Knight Without Armour Read Free Page A

recounted in the common-room how magnanimity had melted
young Fothergill almost to tears—how with shaking voice the boy had
declined the cocoa invitation and had asked to be allowed to go.
    It had been A.J.’s first fight, and he fully realised that he had
lost. What troubled him most was not Smalljohn’s victory but the
attitude of his fellows; if they, had only stood with him, Smalljohn could
have been defeated. Yet they called him a coward because in Rugby football,
which he was compelled to play although he disliked it, he sometimes showed
that he didn’t consider it worth while to get hurt. At the end of his
third year the headmaster’s report summed him up, not too unreasonably,
as: “A thoughtful boy, with many good qualities, but apt to be
obstinate and self- opinionated. Is hardly getting out of Barrowhurst all he
should.”
    A.J. had two adventures at Barrowhurst altogether; the first was the
Smalljohn affair, which was no more than a nine days’ wonder and
certainly did not add to his popularity; but the second was in a different
class: it established his fame on a suddenly Olympian basis, and passed,
indeed, into the very stuff of Barrowhurst tradition. Two miles away from the
school is the tunnel that carries the Scotch expresses under the Pennines. It
is over three miles long, boring under the ridge from one watershed to
another. A.J. walked through it one school half-holiday. Platelayers met him
staggering out, half-deafened and half-suffocated, with eyes inflamed,
soot-blackened face, and hands bleeding where he had groped his way along the
tunnel wall. He was taken to the school in a cab, and had to spend a week in
bed; after which he was thrashed by the headmaster. He gave no explanation of
his escapade beyond the fact that he had wanted to discover what it would be
like. He agreed that the experience had been thoroughly unpleasant.
    A.J.’s fourth year was less troubled. He was in the sixth form by
then, preparing for Cambridge, and was left to do pretty much as he liked.
The tunnel affair had given him prestige of an intangible kind both with boys
and masters, and he spent much of his time reading odd books on all kinds of
subjects that form no part of a public-school curriculum. He cycled miles
about the moorland countryside, picking up fossils and making rubbings of old
brasses in churches; he also (and somehow quite incidentally) achieved an
official Barrowhurst record by a long jump of twenty feet. His sixth-form
status carried prefecture with it, and rather to everyone’s surprise he
made an excellent prefect—straightforward, firm, and tolerant.
    He went to Cambridge in the autumn of 1898; his rooms at St. John’s
overlooked the river and the Backs, being among the best situated in the
University. Sir Henry made him a fairly generous allowance, and began to hope
that the boy might prove some good after all, despite the tepid reports from
Barrowhurst. A.J. liked Cambridge, of course. He didn’t have to play
games, there were no schoolmasters with their irritating systems, he could
read his queer books, listen to string quartets, and wield a
geologist’s hammer to his heart’s content. The only thing he
seemed definitely disinclined for was the sort of work that would earn him a
decent degree. Sir Henry encouraged him to join the Union, and he did so,
though he never spoke. He made one or two close friends, and was well liked
by those who knew him at all. (He was still called
’A.J.’—the nickname had followed him to Cambridge through
the agency of Barrowhurst men.) Most of the vacations he spent in Bloomsbury;
of late years he had seen less and less of his brothers and sisters, several
of whom had emigrated. He also travelled abroad a little—just to the
usual places in France, Germany, and Switzerland.
    He had no particular adventures in Cambridge, and left no mark on
university history unless it were by the foundation of a