None Other Gods | Page 5

from a couple of pegs, and there lay a small carpet-bag beneath it. A basin on an upturned box and a bath completed the furniture.
"You mad ass!" said Jack. "And is that all you have left?"
"Certainly. I'm going to leave the clothes I've got on to you, and you can fetch the hammock when I've gone."
"When do you start?"
"Mr. Guiseley will have his last interview and obtain his exeat from the Dean at half-past six this evening. He proposes to leave Cambridge in the early hours of to-morrow morning."
"You don't mean that!"
"Certainly I do."
"What are you going to wear?"
Frank extended two flanneled legs, ending in solid boots.
"These--a flannel shirt, no tie, a cap, a gray jacket."
Jack stood again in silence, looking at him.
"How much money did your sale make?"
"That's immaterial. Besides, I forget. The important fact is that when I've paid all my bills I shall have thirteen pounds eleven shillings and eightpence."
"What?"
"Thirteen pounds eleven shillings and eightpence."
Jack burst into a mirthless laugh.
"Well, come along to lunch," he said.
* * * * *
It seemed to Jack that he moved in a dreary kind of dream that afternoon as he went about with Frank from shop to shop, paying bills. Frank's trouser-pockets bulged and jingled a good deal as they started--he had drawn all his remaining money in gold from the bank--and they bulged and jingled considerably less as the two returned to tea in Jesus Lane. There, on the table, he spread out the coins. He had bought some tobacco, and two or three other things that afternoon, and the total amounted now but to twelve pounds nineteen shillings and fourpence.
"Call it thirteen pounds," said Frank. "There's many a poor man--"
"Don't be a damned fool!" said Jack.
"I'm being simply prudent," said Frank. "A contented heart--"
Jack thrust a cup of tea and the buttered buns before him.
* * * * *
These two were as nearly brothers as possible, in everything but blood. Their homes lay within ten miles of one another. They had gone to a private school together, to Eton, and to Trinity. They had ridden together in the holidays, shot, dawdled, bathed, skated, and all the rest. They were considerably more brothers to one another than were Frank and Archie, his actual elder brother, known to the world as Viscount Merefield. Jack did not particularly approve of Archie; he thought him a pompous ass, and occasionally said so.
For Frank he had quite an extraordinary affection, though he would not have expressed it so, to himself, for all the world, and a very real admiration of a quite indefinable kind. It was impossible to say why he admired him. Frank did nothing very well, but everything rather well; he played Rugby football just not well enough to represent his college; he had been in the Lower Boats at Eton, and the Lent Boat of his first year at Cambridge; then he had given up rowing and played lawn-tennis in the summer and fives in the Lent Term just well enough to make a brisk and interesting game. He was not at all learned; he had reached the First Hundred at Eton, and had read Law at Cambridge--that convenient branch of study which for the most part fills the vacuum for intelligent persons who have no particular bent and are heartily sick of classics; and he had taken a Third Class and his degree a day or two before. He was remarkably averaged, therefore; and yet, somehow or another, there was that in him which compelled Jack's admiration. I suppose it was that which is conveniently labeled "character." Certainly, nearly everybody who came into contact with him felt the same in some degree.
His becoming a Catholic had been an amazing shock to Jack, who had always supposed that Frank, like himself, took the ordinary sensible English view of religion. To be a professed unbeliever was bad form--it was like being a Little Englander or a Radical; to be pious was equally bad form--it resembled a violent devotion to the Union Jack. No; religion to Jack (and he had always hitherto supposed, to Frank) was a department of life in which one did not express any particular views: one did not say one's prayers; one attended chapel at the proper times; if one was musical, one occasionally went to King's on Sunday afternoon; in the country one went to church on Sunday morning as one went to the stables in the afternoon, and that was about all.
Frank had been, too, so extremely secretive about the whole thing. He had marched into Jack's rooms in Jesus Lane one morning nearly a fortnight ago.
"Come to mass at the Catholic Church," he said.
"Why, the--" began Jack.
"I've got to go. I'm a Catholic."
"What!"
"I became one last week."
Jack had stared at him, suddenly convinced that someone was