Shame and Consciences
adapted by Mihangel
16. Rutter unfulfilled
Jan's second winter term proved his best so far. He played football every day, not brilliantly, for he was never quite quick enough on the ball, but with a truculence and tenacity which won him the black trimmings of a quite lowly team. In form he was no longer a laughing stock, even though it was now the Middle Fifth where one began to cope with Greek iambics as well as Latin elegiacs. But it was a bed of roses after the Middle Remove, and its form-master was Dudley Relton, an angel of forbearance after the inhuman Haigh.
As the cricket master, Relton had watched Jan bowling in the one game in which he had played, thanks to the departed Sprawson, on the Upper. He kept his eye on the young left-hander with the queer individual action. But it was the cool eye of a long-headed cricketer, and Jan never read it for a moment. He only wished that Relton would not look at him sometimes in class as if he knew all about him, and it rather bothered him to get off lighter than he deserved for a grammatical howler in his prose or a vile copy of verses.
Chips was now in the Upper Fifth, uncomfortably alongside Evan, and his extravagant prophesies of Jan's future were neither remembered nor repeated. His enthusiasms had toned themselves down, but his relations with Jan continued as they always had. They were still in and out of each other's studies, they still sat together on Sunday evenings, they still went side by side on walks. But they did not go arm in arm as many fellows did, for they were not bosoms.
That term, which originated with Mrs Thrale, demands a little explanation. It was generally agreed that School House was the best to be in as far as quality and quantity of food was concerned, because its supply was overseen by Mrs Thrale. She was German by birth and, despite her thirty years on these shores, her English was not perfect. She was most famous, after her kind and motherly heart, for her plum cakes, which took the place of the desiccated dog-rocks of other houses, and which she dispensed with her own fair hand. It was her standard practice, if a boy came to her to collect his wedge of cake by himself and without his usual companion, to present him with another wedge "for ze bosom." School parlance, therefore, had long since abbreviated "bosom friend" to "bosom."
Jan did not have a bosom. There was but one boy in the school he yearned to have as a bosom and more than a bosom, but that boy remained inaccessible. Chips he regarded as a good friend. It was a nice distinction, but a real one, and it discouraged him from putting his arm through Chips's.
So it was side by side, not arm in arm, that they walked out along the Binchester road one Sunday afternoon in early October and headed for the interesting old church at Bardney: interesting to Chips the omnivorously curious, if less so to Jan. Some distance ahead of them was another pair of boys who were walking arm in arm and who, when abreast of the Burston turn, climbed over a stile to the left and disappeared. Chips and Jan, on reaching the stile, looked down the fields into the valley and saw the boys vanishing into the small copse which surrounded a very distinct hillock.
"That's Castle Hill," remarked Chips. "Some fellow was telling me about it. There was a castle there once, not a proper stone castle, but a wooden one, on that mound. It might be worth having a look at one day."
Not today, with Bardney beckoning. But next Sunday, on a mild and mellow autumn afternoon, they decided to investigate the site. They climbed the stile and strolled down from the road across the soft meadowland, and as they approached the copse Jan stopped dead of a sudden, grabbing Chips by the sleeve and putting his finger to his lips. Chips looked his question. Jan answered by stealing carefully forward to the edge of the trees, with Chips close behind. There, in a russet and rustling nest of dead leaves, a few yards into the woodland and a few yards short of the castle mound, were the two boys again, but engaged in an energetic and most unexpected activity. Their trousers were round their ankles and their buttocks gleamed pale in the shade. They were facing away from the watchers, quite unaware that they were being observed, and both were grunting like pigs.
For a long minute Jan looked. He turned to glance at Chips, who was staring open-mouthed and trembling-lipped, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. Jan jerked his head, swung on his heel and led the way, equally quietly, back to the stile. There they perched on the top rail, facing the road and bending forward as if they had something to hide, and looked at each other again. Chips for once had no words, and Jan was unsure what to say. Less than a year ago he had guided Chips one step along this educational path. Here now was another step, and a trickier one.
"Rutting like animals!" he finally observed, deciding to keep the tone light. He gave a short laugh. "I wonder if that's where my name comes from? Rutter."
It was the sort of academic query in which Chips's inquisitive mind normally rejoiced, but not in these circumstances. He too was clearly feeling his way.
