Fortitude - Hugh Walpole

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gathered there, along the dusky passage and packed, in a silent motionless throng, into the gymnasium.

      He knew that they were all there with a purpose, and suddenly as he realised the insult that they intended, that spirit of exultation came upon him again. Ah! it was worth while, this battle!

      They made way in silence as he passed quietly to the other end of the gymnasium and stood, a little above them, on the steps that led to the gallery. He started the roll-call with the head of the school and the sixth form … there was no answer to any name; only perfect silence and every eye fixed upon him. For a wild moment he wished to burst out upon them, to crash their heads together, to hurt—then his self-control returned. Very quietly and clearly he read through the school list, a faint smile on his lips. Bobby Galleon was the only boy, out of three hundred, who answered.

      When he had finished he called out as was the custom, “Roll is over,” then for a brief instant, with the list in his hand, smiling, he faced them all. Every eye was upon him—Ellershaw, West, Barton smiling a little, some faces nervous, some excited, all bitterly, intensely hostile … and he must return next year!

      He came down from the steps and walked very slowly to the door, and then as his fingers touched the handle there was a sound—a whisper, very soft and then louder; it grew about his ear like a shot … the whole school, motionless as before, was hissing him.

      There was no word spoken, and he closed the door behind him.

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      That same night he walked, before chapel, with Bobby to the top of the playing fields. The night was dark and heavy, with no moon nor stars—but there was a cool wind that touched his cheek.

      “Well, I've been a pretty good failure, Bobby. You've stuck to me like a brick. I shall never forget it. … But you know never in all my life have I been as happy as I was this afternoon. The devils! I'll have 'em under next year.”

      “That's not the way—” Bobby tried timorously to explain.

      “Oh, yes, it is. … Anyhow it's my way. I wonder what there is about me that makes people hate me so.”

      “People don't.”

      “Yes, they do. At home, here—it's all the same. I'm always having to fight about something, always coming up against things.”

      “I suppose it's your destiny,” said Bobby. “You always say it's to teach you pluck.”

      “That's what an old chap I knew in Cornwall said. But why can't I be let alone? How I loved that bit last year when the fellows liked me—only the decent things never last.”

      “It'll be all right later,” Bobby answered, thinking that he had never seen anything finer than the way Peter had taken that afternoon. “In a way,” he went on, “you fellows are lucky to get a chance of standing up against that sort of thing; it's damned good practice. Nobody ever thinks I'm worth while.”

      “Well,” said Peter, throwing a clod of dark, scented earth into the air and losing sight of it in the black wall about him—“Here's to next year's battle!”

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      Peter never saw Dawson's again. When the summer holidays had run some three weeks a letter arrived stating, quite simply and tersely that, owing to the non-payment by evading parents of bills long overdue and to many other depressing and unavoidable circumstances Mr. Barbour and that House of Cards, his school, had fallen to pieces. There at any rate was an end to that disastrous accumulation of brick and mortar, and the harm that, living, it had wrought upon the souls and bodies of its victims its dying could not excuse. No tears were shed for Dawson's.

      Peter, at the news, knew that now his battle never could be won. That battle at any rate must be left behind him with his defeat written large upon the plain of it, and this made in some unrealised way the penalty of the future months harder to bear. He had, behind him, defeat. Look at it as he might, he had been a failure at Dawson's—he had not done the things that he had been put there to do—and yet through the disaster he knew that in so far as he had refused to bend to the storm so far there had been victory; of that at any rate he was sure.

      So he turned resolutely from the past and faced the future. It was as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed—a dream, a fantasy, a delirium—something that had left no external things behind it and had only in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its mark. He faced his House. …

      Scaw House had seemed to him, during these last three years, merely an interlude at Dawson's. There had been hurried holidays that had been spent in recovering from and preparing for the term and the House had scarcely, and only very quietly, raised its head to disturb him. He had not been disturbed—he had had other things to think about—and now he was very greatly disturbed indeed; that was the first difference that he consciously realised. The disturbance lay, of course, partly in the presence of his father and in the sense that he had had growing upon him, during the last two years, that their relationship, the one to the other, would, suddenly, one fine day, spring into acute emotion. They were approaching one another gradually as in a room whose walls were slowly closing. “Face to face—and then body to body—at last, soul to soul!”

      He did not, he thought, actively hate his father; his father did not actively hate him, but hate might spring up at any moment between them, and Peter, although he was only sixteen, was no longer a child. But the feeling of apprehension that Scaw House gave him was caused by wider influences than his father. Three years at Dawson's had given Peter an acute sense of expecting things, it might be defined as “the glance over the shoulder to see who followed”—some one was always following at Scaw House. He saw in this how closely life was bound together, because every little moment at Dawson's contributed to his present active fear. Dawson's explained Scaw House to Peter. And yet this was all morbidity and Peter, square, broad-shouldered, had no scrap of morbidity in his clean body. He did not await the future with the shaking candle of the suddenly awakened coward, but rather with the planted feet and the bared teeth of the bull-dog. …

      He watched the faces of his father, his aunt and Mrs. Trussit. He observed the frightened dreams of his grandfather, the way that old Curtis the gardener would suddenly cease his fugitive digging and glance with furtive eyes at the windows of the house; about them were the dark shadows of the long passages, the sharp note of some banging door in a distant room, the wail of that endless wind beyond the walls. He felt too that Mrs. Trussit and his aunt were furtively watching him. He never caught them in anything tangible but he knew that, when his back was turned, their eyes followed him—questioning, wondering.

      Something must be done or he could not answer for his control. If he were not to return to Dawson's, what then?

      It was his seventeenth birthday one hot day towards the end of August, and at breakfast his father, without looking up from his paper, said:

      “I have made arrangements for you with Mr. Aitchinson to enter his office next week. You'll have to work—you've been idling long enough.”

      The windows were wide open, the lawn was burning in the sun, bees carried the

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