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CHAPTER II
AN IMPORTANT ITEM
Now the cause of my leaving Tiverton school, and the
way of it, were as follows. On the 29th day of
November, in the year of our Lord 1673, the very day
when I was twelve years old, and had spent all my
substance in sweetmeats, with which I made treat to the
little boys, till the large boys ran in and took them,
we came out of school at five o'clock, as the rule is
upon Tuesdays. According to custom we drove the
day-boys in brave rout down the causeway from the
school-porch even to the gate where Cop has his
dwelling and duty. Little it recked us and helped them
less, that they were our founder's citizens, and haply
his own grand-nephews (for he left no direct
descendants), neither did we much inquire what their
lineage was. For it had long been fixed among us, who
were of the house and chambers, that these same
day-boys were all 'caddes,' as we had discovered to
call it, because they paid no groat for their
schooling, and brought their own commons with them. In
consumption of these we would help them, for our fare
in hall fed appetite; and while we ate their victuals,
we allowed them freely to talk to us. Nevertheless, we
could not feel, when all the victuals were gone, but
that these boys required kicking from the premises of
Blundell. And some of them were shopkeepers' sons,
young grocers, fellmongers, and poulterers, and these
to their credit seemed to know how righteous it was to
kick them. But others were of high family, as any
need be, in Devon--Carews, and Bouchiers, and Bastards,
and some of these would turn sometimes, and strike the
boy that kicked them. But to do them justice, even
these knew that they must be kicked for not paying.
After these 'charity-boys' were gone, as in contumely
we called them--'If you break my bag on my head,' said
one, 'how will feed thence to-morrow?'--and after old
Cop with clang of iron had jammed the double gates in
under the scruff-stone archway, whereupon are Latin
verses, done in brass of small quality, some of us who
were not hungry, and cared not for the supper-bell,
having sucked much parliament and dumps at my only
charges--not that I ever bore much wealth, but because
I had been thrifting it for this time of my birth--we
were leaning quite at dusk against the iron bars of the
gate some six, or it may be seven of us, small boys
all, and not conspicuous in the closing of the daylight
and the fog that came at eventide, else Cop would have
rated us up the green, for he was churly to little boys
when his wife had taken their money. There was plenty
of room for all of us, for the gate will hold nine boys
close-packed, unless they be fed rankly, whereof is
little danger; and now we were looking out on the road
and wishing we could get there; hoping, moreover, to
see a good string of pack-horses come by, with troopers
to protect them. For the day-boys had brought us word
that some intending their way to the town had lain that
morning at Sampford Peveril, and must be in ere
nightfall, because Mr. Faggus was after them. Now Mr.
Faggus was my first cousin and an honour to the family,
being a Northmolton man of great renown on the highway
from Barum town even to London. Therefore of course, I
hoped that he would catch the packmen, and the boys
were asking my opinion as of an oracle, about it.
A certain boy leaning up against me would not allow my
elbow room, and struck me very sadly in the stomach
part, though his own was full of my parliament. And
this I felt so unkindly, that I smote him straightway
in the face without tarrying to consider it, or
weighing the question duly. Upon this he put his head
down, and presented it so vehemently at the middle of
my waistcoat, that for a minute or more my breath
seemed dropped, as it were, from my pockets, and my
life seemed to stop from great want of ease. Before I
came to myself again, it had been settled for us that
we should move to the 'Ironing-box,' as the triangle of
turf is called where the two causeways coming from the
school-porch and the hall-porch meet, and our fights
are mainly celebrated; only we must wait until the
convoy of horses had passed, and then make a ring by
candlelight, and the other boys would like it. But
suddenly there came round the post where the letters of
our founder are, not from the way of Taunton but from
the side of Lowman bridge, a very small string of
horses, only two indeed (counting for one the pony),
and a red-faced man on the bigger nag.
'Plaise ye, worshipful masters,' he said, being feared
of the gateway, 'carn 'e tull whur our Jan Ridd be?'
'Hyur a be, ees fai, Jan Ridd,' answered a sharp little
chap, making game of John Fry's language.
'Zhow un up, then,' says John Fry poking his whip
through the bars at us; 'Zhow un up, and putt un aowt.'
The other little chaps pointed at me, and some began to
hallo; but I knew what I was about.
