The first climax came fairly soon. The youth who had asked him his name came out to the desk and said, “Please, sir, what’s the French for… ” (an unprintable word even in these days). He spoke loudly and clearly. The group looked up interestedly. One of the women students tittered. Hamish rose to his feet and picked up a piece of chalk as though he was going to write on the blackboard. Instead, he dropped the chalk, seized the student by the collar, swung him round and kicked him half across the room.
“That’s the French you are asking for,” he said pleasantly, “and, if you can’t spell it, perhaps I can be of further assistance.” He looked at the class. “Does any other gentleman require help?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, I do,” said a hulking young man at the back of the room. “You’ve hurt that poor boy. I demand satisfaction. I don’t like to see you hurt that poor boy.”
“Oh, are you the champion of the oppressed?” asked Hamish, measuring him with his eye. The young man, who appeared to be among the oldest and was certainly the biggest of those present, stepped out from the ranks and came towards him. Without further speech he swung a heavy fist at Hamish’s head. Hamish avoided it easily, put his left fist with a sharp jab into the man’s brightly-coloured shirt-front and then clipped him under the jaw with his right. It was not, and was not intended to be, a knock-out blow.
“Hey!” said the man, blinking. “How did that happen?”
“Come again, and I’ll show you.”
“Right,” said the fellow. He grinned good-naturedly. “In the gym, though, and, I think, with the gloves on.” He returned to his place. The youth whom Hamish had kicked limped out of the room, no doubt (thought Hamish) to confide his troubles to the Warden. Hamish seated himself again. He felt certain that his own troubles were by no means over, but he felt also that the preliminary skirmish had gone his way. He had no intention of allowing anybody to read out the scurrilous stuff which he was quite sure some, if not all, had put into their notebooks. Instead he said, “I shall now translate my lecture for you, so perhaps you will correct your own work and form your own opinion as to how much of the lecture you understood.”
There were no more interruptions. When he had finished, amid what he thought he recognized as the brooding silence which precedes a thunderstorm, he wrote a short vocabulary on the blackboard and braced his shoulders against the missiles which he more or less expected would be thrown at him once his back was turned. These, singularly enough, did not materialize. Turning again to the students, he remarked in a quiet tone, “Some of you may care to use some of those words in your essay. The subject is Mémorial d’un Gladiateur Romain. Needless to say, the work is entirely optional, as I understand is customary here, but I shall be happy to mark anything sent in.”
“So what is your name?” asked one of the women students.
“The Warden has suggested that I answer to the name of James, mademoiselle,” replied Hamish.
“Come up and see me sometime, James,” said the damsel, who appeared to be about eighteen.
“I suggest you wash your face and comb your hair before you issue your invitations,” said Hamish. “The class is dismissed.” He stood in the doorway as they clattered out and, waylaying the large student, said to him, “And what’s your name, may I ask?”
“Richard,” he replied. “In other words, Dirty Dick, so you’d better look out. You won’t catch me napping again.” But he grinned amiably as he spoke.
“Fine. We meet at Philippi, then. Let me know when you can spare the time.” Hamish gave the young man a friendly clap on the shoulder and they walked out side by side to the college canteen.
chapter
2
Long Jump with Casualties
« ^ »
Two circumstances made life at Joynings, so far as Hamish was concerned, very much simpler and easier than he might have expected. One was the lack of brotherliness among the men students to which Henry had referred. They were prepared to sabotage, more or less effectively, lectures which did not please them, but of physical ganging-up against authority there was little sign. The second circumstance was that the promised set-to with the gloves between Hamish and his hulking challenger had resulted in a spectacular knock-out by Hamish, followed by a cheerful, unembittered relationship with the defeated Richard which Hamish found undeniably helpful.
Richard, he learned later, had been expelled from his school for half-killing an unpopular sadistic prefect. He was now twenty-one years of age and had been at Joynings for four years, during which time his size, weight and strength had brought him to a position of leadership to which his other attributes scarcely entitled him. Hamish, bit by bit, learned the case-histories of a good many of the men-students. By no means all of them were discreditable, he thought.
Miss Yale, the senior woman lecturer—the battle-axe to whom Hamish had referred in his letter home—was more reticent about the women students, but these, with no encouragement from him, told Hamish more about themselves than he ever learned from headquarters. They also made overtures to him which so young a man might have found embarrassing but for the fact that Hamish had a fund of common sense and a robust sense of humour inherited from his mother, a useful streak of Puritanism which came to him from his father, a trick of summing-up people and situations which Dame Beatrice, his mother’s employer had taught him, and (possibly the product of all these) a superb self-confidence which was all his own and which, by the unreflecting, was often mistaken for arrogance.
With all his colleagues he got on reasonably well, although his preferences were for Henry and the redoubtable Miss Yale. That formidable middle-aged Amazon could beat him at golf (there was a links twenty miles from the College) and was, he discovered, an ex-county champion at throwing the javelin and, but for unfortunate family affairs which had prevented her from appearing at final trials, a near-certainty for an international vest in those Dark Ages before Hamish had been born.
The match with the talented Squadron Club was lost by Joynings, a circumstance moodily and unfairly related by the losers to the non-appearance of their first string in the shot— the youth put out of action by Jones. To those who expressed their views to him, Hamish pointed out, logically enough, that even if Derry, the athlete injured by Jones, had taken part and had won his event, the result of the match would have been unaltered. The College still could not have won a match which was decided on an aggregate of points.
He himself was mostly engaged in coaching swimming, but he soon found that, except for Jones, who seemed to be odd man out in most of the College activities, there was a cheerful spirit of give and take among the members of the senior common room and that he could always call upon somebody to act as starter or hold a stop-watch or even watch over a nervous learner while he himself was engaged with the more talented and further advanced of his flock.
Henry he had liked from their first meeting, but naturally, at his age, he had more in common with the younger men. There was an ex-Cambridge Blue named Martin, who was second coach under Henry for the javelin, hammer, discus and shot, and a slightly older man, whose age was still well under thirty, who was the coach for the jumps; he was called Barry, for, by Gascoigne Medlar’s ruling, nobody was known by anything other than his first name. There was also a member of a provincial but famous athletics club who coached all the running—not a favourite series of events at Joynings, as it happened, so he was only a part-timer at the College. He retained his amateur status by acting nominally as a lecturer in science. He talked with a Midlands accent and was named Jerry.