THE COMPLETE DAVID BLAIZE TRILOGY (Illustrated Edition). Эдвард Бенсон

sir; thank you, sir,” said David, beaming.

      “Ah! Well, we’ll take a little stroll across the field, you and I, before we begin our English literature.”

      It was one of those days when Rhadamanthus unbent, when the man who could be so terrible became wholly enchanting, a man not to fear but to love. These days were not common, but when they came they were golden. And now that tremendous person, who had been a rowing-blue at Oxford, who was the incarnation of fate and retribution, laid his arm over David’s shoulder and put aside his terrors.

      “I had a long talk to your father, David,” he said. “No, no one can hear me call you David; don’t be alarmed; and no doubt he has told you part of what we said, that you are to go up for a scholarship at Marchester next week. Do your best, won’t you, and be a credit, not to me, which doesn’t matter so much, but to yourself. And I told your father I was proud of you, and I meant it. You and I have had what they call words before now, haven’t we? In fact, I’m afraid that sometimes it has come to blows. You have often been most unsatisfactory, idle and careless and disobedient; I dare say there’s not a single school rule that you haven’t broken. But I told your father that I had never found you mean nor bestial. I look upon you as a boy I can trust.”

      David’s young skin flushed with pleasure, and then went white again with a resolution that frightened himself.

      “I—I’ve done lots of things you don’t know about, sir,” he said. “I don’t think it’s right you should think me good—I’ve——”

      The Head stopped, and David’s heart sank into his boots. What an ass he had been to say that! Why not have received this handsome tribute, however undeserved, without disturbing the misplaced faith that prompted it? And yet he knew that he had done it deliberately and because he had to.

      “Do you wish to tell me about them?” asked the Head. But his voice was still quiet and kind. David seemed to himself to be going mad. He just heard his voice in a quaking whisper say:

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Well, then, David, I don’t want to hear about them,” said this astounding man, “though I thank you for wishing to tell me. I feel sure you have broken rules of school often enough, but I don’t think you have broken rules of character. They are much more important, though school rules have got to be kept as well.”

      Suddenly his grip on David’s shoulder tightened, and his eye fixed itself on the back of a small boy who was sitting on the wire railing at the edge of the field, unconscious of their approach.

      “Ferrers Minor, I think,” he called out in an awful voice.

      The Head thought right, and Ferrers Minor presented his startled and dejected countenance.

      “Did you, or did you not, know the rule about sitting on the railings?” demanded the Head.

      “Yes, sir,” said Ferrers Minor.

      “Then this is wilful disobedience,” thundered the Head. “I will not be bullied by you, Ferrers Minor, nor have you disregard the rules with which you are perfectly well acquainted. I suppose you wish to make a fool of me, to hold me up to ridicule for having the impertinence to frame rules which Mr. Ferrers Minor keeps or not, as he finds convenient. Was that your plan?”

      “N-no, sir,” said Ferrers Minor.

      “Then I will make a plan for you instead, and it is that you write out in your best copy-hand ‘I will not sit on the railings like an ass’ a hundred times. You may go, Ferrers Minor.”

      But Rhadamanthus, the inexorable terror, had only mounted his judgment throne for a moment, and came down off it again. His grip relaxed, and he patted David’s shoulder.

      “And now for our literature lesson,” he said. “It’s too hot to hold it in the museum, isn’t it, Blaize, when we can sit under the trees instead. Let’s have it out here: go in, will you, and tell the class to come out. And, personally, I shall take my coat off, and anybody else who likes to do the same of course may.”

      The boys trooped out at David’s summons, peeling off their coats, and grouped themselves in the shade of the four big elms that stood in a quadrilateral clump at the edge of the field. The Head had taken off his coat, and, leaning on his elbows, lay on that part of his person which in ordinary mortals is called the stomach, with a book or two in front of him.

      “All comfortably settled?” he said. “That’s all right. Now to-day I’m going to talk to you about a man whom very likely you have never heard of, and read you something he wrote. His name was Keats, John Keats. Has anybody heard of him?” Nobody had.

      “He was a chemist’s assistant,” said the Head, “and if some ninety or a years ago, you, Stone, or you, Blaize, had gone into a doctor’s little dispensary near Hampstead to get a dose because you had a pain in your inside, from eating too many strawberries, or from having shirked into Richmond and devoured more than a sufficiency of Maids of Honour you might have had your medicine given you by one of the greatest lyrical poets who ever lived. The doctor’s assistant, a pale young man with a bad cough, might perhaps have mixed it for you, and if you were wide awake you might have seen that when he got up to give you your pill or your powder, he laid down a pencil and a piece of paper on which he was scribbling. Stone, if you leave that wasp alone he will not get angry and sting you, or lose his head and think it was me who was annoying him. Yes, and then when you had paid your twopence and gone away with your pill, you may be sure he would have taken up his pencil and paper again. No doubt, if you had asked him, he would have copied out for you what he was writing on another piece of paper, in which he was accustomed to wrap up parcels, and wondered that you cared to pay another twopence for it. But if you sold that piece of paper to-day you would get, not twopence, but hundreds of pounds for it. For on it would be written lines by John Keats, in his own hand. And what you might have found on that piece of paper is this:

      “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

       My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

       Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

       A minute since, and Lethe wards have sunk.

      “Lethe we had in our Homer not long ago. Lethe, the water of forgetfulness. Sometimes I think Blaize and others of you have drunk it.

      “ ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

       But being too happy in thy happiness

       That thou, light-wingèd dryad of the trees

       In some melodious plot

       Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

       Dreamest of summer in full-throated ease.”

      He read on, occasionally stopping to explain a word; once and again his voice trembled, as it did sometimes when he preached; once it nearly stopped altogether as he came to the lines:

      “Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

       Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

       She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

      “In tears amid the alien corn,” he repeated.

      The entire informality of these proceedings, the absence of the sense that they were being taught and had got to learn, disarmed the boys, and before this stanza was reached the fact that it was the portentous Head who was reading to them had quite vanished. They were all sitting or lying about at ease on the grass, one or two of them listening intently, the others, for the most part, feeling just lazy and soothed and comfortable. But among the intent listeners was David, and as the Head paused and repeated “alien corn,” he rolled over on to his back, absorbed and lost.

      “Golly,” he said quietly to himself. “Oh Golly!” Then he became aware that he had spoken aloud, but scarcely wondered whether the Head had heard or not, so completely did the magic of the words possess him. And in some mysterious way they added to his store of happiness: they became part of him, and thus part of the fact that he was going to Marchester