'Oh, John, John,' I cried, 'what's the use of your
coming now, and Peggy over the moors, too, and it so
cruel cold for her? The holidays don't begin till
Wednesday fortnight, John. To think of your not
knowing that!'
John Fry leaned forward in the saddle, and turned his
eyes away from me; and then there was a noise in his
throat like a snail crawling on a window-pane.
'Oh, us knaws that wull enough, Maister Jan; reckon
every Oare-man knaw that, without go to skoo-ull, like
you doth. Your moother have kept arl the apples up,
and old Betty toorned the black puddens, and none dare
set trap for a blagbird. Arl for thee, lad; every bit
of it now for thee!'
He checked himself suddenly, and frightened me. I knew
that John Fry's way so well.
'And father, and father--oh, how is father?' I pushed
the boys right and left as I said it. 'John, is father
up in town! He always used to come for me, and leave
nobody else to do it.'
'Vayther'll be at the crooked post, tother zide o'
telling-house.* Her coodn't lave 'ouze by raison of
the Chirstmas bakkon comin' on, and zome o' the cider
welted.'
* (The 'telling-houses' on the moor are rude cots where
the shepherds meet to 'tell' their sheep at the end of
the pasturing season. )
He looked at the nag's ears as he said it; and, being
up to John Fry's ways, I knew that it was a lie. And
my heart fell like a lump of lead, and I leaned back on
the stay of the gate, and longed no more to fight
anybody. A sort of dull power hung over me, like the
cloud of a brooding tempest, and I feared to be told
anything. I did not even care to stroke the nose of my
pony Peggy, although she pushed it in through the
rails, where a square of broader lattice is, and
sniffed at me, and began to crop gently after my
fingers. But whatever lives or dies, business must be
attended to; and the principal business of good
Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with
one another.
'Come up, Jack,' said one of the boys, lifting me under
the chin; 'he hit you, and you hit him, you know.'
'Pay your debts before you go,' said a monitor,
striding up to me, after hearing how the honour lay;
'Ridd, you must go through with it.'
'Fight, for the sake of the junior first,' cried the
little fellow in my ear, the clever one, the head of
our class, who had mocked John Fry, and knew all about
the aorists, and tried to make me know it; but I never
went more than three places up, and then it was an
accident, and I came down after dinner. The boys were
urgent round me to fight, though my stomach was not up
for it; and being very slow of wit (which is not
chargeable on me), I looked from one to other of them,
seeking any cure for it. Not that I was afraid of
fighting, for now I had been three years at Blundell's,
and foughten, all that time, a fight at least once
every week, till the boys began to know me; only that
the load on my heart was not sprightly as of the
hay-field. It is a very sad thing to dwell on; but
even now, in my time of wisdom, I doubt it is a fond
thing to imagine, and a motherly to insist upon, that
boys can do without fighting. Unless they be very good
boys, and afraid of one another.
'Nay,' I said, with my back against the wrought-iron
stay of the gate, which was socketed into Cop's
house-front: 'I will not fight thee now, Robin Snell,
but wait till I come back again.'
'Take coward's blow, Jack Ridd, then,' cried half a
dozen little boys, shoving Bob Snell forward to do it;
because they all knew well enough, having striven with
me ere now, and proved me to be their master--they
knew, I say, that without great change, I would never
accept that contumely. But I took little heed of them,
looking in dull wonderment at John Fry, and Smiler, and
the blunderbuss, and Peggy. John Fry was scratching
his head, I could see, and getting blue in the face, by
the light from Cop's parlour-window, and going to and
fro upon Smiler, as if he were hard set with it. And
all the time he was looking briskly from my eyes to the
fist I was clenching, and methought he tried to wink at
me in a covert manner; and then Peggy whisked her tail.
'Shall I fight, John?' I said at last; 'I would an you
had not come, John.'
'Chraist's will be done; I zim thee had better faight,
Jan,' he answered, in a whisper, through the gridiron
of the gate; 'there be a dale of faighting avore thee.
Best wai to begin gude taime laike. Wull the geatman
latt me in, to zee as thee hast vair plai, lad?'
He looked doubtfully down at the colour of his cowskin
boots, and the mire upon the horses, for the sloughs
were exceedingly mucky. Peggy, indeed, my sorrel
pony, being lighter of weight, was not crusted much
over the shoulders; but Smiler (our youngest sledder)
had been well in over his withers, and none would have
deemed him a piebald, save of red mire and black mire.
