of quite extraordinary range, with the Seven Seas, the Old World and the New for its theatre. Philip (Hans) Tapsell was a Danish sailor who early in his seagoing career took a Manx name to enable him to sail in English ships. For thirty-five years he was at sea, most of the time in whaleships; for the next forty years he was a trader among the Maoris. His story surveys the transformation of New Zealand from a land of cannibal warfare into a British colony of peace and comfort and wealth.

Published bv A. H. and A W. REED

i UUI.JIIIU uy i-t. 11. unu y-1 ff. iu-i-u 33 Jetty Street. Dunedin. 182 Wakefield Street, Wellington.

EPILOGUE

“ That’s Daddy,” said Pauline. “He hasn’t changed any more than Hurzel has. He’s just as Harold left him, except for his back. The garden’s responsible for that.”

Ponto waited with her till Mr. Marsh entered the room. Then it was as if he made a discovery that transcended his first discovery of Hurzel. Behind the red gate and the green fastness there had been remoteness and wonder, and vague longing. He had penetrated the vastness, but had never found Hurzel’s secret. It was something in which his own soul was involved, but as the tall bent figure entered the room, he was aware of something that did not elude, the quite obvious and commonplace, but by no means common fact of comradeship between father and daughter. Mr. Marsh’s manner towards him was just as it had always been. Ponto was someone whom Harold had brought to the house. The knighthood was merely an accident of time. Ponto felt that Mr. Marsh would have treated him with the same courtesy if he had stood before the mast of Hurzel in dungarees. He had but few minutes before setting out to keep an appointment with a pressman, who wanted to purvey Sir Frederick Lawrence’s views on many subjects to his fellow citizens. Pauline and Mr. Marsh walked with him to the gate. It closed upon something that was better than enchantment. Ponto felt that he had the poplars of the Pleasaunce in perspective. To-morrow he would take Dorothy to see them.

Coulls Somerville Wilkie Ltd.. Crawford Street. Dunedin.

Books of Distinction and New Zealand Interest

Any three books ordered together will be sent post free

KiritHs 1 '" w: stks r ssr Cn hj ln ,, New Zealand and in no other part of the world could this be done better.

TALES OF THE MAORI BUSH. James Cowan. 7/(post 6d ). "It may safely be predicted that Mr. Lowan s latest book will find an honoured place on the bookshelf of every student of Maori lore and legend ana of every lover of this very beautiful and mysterious land. —( The Dominion).

ADVENTURES IN GEYSERLAND. Alfred Warbrick Preface by James Cowan. Dedicated to Lord Bledisloe. Well illustrated. 5/- (post 3d.). "Of great interest.” (Auckland Star). "The book has a pleasant format.” (Otago Daily limes). "We have thoroughly enjoyed reading this little book, admiring again and again its fine photographs. It is well printed and beautifully produced—a joy to handle.”— (The Outlook).

EARLY MAORILAND ADVENTURES OF J. W. STACK. Edited, with a Memoir, by A. H. Reed. 7/6 (post 6d.). De luxe edition, extra illustrated, numbered, and signed by Canon Stack’s daughters, 15/-. With interesting notes contributed by Bishop Williams, H. D. Skinner, Johannes Andersen, H. Fildes, and other authorities.

A TRADER IN CANNIBAL LAND. The Adventures of Captain Tapsell. By James Cowan. 160 pages, crown Bvo. Fully illustrated. Frontispiece in colour Price 6/- net. This memoir of a boldly dramatic figure in New Zealand’s history is an authentic Odyssey of searoving and shore-trading adventure. It is a record of quite extraordinary range, with the Seven Seas, the Old World and the New for its theatre. Philip (Hans) Tapsell was a Danish sailor who early in his seagoing career took a Manx name to enable him to sail in English ships. For thirty-five years he was at sea, most of the time in whaleships; for the next forty years he was a trader among the Maoris. His story surveys the transformation of New Zealand from a land of cannibal warfare info a British colony of peace and comfort and wealth.

Published by A. H. and A W. REED

33 Jetty Street, Dunedin. 182 Wakefield Street, Wellington.

Please return this item to:

Document Supply Services

National Library of New Zealand

PO Box 1467

Wellington

Supplied at no charge from the collections of the National Library of New Zealand

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1936-9917502603502836-A-poor-scholar---a-tale-of-progr

Bibliographic details

APA: Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards). (1936). A poor scholar : a tale of progress. A.H. and A.W. Reed.

Chicago: Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards). A poor scholar : a tale of progress. Dunedin, N.Z.: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1936.

MLA: Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards). A poor scholar : a tale of progress. A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1936.

Word Count

76,810

A poor scholar : a tale of progress Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards), A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

Using This Item

Out of copyright (New Zealand)

To the best of the National Library of New Zealand’s knowledge, under New Zealand law, copyright in this book has expired.

You can copy this item, share it, and post it on a blog or website. It can be modified, remixed and built upon. It can be used commercially. If reproducing this item, it is helpful to include the source.

For further information please refer to the Copyright guide.

A poor scholar : a tale of progress Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards), A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

Using This Item

Out of copyright (New Zealand)

To the best of the National Library of New Zealand’s knowledge, under New Zealand law, copyright in this book has expired.

Contents of this book

Permanent link to this item

Bibliographic details

Word Count

A poor scholar : a tale of progress Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards), A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

Using This Item

Out of copyright (New Zealand)

A poor scholar : a tale of progress Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards), A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

Using This Item

Out of copyright (New Zealand)

Log in or create a Papers Past website account

Log in with RealMe®

Log in again to continue your work

Log in again with RealMe®

Alert

Contents of this book

Cover Page - Page 20 of 300

Cover Page - Page 20 of 300

Cover Page - Page 20 of 300

Cover Page - Page 20 of 300

Permanent link to this item

Bibliographic details

Word Count

A poor scholar : a tale of progress Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards), A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

Using This Item

Out of copyright (New Zealand)

A poor scholar : a tale of progress Allen, C. R. (Charles Richards), A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1936

Using This Item

Out of copyright (New Zealand)

Log in or create a Papers Past website account

Log in with RealMe®

Log in again to continue your work

Log in again with RealMe®

Alert