Excerpt
Chapter One.
“There’ll be such a game directly. Just listen to old Dicksee.”
I was very low-spirited, but, as the bright, good-looking lad at my side nudged me with his elbow, I turned from casting my eyes round the great bare oak-panelled room, with its long desks, to the kind of pulpit at the lower end, facing a bigger and more important-looking erection at the upper end, standing upon a broad daïs raised a foot above the rest of the room. For this had been the banqueting hall of Meade Place, in the good old times of James the First, when its owner little thought it would ever be the schoolroom of Dr Browne’s “Boarding Establishment for Gentlemen’s Sons.” In fact, there was a broad opening now, with a sliding door, right through the thick wall into the kitchen, so my companion told me, and that I should see the shoulders of mutton slip through there at dinner-time.
So I looked at the lower pulpit, in which sat Mr Rebble, one of the ushers, a lank, pale-faced, haggard man, with a dotting of freckles, light eyebrows, and pale red hair which stood up straight like that upon a clothes-brush.
He was resting his elbows on the desk and wiping his hands one over the other, as if the air was water and he had a piece of soap between his palms. By him was a boy with a book, reading in a highly-pitched voice which did not seem to fit him, being, like his clothes, too small for such a big fellow, with his broad face and forehead all wrinkled up into puckers with the exertion of reading.
“Tchish! tchish! Silence!” said Mr Rebble, giving three stamps on the floor. “Now go on, Dicksee.”
“I say, do listen,” said the boy by my side. “He isn’t well, and I gave him a dose this morning.”
“You did?” I said. “You hit him?”
“No, no,” said the boy, laughing. “I often do though—a miserable sneak. I gave him a dose of medicine. He had been eating too many of Polly Hopley’s cakes. My father is a doctor!” he added importantly.
“Oh!” I said.
“I say, do listen. Did you ever hear such a whine?”
As he spoke, I heard the big, stoutly-built boy give a tremendous sniff, and then go on reading.
“I love Penny Lope—Penny Lope is loved by me.”
“Pen-el-o-pe!” cried the usher angrily, as he snatched the book from the boy’s hands, closed it, and boxed his ears with it, right and left, over and over again. “You dumkopf!” he shouted; “you muddy-brained ass! you’ll never learn anything. You’re more trouble than all the rest of the boys put together. There, be off to your seat, and write that piece out twenty-five times, and then learn it by heart.”
“Ow, ow, ow! sniff, sniff, snork!”
“Silence, sir, or I’ll make the imposition fifty times!”
The howl subsided into a series of subdued sniffs as the big fellow went back to his place, amidst the humming noise made by some fifty boys, who, under the pretence of studying their lessons, kept up conversations, played at odd or even for marbles, or flicked peas at each other across the school....