The great blunderbuss, moreover, was choked with a
dollop of slough-cake; and John Fry's sad-coloured
Sunday hat was indued with a plume of marish-weed.
All this I saw while he was dismounting, heavily and
wearily, lifting his leg from the saddle-cloth as if
with a sore crick in his back.
By this time the question of fighting was gone quite
out of our discretion; for sundry of the elder boys,
grave and reverend signors, who had taken no small
pleasure in teaching our hands to fight, to ward, to
parry, to feign and counter, to lunge in the manner of
sword-play, and the weaker child to drop on one knee
when no cunning of fence might baffle the onset--these
great masters of the art, who would far liefer see us
little ones practise it than themselves engage, six or
seven of them came running down the rounded causeway,
having heard that there had arisen 'a snug little mill'
at the gate. Now whether that word hath origin in a
Greek term meaning a conflict, as the best-read boys
asseverated, or whether it is nothing more than a
figure of similitude, from the beating arms of a mill,
such as I have seen in counties where are no
waterbrooks, but folk make bread with wind--it is not
for a man devoid of scholarship to determine. Enough
that they who made the ring intituled the scene a
'mill,' while we who must be thumped inside it tried to
rejoice in their pleasantry, till it turned upon the
stomach.
Moreover, I felt upon me now a certain responsibility,
a dutiful need to maintain, in the presence of John
Fry, the manliness of the Ridd family, and the honour
of Exmoor. Hitherto none had worsted me, although in
the three years of my schooling, I had fought more than
threescore battles, and bedewed with blood every plant
of grass towards the middle of the Ironing-box. And
this success I owed at first to no skill of my own;
until I came to know better; for up to twenty or thirty
fights, I struck as nature guided me, no wiser than a
father-long-legs in the heat of a lanthorn; but I had
conquered, partly through my native strength, and the
Exmoor toughness in me, and still more that I could not
see when I had gotten my bellyful. But now I was like
to have that and more; for my heart was down, to begin
with; and then Robert Snell was a bigger boy than I had
ever encountered, and as thick in the skull and hard in
the brain as even I could claim to be.
I had never told my mother a word about these frequent
strivings, because she was soft-hearted; neither had I
told by father, because he had not seen it. Therefore,
beholding me still an innocent-looking child, with fair
curls on my forehead, and no store of bad language,
John Fry thought this was the very first fight that
ever had befallen me; and so when they let him at the
gate, 'with a message to the headmaster,' as one of the
monitors told Cop, and Peggy and Smiler were tied to
the railings, till I should be through my business,
John comes up to me with the tears in his eyes, and
says, 'Doon't thee goo for to do it, Jan; doon't thee
do it, for gude now.' But I told him that now it was
much too late to cry off; so he said, 'The Lord be with
thee, Jan, and turn thy thumb-knuckle inwards.'
It was not a very large piece of ground in the angle of
the causeways, but quite big enough to fight upon,
especially for Christians, who loved to be cheek by
jowl at it. The great boys stood in a circle around,
being gifted with strong privilege, and the little boys
had leave to lie flat and look through the legs of the
great boys. But while we were yet preparing, and the
candles hissed in the fog-cloud, old Phoebe, of more
than fourscore years, whose room was over the
hall-porch, came hobbling out, as she always did, to
mar the joy of the conflict. No one ever heeded her,
neither did she expect it; but the evil was that two
senior boys must always lose the first round of the
fight, by having to lead her home again.
I marvel how Robin Snell felt. Very likely he thought
nothing of it, always having been a boy of a hectoring
and unruly sort. But I felt my heart go up and down as
the boys came round to strip me; and greatly fearing to
be beaten, I blew hot upon my knuckles. Then pulled I
off my little cut jerkin, and laid it down on my head
cap, and over that my waistcoat, and a boy was proud to
take care of them. Thomas Hooper was his name, and I
remember how he looked at me. My mother had made that
little cut jerkin, in the quiet winter evenings. And
taken pride to loop it up in a fashionable way, and I
was loth to soil it with blood, and good filberds were
in the pocket. Then up to me came Robin Snell (mayor
of Exeter thrice since that), and he stood very square,
and looking at me, and I lacked not long to look at
him. Round his waist he had a kerchief busking up his
small-clothes, and on his feet light pumpkin shoes, and
all his upper raiment off. And he danced about in a
way that made my head swim on my shoulders, and he
stood some inches over me. But I, being muddled with
much doubt about John Fry and his errand, was only
stripped of my jerkin and waistcoat, and not comfortable
to begin.
