Miss Primrose Part 2

"Let us pray."

For a moment the Professor stood there silently with lowered eyes.

Bertram and Peter, their shoulders touching, bowed their heads.

"_Our Father in heaven...._"

There was no altar--only a flat-topped desk; no stained-gla.s.s windows--only the suns.h.i.+ne on the panes; and there a man's voice, deep and trembling, and here a school-boy's beating heart.

"_ ... Help us, O Father, to be kinder...._"

How you loved Peter, the Professor, and your ugly Rugby on its hill!

"_ ... Lead us, O Father, to a n.o.bler youth...._"

Ay, they should know you for the man you were, deep down in your hidden soul.

"_ ... Give us, O Father, courage for the battle...._"

Wait till the next time Murphy b.u.mped you on the stairs!

"_ ... to put behind us all indolence of flesh and soul...._"

You would study hard that term.

"_ ... all heedlessness and disobedience...._"

You would keep the rules.

"_ ... for Jesus' sake--Amen._"

"Peter, did you see the sheep...."

"If the two young gentlemen _whispering_ on the back seat--"

You flushed angrily. Other fellows whispered on back seats. Why, always, did the whole school turn so knowingly to you?

Sitting, one study-hour, in the a.s.sembly-hall, Bertram's eyes wandered to the top of the _Commentaries_, strayed over the book to the braids of the Potter girl beyond, and on to the long, brown benches. The hum of recitations there, whispering behind him, giggling half suppressed, and the sharp rat-tat of the teacher's warning pencil came to him vaguely as in a dream. Through the tall windows he saw the spotless blue of the sky, the bright-green, swaying tips of the maples, and the flight of wings. Out there it was spring. Two more months of Caesar--eight more dreary weeks of legions marching and barbarians bending beneath the yoke--then summer and the long vacation, knights jousting in the orchard, Indians scalping on the hill. Eight weeks--forty days of school.

Behind a sheltering grammar Peter was reading Hughes. Over his shoulder Bertram could make out Tom, just come to Rugby, watching the football, and that cool Crab Jones, fresh from a scrimmage, with the famous straw still hanging from his teeth. He read to the line of Peter's shoulder, then his eyes wandered again to the school-room window. It was spring in Gra.s.sy Ford--it was spring in Warwicks.h.i.+re....

"If the young _gentleman_ gazing out of the window--"

"_Tertia vigilia eruptionem fecerunt_"--third watch--eruption--they made. _Eruptionem_--eruption--pimples--break out--sally. They made a sally at the third watch. _Tertia vigilia_, ablative case. Ablative of what? Ablative of time. Why ablative of time? Because a noun denoting--oh, hang their _eruptionem_! They were dead and buried long ago. Why does a fellow learn such stuff? Help his English--huh! English helps his Latin--that's what. _How_ does a fellow know _eruptionem_?

Because he's seen pimples--that's how. No sense learning Latin. Dead language--dead as a door-nail....

Bertram Weatherby drew a picture on the margin of his book--a head, shoulders, two arms, a trunk--and trousered legs. Carefully, then, he dotted in the eyes--the nose--the mouth--the ears beneath the tousled hair. He rolled the s.h.i.+rt-sleeves to the elbows--drew the trousers-belt--the shoes. Then delicately, smiling to himself the while, his head tilted, his eyes squinted like a connoisseur, he drew a straw pendent from the figure's lips.

"Peter, who's that?"

"s.h.!.+ not so loud. She'll hear you."

"Who's that, Peter?"

"Hm--Crab Jones."

"Now, if the idle young gentleman drawing _pictures_--"

"_Tertia vigilia eruptionem fecerunt_"--oh, they did, did they? What of that?...

"Rugby," said the Professor, who had a way of enlivening his cla.s.ses with matters of the outer world--"Rugby, as I have heard my friend Dr.

Primrose say, who was a Rugby boy himself, is very different from our public schools. Only the other day he was telling me of a school-mate, a professor now, who had returned to England, and who had spent a day there rambling about the ivied buildings, and searching, I suppose, for the ancient form where he had carved his name. Dr. Primrose told me how, as this old friend lingered on the greensward where the boys played cricket, as he himself had done on that very spot--fine, manly fellows in their white flannels--he heard not a single oath or vulgar word in all that hour he loitered there. One young player called to another who ran too languidly after the ball. '_Aren't_ you playing, Brown?' he cried, with a touch of irony in his voice."

The Professor paused.

"I have heard stronger language on our playground here."

He paused again, adding, impressively:

"We might do well to _imitate_ our English cousins."

"Just what _I_ say," whispered young Bertram Weatherby.

"The Prof.'s all right," Peter whispered back.

And so, down-town, after school that day, behold!--sitting on stools at Billy's Palace Lunch Counter, in the Odd Fellow's Block--two fine, manly chaps, not in white cricket flannels, to be sure, but--

"It's _some_ like Sallie Harrowell's," one mumbled, joyously, crunching his b.u.t.tered toast, and the other nodded, taking his swig of tea.

So it came to pa.s.s that they looked reverently upon the Professor with Rugbeian eyes, and more admiringly as they noted new likenesses between him and the great head-master. There was a certain resemblance of glowing countenance, they told themselves, a certain ardor of voice, as they imagined, and over all a sympathy for boys.

"Well," he would say, stopping them as they walked together arm in arm, "if you seek Peter, look for Bertram--eh?" giving their shoulders a bantering shake which pleased them greatly as they sauntered on.

Listening to his prayers in chapel, hearing at least the murmur of them as they bowed their heads, their minds swayed by the earnestness of the great man's voice rather than by the words he uttered, they felt that glow which comes sometimes to boys who read and dream. Then Bertram loved the touch of Peter's shoulder, and, with the memory of another doctor and another school-boy, he loved his Rugby, little and meagre and vineless though it was upon its threadbare hill. When he had left it he would return some day, he thought; he would stand like Tom in the last chapter; he would sit again at his old brown desk, alone, musing--missing his mate, and finding silence where happy whisperings and secret play had been--but still in the pine before him he would trace the letters he had cut, and, seeing them, he would be again the boy who cut them there.

One morning, such was the fervor of the Professor's voice, there was some such dream, and when it ended, prayer and dream together--

"After these exercises--"

It was the Professor's voice.

"--I wish to see in my office Bertram Weatherby and Peter Wynne."