Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

It was a day in September 186-. It was between five and six o’clock in the afternoon. The railway station of St. Anselm’s seemed to be asleep save for the movement of four people, or, more strictly, of two pairs of people, who were pacing up and down at opposite ends of the platform, apparently awaiting the arrival of the same train to take them to London. Each pair consisted of a gentleman and a boy. It was evident that the two pairs were not acquainted one with the other. Once, but only once, in their patient promenade they approached and passed each other; and in so doing each of the two boys eyed the other with the curiously distant inquisitiveness of English schoolboys who have not met before, but who are dimly conscious that, as members of the same great institution, they have entered, or are about to enter, into a mysterious relation; and, as soon as they had got out of earshot, each of them, turning at the same moment almost half round, whispered to his father, ‘I’m sure that fellow is a new boy; I wonder whose house he’s in.’ It was one of the many questions that are asked in life more for the sake of putting them than in the hope that they will be answered. But there would have been no disposition to answer it, if answer had been possible; for just then a train drew up at the opposite platform, and out of it poured a number of boys, of all sorts and ages, clamouring for porters, clamouring for luggage, greeting one another, chaffing one another, rushing out of the station to secure cabs or other conveyances, rushing back to recover articles which they had left in the racks or under the seats of the carriages, turning the quiet of the little station into such a Babel or Bedlam as can be caused by no human beings but English public school boys in the last half-hour of freedom before the ringing of the bell which marks the fatal time when they must be all in their boarding houses—the end of the holidays, the beginning of a new term.

At last the train, looking desolate when it had discharged its freight of youthful humanity, moved on;the platform on which the boys of St. Anselm’s had alighted was deserted once more, and the two fathers and their sons, who had watched the scene with unmistakable amusement and interest, resumed their walk on the other side of the station. The pairs were strangely different in appearance. One of the gentlemen was tall and strongly built; his face was sunburnt; he possessed the indescribable athletic, unliterary air of an English country gentleman. He walked with a rapid step, spoke in hearty, cheery tones, appeared to be in good humour with himself and with the world, and it was difficult, in looking at him, to mistake the characteristics of easy temper, ample fortune, and high breeding. The boy at his side, lithe and stalwart, whose bright complexion and soft blue eyes were passports to favour, even without the radiant smile that played now and again, like a wandering sunbeam, on his mobile features, was a type of generous, healthy English boyhood. No being, perchance, is so distinct, none so beautiful or attractive, as a noble English boy. He is open-hearted, open-handed; there is not a cloud upon his brow; he looks the world in the face; for him all life is, as it were, sunshine without rain. Such a boy was Harry Venniker. He was like his father, yet with a delicate grace that was not altogether his father’s. He was now nearly fourteen years of age, and he seemed a little older than his years. The boy at the other end of the platform, who was nearly of the same age, though he looked younger, was thin and pale; he wore spectacles, and stooped a little in his walk, and there was a certain nervous anxiety, not unmixed with a fine intelligence, in his demeanour whenever he met the gaze of any man or woman, even of one of the porters in the station, directed towards himself. His father was a country clergyman (like so many another) with a small income and a large family—an income growing unfortunately smaller and a family growing, shall it be said fortunately? larger—who, though he had come down a little in the world, as he would at times rather sorrowfully confess, had set his heart upon giving his eldest son—the only child of the first Mrs. Eversley—a good education; and, finding him clever, much above the average of boys in his own rural experience, had been so far encouraged by his success in winning a scholarship and by the generosity of a wealthy friend, a near relative of the first Mrs. Eversley, who had offered to undertake all responsibility for his educational expenses, that he had resolved, not without many painful misgivings, to send him to school at St. Anselm’s. There was an aspect of bygone gentility about Mr. Eversley; he looked like a man who had seen better days, though nobody could tell or guess how long it was since he had seen them. The memory of those days was somehow written upon his face; and yet, if the truth must be told, a casual observer would have been more likely to notice that his coat was a little threadbare at the elbow, and his clerical hat a little soiled about the brim, than that his personal appearance was not unworthy of a better garb.