'Come now, shake hands,' cried a big boy, jumping in
joy of the spectacle, a third-former nearly six feet
high; 'shake hands, you little devils. Keep your pluck
up, and show good sport, and Lord love the better man
of you.'
Robin took me by the hand, and gazed at me
disdainfully, and then smote me painfully in the face,
ere I could get my fence up.
'Whutt be 'bout, lad?' cried John Fry; 'hutt un again,
Jan, wull 'e? Well done then, our Jan boy.'
For I had replied to Robin now, with all the weight and
cadence of penthemimeral caesura (a thing, the name of
which I know, but could never make head nor tail of
it), and the strife began in a serious style, and the
boys looking on were not cheated. Although I could not
collect their shouts when the blows were ringing upon
me, it was no great loss; for John Fry told me
afterwards that their oaths went up like a furnace
fire. But to these we paid no heed or hap, being in
the thick of swinging, and devoid of judgment. All I
know is, I came to my corner, when the round was over,
with very hard pumps in my chest, and a great desire to
fall away.
'Time is up,' cried head-monitor, ere ever I got my
breath again; and when I fain would have lingered
awhile on the knee of the boy that held me. John Fry
had come up, and the boys were laughing because he
wanted a stable lanthorn, and threatened to tell my
mother.
'Time is up,' cried another boy, more headlong than
head-monitor. 'If we count three before the come of
thee, thwacked thou art, and must go to the women.' I
felt it hard upon me. He began to count, one, too,
three--but before the 'three' was out of his mouth, I
was facing my foe, with both hands up, and my breath
going rough and hot, and resolved to wait the turn of
it. For I had found seat on the knee of a boy sage and
skilled to tutor me, who knew how much the end very
often differs from the beginning. A rare ripe scholar
he was; and now he hath routed up the Germans in the
matter of criticism. Sure the clever boys and men have
most love towards the stupid ones.
'Finish him off, Bob,' cried a big boy, and that I
noticed especially, because I thought it unkind of him,
after eating of my toffee as he had that afternoon;
'finish him off, neck and crop; he deserves it for
sticking up to a man like you.'
But I was not so to be finished off, though feeling in
my knuckles now as if it were a blueness and a sense of
chilblain. Nothing held except my legs, and they were
good to help me. So this bout, or round, if you
please, was foughten warily by me, with gentle
recollection of what my tutor, the clever boy, had told
me, and some resolve to earn his praise before I came
back to his knee again. And never, I think, in all my
life, sounded sweeter words in my ears (except when my
love loved me) than when my second and backer, who had
made himself part of my doings now, and would have wept
to see me beaten, said,--
'Famously done, Jack, famously! Only keep your wind up,
Jack, and you'll go right through him!'
Meanwhile John Fry was prowling about, asking the boys
what they thought of it, and whether I was like to be
killed, because of my mother's trouble. But finding
now that I had foughten three-score fights already, he
came up to me woefully, in the quickness of my
breathing, while I sat on the knee of my second, with a
piece of spongious coralline to ease me of my bloodshed,
and he says in my ears, as if he was clapping spurs
into a horse,--
'Never thee knack under, Jan, or never coom naigh
Hexmoor no more.'
With that it was all up with me. A simmering buzzed in
my heavy brain, and a light came through my eyeplaces.
At once I set both fists again, and my heart stuck to
me like cobbler's wax. Either Robin Snell should kill
me, or I would conquer Robin Snell. So I went in again
with my courage up, and Bob came smiling for victory,
and I hated him for smiling. He let at me with his
left hand, and I gave him my right between his eyes,
and he blinked, and was not pleased with it. I feared
him not, and spared him not, neither spared myself. My
breath came again, and my heart stood cool, and my eyes
struck fire no longer. Only I knew that I would die
sooner than shame my birthplace. How the rest of it
was I know not; only that I had the end of it, and
helped to put Robin in bed.
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