Flashman. George MacDonald Fraser

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      Hughes got it wrong, in one important detail. You will have read, in Tom Brown, how I was expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, which is true enough, but when Hughes alleges that this was the result of my deliberately pouring beer on top of gin-punch, he is in error. I knew better than to mix my drinks, even at seventeen.

      I mention this, not in self-defence, but in the interests of strict truth. This story will be completely truthful; I am breaking the habit of eighty years. Why shouldn’t I? When a man is as old as I am, and knows himself thoroughly for what he was and is, he doesn’t care much. I’m not ashamed, you see; never was – and I have enough on what Society would consider the credit side of the ledger – a knighthood, a Victoria Cross, high rank, and some popular fame. So I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer in Cardigan’s Hussars; tall, masterful, and roughly handsome I was in those days (even Hughes allowed that I was big and strong, and had considerable powers of being pleasant), and say that it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward – and, oh yes, a toady. Hughes said more or less all these things, and his description was pretty fair, except in matters of detail such as the one I’ve mentioned. But he was more concerned to preach a sermon than to give facts.

      But I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true.

      At all events, Hughes was wrong in saying I suggested beer. It was Speedicut who ordered it up, and I had drunk it (on top of all those gin-punches) before I knew what I was properly doing. That finished me; I was really drunk then – ‘beastly drunk’, says Hughes, and he’s right – and when they got me out of the ‘Grapes’ I could hardly see, let alone walk. They bundled me into a sedan, and then a beak hove in sight and Speedicut lived up to his name and bolted. I was left sprawling in the chair, and up came the master and saw me. It was old Rufton, one of Arnold’s housemasters.

      ‘Good God!’ he said. ‘It’s one of our boys – drunk!’

      I can still see him goggling at me, with his great pale gooseberry eyes and white whiskers. He tried to rouse me, but he might as well have tried to wake a corpse. I just lay and giggled at him. Finally he lost his temper, and banged the top of the chair with his cane and shouted:

      ‘Take him up, chairmen! Take him to the School! He shall go before the Doctor for this!’

      So they bore me off in procession, with old Rufton raging behind about disgusting excesses and the wages of sin, and old Thomas and the chairmen took me to the hospital, which was appropriate, and left me on a bed to sober up. It didn’t take me long, I can tell you, as soon as my mind was clear enough to think what would come of it. You know what Arnold was like, if you have read Hughes, and he had no use for me at the best of times. The least I could expect was a flogging before the school.

      That was enough to set me in a blue funk, at the very thought, but what I was really afraid of was Arnold himself.

      They left me in the hospital perhaps two hours, and then old Thomas came to say the Doctor wanted to see me. I followed him downstairs and across to the School-house, with the fags peeping round corners and telling each other that the brute Flashy had fallen at last, and old Thomas knocked at the Doctor’s door, and the voice crying ‘Come in!’ sounded like the crack of doom to me.

      He was standing before the fireplace, with his hands behind looping up his coat-tails, and a face like a Turk at a christening. He had eyes like sabre-points, and his face was pale and carried that disgusted look that he kept for these occasions. Even with the liquor still working on me a little I was as scared in that minute as I’ve ever been in my life – and when you have ridden into a Russian battery at Balaclava and been chained in an Afghan dungeon waiting for the torturers, as I have, you know what fear means. I still feel uneasy when I think of him, and he’s been dead sixty years.

      He was live enough then. He stood silent a moment, to let me stew a little. Then:

      ‘Flashman,’ says he, ‘there are many moments in a schoolmaster’s life when he must make a decision, and afterwards wonder whether he was right or not. I have made a decision, and for once I am in no doubt that I am right. I have observed you for several years now, with increasing concern. You have been an evil influence in the school. That you are a bully, I know; that you are untruthful, I have long suspected; that you are deceitful and mean, I have feared; but that you had fallen so low as to be a drunkard – that, at least, I never imagined. I have looked in the past for some signs of improvement in you, some spark of grace, some ray of hope that my work here had not, in your case, been unsuccessful. It has not come, and this is the final infamy. Have you anything to say?’

      He had me blubbering by this time; I mumbled something about being sorry.

      ‘If I thought for one moment,’ says he, ‘that you were sorry, that you had it in you to show true repentance, I might hesitate from the step that I am about to take. But I know you too well, Flashman. You must leave Rugby tomorrow.’

      If I had had my wits about me I suppose I should have thought this was no bad news, but with Arnold thundering I lost my head.

      ‘But, sir,’ I said, still blubbering, ‘it will break my mother’s heart!’

      He went pale as a ghost, and I fell back. I thought he was going to hit me.

      ‘Blasphemous wretch!’ he cried – he had a great pulpit trick with phrases like those – ‘your mother has been dead these many years, and do you dare to plead her name – a name that should be sacred to you – in defence of your abominations? You have killed any spark of pity I had for you!’

      ‘My father –’

      ‘Your father,’ says he, ‘will know how to deal with you. I hardly think,’ he added, with a look, ‘that his heart will be broken.’ He knew something of my father, you see, and probably thought we were a pretty pair.

      He stood there drumming his fingers behind him a moment, and then he said, in a different voice:

      ‘You are a sorry creature, Flashman. I have failed in you. But even to you I must say, this is not the end. You cannot continue here, but you are young, Flashman, and there is time yet. Though your sins be as red as crimson, yet shall they be as white as snow. You have fallen very low, but you can be raised up again …’

      I haven’t a good memory for sermons, and he went on like this for some time, like the pious old hypocrite that he was. For he was a hypocrite, I think, like most of his generation. Either that or he was more foolish than he looked, for he was wasting his piety on me. But he never realised it.

      Anyway, he gave me a fine holy harangue, about how through repentance I might be saved – which I’ve never believed, by the way. I’ve repented a good deal in my time, and had good cause, but I was never ass enough to suppose it mended anything. But I’ve learned to swim with the tide when I have to, so I let him pray over me, and when he had finished I left his study a good deal happier than when I went in. I had escaped flogging, which was the main thing; leaving Rugby I didn’t mind a button. I never much cared for the place, and the supposed disgrace of expulsion I didn’t even think about. (They had me back a few years ago to present prizes; nothing was said about expulsion then, which shows that they are just as big hypocrites now as they were in Arnold’s day. I made a speech, too; on Courage, of all things.)

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