The Elderbrook Brothers by Gerald Bullet Page A

by winning a scholarship. His father, it was smirkingly whispered, was ‘only a carpenter’: like Jesus Christ, some audacious person had remarked, whereat the smirks became nervous giggles followed by an embarrassed silence, for that was a name you never mentioned, unless you were the Head saying morning prayers or preaching the Sunday evening sermon in the school chapel. Felix did not ask whether he himself liked Pemrose: he knew him for a strange, clever, interesting, and sometimes disconcerting chap, full of odd opinions and out-of-the-way knowledge. He had a large egg-shaped head, an untidy mass of hair, and a loping walk. When making a new acquaintance or confronting an elder he had a trick of boldly staring, as if resolved to hold his ground, and his voice on such occasions would be harsh and rather loud. Once, he hardly knew how it happened, Felix found himself walking with Pemrose through the byways of Keyborough in the romantic dusk of a winter’s late afternoon, and Pemrose had told him a frightening fascinating story of a woman being laid out for burial while in a cataleptic trance, and how her husband, remembering a certain prophecy, had lifted her hand to the candlelight and seen the pink translucency of the flesh round the finger-bones and by that token knew her to be still alive. ‘Don’t be worried,’ said Pemrose, suddenly noticing the quality of his listener’s silence. ‘It was hundreds of years ago. They hadn’t gotscience then.’ The two boys stood at the Pemroses’ gate in a street of small shabby villas. In the gathering darkness Felix could no longer see the expression of his companion’s face. Mortal life was desolate and lonely and filled with unspeakable dangers, and to break the silence seemed queer and rash. Felix had an instinct to whisper his goodbye, lest the sleeping malice of the universe should wake and become aware of him. But Pemrose, if he shared the sensation, paid no heed to it. He did not believe in such things, for his father was an adherent of Mr Bradlaugh the atheist. Ghosts and their like were nothing to him, except material for the stories he revelled in. ‘We don’t believe in salt either,’ he said, with a characteristic leap from philosophy to dietetics. ‘Once you get it in you it never leaves the system. Did you know that?’
    Pemrose was a brilliant draughtsman, and if it came to a story about ships and pirates he was obviously the man to do the pictures.
    â€˜I say, Clifford. You know Pemrose? Do you think he’d do some illustrations for us?’
    While Clifford was communing with himself on this proposal Dilston returned to the classroom staggering affectedly under a load of drawing-books, of which Mr Plover at once relieved him. Mr Plover began distributing the books to their owners, with comments on their work. But he soon tired of the job.
    â€˜Here, Dilston, you give them out. No, no,’ he cried hastily, as a dozen boys leapt from their places to throw themselves on Dilston, ‘I don’t want a stampede. Get back, you little brutes! Get back!’
    He put on a fierce face, but the boys knew very well that he did not personally care a button what they did: that was the comforting thing about Mr Plover. What he did care about was that his class should not be discovered in an uproar by some prowling senior master. And today there was an additional and very special reason against romping, in class or out of it.
    â€˜Well, you fellows,’ said Mr Plover, when order had been restored, ‘you didn’t do so badly and you didn’t do so well.There was only one of you had a real idea. What I asked for was a drawing suggesting the school holidays. Some of you did pictures of cricket, boating, cycling, horse-riding. That kind of thing. Quite good in its way. But this boy did better. His drawing shows us a desk or table on which there’s an inkpot, a pen, a ruler, a pair of