Read The Elderbrook Brothers for Free Online

sir,’ said Guy.
    â€˜Here’s a boy——’ cried Mr Cowlin. He began to feel happier. Without malice, but rather to distract attention from his own foolishness, which had lost him a piece of chalk and given Florrie Binstead a grievance of which she evidently intended to make full use, he flung up his hands, exhibiting Guy to the world as a most curious, a perhaps unique specimen of juvenile turpitude. ‘Here’s a boy who knows nothing. He admits it. He’s proud of it. What are we to do with him?’
    The exordium was cut short by renewed wailing from Florrie Binstead. Injured severely in her self-esteem, she would no longer suffer herself to be ignored.
    The harassed schoolmaster turned to her almost entreatingly. ‘Come now, you’ve had your nice cry, Florrie. It didn’t hurt so much. Show me the place. Very well—don’t then! See to her, some of you. And gimme my chalk, d’ you hear?’
    Being now the centre of attention, Florrie gradually allowed her sobs to subside. Presently the writing on the blackboard was resumed, and the children, though wishing the excitement had lasted longer, exchanged bright glances of satisfaction in the knowledge that it had carried them at least a few minutes nearer to the ten-minute break.
    One child alone paid no heed to that glittering prospect. He was a boy who knew nothing. He had been called so, in the presence of his giggling schoolfellows. The unwanted middle one, not big enough to work with his brother Matthew on the farm, and not clever enough to go to the grammar school with his young brother Felix, he sat in proud isolation, dumb and desolate, meditating a formless revenge.
§ 7
    CATCHING sight of himself in the looking-glass Felix had the queerest sensation, as though some other self, a self he had left behind at Upmarden, were closely watching him in this new place: this new place which was new no longer, which had once seemed unreal, like something happening to someone else, but was now, with his first term drawing to an end, the place one woke up in each morning without surprise, with scarcely a backward glance at home, the place where in spite of those first fears, now all but forgotten with new ones looming ahead, one already had the trick of knowing how to avoid hurt, how to manage the tumult of authority, how to seem unafraid, how to stare down the aggressor, how to bend and not break under the pressure of these other wills, and when to resist, when to elude, when to feign surrender while still secure and impregnable in the secret of oneself.
    Sometimes, after lights out in the dormitory, he floated away to sleep on a tide of random thoughts told in fancy to his mother, or Faith, or Nancy, or that second self to whom one could tell everything. It was a long rambling letter that would never be written. Dear Mum, O the poor rabbit, it was horrible, he looked so sort of loving and saying something: he wasn’t like the ones we get at home, harvest-time: he was special. When he was looking at me it was like me looking. In our wood it was, next to the playing-fields, and Jerry Cockle hit him: it was horrible because I was just thinking, oh I don’t know, feeling he was only little, and then Jerry Cockle did that. With a cricket-stump he did. Him and me are chums but he’s funny that way, and I don’t think I shall like him any more. The way it dropped down, and blood running out, it was the same as being killed yourself, nearly: but he’s funny that way, when we find a nest he takes all the eggs, not like you told us leaving some for the mother. It’s nice in the wood but sometimes I don’t like it so much: not when it’s getting later and the trees seem to stand very close up to you and listento everything you’re thinking: I don’t much like it then, but it’s nice thinking about it afterwards. Even being afraid is quite interesting afterwards. When other boys are there