"I'd heard about -- what they were doing," he ventured after another pause. "Had you, Tiger?"
"Yes."
He had not only heard about it, but he had witnessed it; and not merely between horses and cattle and sheep, but between men, or rather boys. As gentry's stables went, the Devereuxs' had been quite modest. Old Rutter the coachman ruled them with a rod of iron. Jan the stable-boy, when he was not attending the local school, carried out such menial tasks as mucking out and cleaning the harness. Between them in the hierarchy came Ted the groom, a lad of nineteen who groomed and exercised the horses and sat beside the coachman when the Devereuxs went visiting in their landau. Ted's language, like old Rutter's, was always free, and so too, Jan discovered, was Ted's behaviour. He never made any passes at Jan himself, for fear perhaps of old Rutter. But only a few months after Jan had spied on Ted's solitary pleasures in his retreat in the hayloft, he had spied on him again as he indulged in a less solitary activity.
The Devereuxs had had visitors staying, whose carriage was manned by a coachman and a smart and eye-turning groom of perhaps sixteen, a real "tiger." One evening when both coachmen had repaired to the public house, Jan had come into the stable just in time to see both grooms disappearing up the ladder to Ted's retreat. Intrigued again, he had climbed to the hayloft by the outside stairs, and had again peeped through the partition. What he saw, as he watched spell-bound for half an hour, was a revelation to him. Far from shocking or disgusting him, it had cast a great flood of light on a feeling which, he suddenly realised, had long been lurking dormant and unrecognised in the depths of his soul. Having seen what the two grooms were doing, he had instantly known with whom he would like to do it himself.
"Have you ever done it, Tiger?" was Chips's next question.
"No." Perhaps the regret was audible.
"Would you like to do it?"
Jan gazed along the road. A trap was trotting towards them from the town. From the opposite direction another pair of boys, evidently bosoms, were approaching arm-in-arm. Independent-minded Jan may have been, but he felt suddenly lonely. Yes, he would like to do it, he would very much like to do it. The trap clattered past them, leaving behind a whiff of horse-flesh. That stallion would happily mount the first mare in heat that came his way. Stallions did not love, they lusted. Maybe those fellows in the copse were just lusting stallions. But Jan was not an animal. He was a human being of a sort, and not just a flirt, for he had his pride and his conscience. He could not rut the first willing youngster who came his way.
For him, in his embryonic thinking, to rut meant having at least a bosom to rut. For him, it demanded at least that blend of equality, trust, honesty and physical attraction, that meeting of minds which made up bosom friendship. That was the first stage. The next stage beyond it was different. It was love, or it could be love.
But as well as his pride and conscience he had his shame. If he was honest and revealed his shameful secret, what boy in the school would trust him or treat him as an equal? The two bosoms passed by, chattering gaily. Only one single boy in the school knew Jan's secret, and although he seemed trustworthy he did not treat him as an equal, or only very occasionally when it served his purpose. Much as Jan yearned for his bosom friendship, even for his love, he was beyond his reach. And if Evan was beyond his reach, then everyone else in the school was even further beyond.
Or was equality, treating each other as equals, really so far beyond reach? Jan thought of his father and of the mother he had never known, who must have loved each other and presumably treated each other as equals -- Rutter senior may have been a rough diamond, but not a bad man. They had been separated by a huge gulf of rank, but it had not mattered, not to them. A song came into Jan's head from the opera that he and Chips had gone to last Easter.
Never mind the why and wherefore,
Love can level ranks and therefore --
in that case, a captain's daughter had married a common sailor. Love had been shown on both sides, as it must have been between the squire's daughter and the squire's groom. But the ironmaster's son and the ironmaster's stable-boy were a different matter. No love had been shown on either side, however much it budded in the stable-boy's heart. No love could be shown, not as things were.
Jan suddenly remembered that Chips was still waiting for an answer. He was a decent old stick, was Chips, who deserved an honest answer, though not a totally honest one. In any event, Jan had taken so long in supplying it that Chips must have guessed what it would be.
"Yes. With the right person."
Chips nodded slowly. "With the right girl, or -- well -- the right boy?"
Jan was startled. Ever since that episode in the hayloft he had known where his inclinations lay. That did not worry him, any more than the fact that he could bowl with his left hand but not with his right. It was the way he was made. He was well aware that in the eyes of society and authority, while it was reprehensible for a groom to rut a lady, it was utterly scandalous for a man to rut a man, or a boy a boy. Love between man and woman was normal and, within limits, accepted, whereas love between men -- or boys -- was beyond society's comprehension. But he did not care, for the whole of society's attitude was beyond his own comprehension.
Jan drew no distinction between the genders. Of course there were differences of technical detail, just as there were between bowlers. But whereas the rules of cricket were the same for left-handers as they were for right-handers, society laid down discriminatory rules for love. Jan's mind was too independent and unconventional to feel bound by them. But old Chips had probably been shocked enough for today. Jan would leave the options open.
"With the right person," he repeated.
Chips evidently recognised that the options remained open, and nodded again. He followed his nod with an almost hopeful look which Jan, already back into his thoughts, barely noticed.
"Excuse us," said a voice behind them. It was the two boys from the copse, bold as brass and sublimely ignorant that their activities had been witnessed, wanting to cross the stile. And Jan and Chips recognised them: Gillespie from the Upper Fifth and Richardson from the Lower Fifth. Both were in the Lodge, and both were bosoms of Evan. As he made way for them, Jan's mind swooped. Did that mean that Evan rutted too? No, far from necessarily. If two of a small gang of bosoms rutted, it did not mean that they all did. But they might, they might.
That thought was a shock to him, and Chips saw that it was. Wrestling with this new question saw Jan the whole of the way home. Chips, beside him, seemed equally preoccupied, as if he was drawing unwelcome conclusions, and was equally silent.
Nearly two weeks later the buzz spread like wild-fire around the school that Richardson and Gillespie in the Lodge had been bunked, and it told what their crime had been. It proved true enough: Chips and Jan, comparing notes next day, confirmed that neither boy had been in first school.
"I say, Chips, it wasn't you who reported them, was it?"
"No!" His instant and emphatic denial made Jan regret his unworthy suspicion.
Next Sunday the stern little old man, looking down at his flock from the pulpit, spoke to them more in sorrow than in anger, and more directly than he usually did.
"Curiosity, ignorance and lies form a very hotbed of impurity, the very negation of True Life. We pay heavily for our civilised habits of false shame and for the mystery in which sex is wrapped. I confess that for curiosity I have no remedy. But lies are on a different footing, lies about the impossibility of being pure; and to them the only answer is a flat denial, for purity is entirely possible and, once attained, it is easy; ask anyone who has attained it. Perfect ignorance is a good protection; but in a boy perfect ignorance is impossible, and half-ignorance is deadly.
"It is for this reason that every year I speak to you upon this subject. It is for this reason that the school tries to detect and check the subtle beginnings of impure thought, to create a healthy disgust for impure conversation, to set up all possible guards against the temptation to impure act, to arm you for the inevitable struggle with your own lower nature or against the influence of evil associates. This the school tries to do, and in this it has failed."
All very well for him and the likes of him, thought Jan as he listened, all very well for those who subscribe to his standards. But they are not my standards. And for once my standards cannot be put down to an upbringing in the stable, because poor old Gillespie and Richardson were not brought up in a stable.
On their afternoon walk neither Jan nor Chips mentioned the sermon. But Chips had a question to put, rather nervously.
"Tiger, confirmation classes are starting next week, aren't they? Are you going to them? Are you going to be confirmed?"
"Worse luck, yes."
It was a sore point with Jan. You did not have to be confirmed, much though it was encouraged.
"No choice. My grandfather asked when I was going to be, and if I'd said I wasn't going to be, he'd have lost his wool."
"Well, I'm not going to be." Chips sounded unusually defiant. "And when I told old Pagan" -- which was the highly inappropriate surname of the school chaplain -- "at least he had the decency not to ask why."
Chips would not elaborate, and Jan found himself reflecting that he knew the old ass not nearly as well as he thought, and approving of the old ass more and more. So Jan attended confirmation classes, which were run by Jerry and old Pagan. He sat through hours of exhortation, his heart and his head barricaded off from it by a solid wall of reservations. In December the Bishop of Paulbury came to conduct the service, and in the congregation -- though he did not have to be -- was Chips, lending moral support. Or, as Jan impiously and gratefully wondered as godly hands were laid on his ungodly head, was it immoral support?
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