The Hill

The Hill, by Horace Annesley Vachell

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Title: The Hill A Romance of Friendship
Author: Horace Annesley Vachell
Release Date: October 23, 2007 [EBook #23154]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ALSO BY HORACE A. VACHELL
QUINNEYS'

THE HILL
A ROMANCE OF FRIENDSHIP

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET

FIRST EDITION April, 1905
Fortieth Impression Jan., 1950

Transcriber's Note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Greek text has been transliterated and is shown between {braces}.

To GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL
I dedicate this Romance of Friendship to you with the sincerest pleasure and affection. You were the first to suggest that I should write a book about contemporary life at Harrow; you gave me the principal idea; you have furnished me with notes innumerable; you have revised every page of the manuscript; and you are a peculiarly keen Harrovian.
In making this public declaration of my obligations to you, I take the opportunity of stating that the characters in "The Hill," whether masters or boys, are not portraits, although they may be called, truthfully enough, composite photographs; and that the episodes of Drinking and Gambling are founded on isolated incidents, not on habitual practices. Moreover, in attempting to reproduce the curious admixture of "strenuousness and sentiment"--your own phrase--which animates so vitally Harrow life, I have been obliged to select the less common types of Harrovian. Only the elect are capable of such friendship as John Verney entertained for Henry Desmond; and few boys, happily, are possessed of such powers as Scaife is shown to exercise. But that there are such boys as Verney and Scaife, nobody knows better than yourself.
Believe me, Yours most gratefully, HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
BEECHWOOD, February 22, 1905

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE MANOR 1 II. C?SAR 19 III. KRAIPALE 35 IV. TORPIDS 58 V. FELLOWSHIP 70 VI. A REVELATION 92 VII. REFORM 107 VIII. VERNEY BOSCOBEL 123 IX. BLACK SPOTS 140 X. DECAPITATION 158 XI. SELF-QUESTIONING 173 XII. "LORD'S" 189 XIII. "IF I PERISH, I PERISH" 211 XIV. GOOD NIGHT 230
CHAPTER I
The Manor
"Five hundred faces, and all so strange! Life in front of me--home behind, I felt like a waif before the wind Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.
"Chorus. Yet the time may come, as the years go by, When your heart will thrill At the thought of the Hill, And the day that you came so strange and shy."
The train slid slowly out of Harrow station.
Five minutes before, a man and a boy had been walking up and down the long platform. The boy wondered why the man, his uncle, was so strangely silent. Then, suddenly, the elder John Verney had placed his hands upon the shoulders of the younger John, looking down into eyes as grey and as steady as his own.
"You'll find plenty of fellows abusing Harrow," he said quietly; "but take it from me, that the fault lies not in Harrow, but in them. Such boys, as a rule, do not come out of the top drawer. Don't look so solemn. You're about to take a header into a big river. In it are rocks and rapids; but you know how to swim, and after the first plunge you'll enjoy it, as I did, amazingly."
"Ra--ther," said John.
In the New Forest, where John had spent most of his life at his uncle's place of Verney Boscobel, this uncle, his dead father's only brother, was worshipped as a hero. Indeed he filled so large a space in the boy's imagination, that others were cramped for room. John Verney in India, in Burmah, in Africa (he took continents in his stride), moved colossal. And when uncle and nephew met, behold, the great traveller stood not much taller than John himself! That first moment, the instant shattering of a precious delusion, held anguish. But now, as the train whirled away the silent, thin, little man, he began to expand again. John saw him scaling heights, cutting a path through impenetrable forests, wading across dismal swamps, an ever-moving figure, seeking the hitherto unknowable and irreclaimable, introducing order where chaos reigned supreme, a world-famous pioneer.
How good to think that John Verney was his uncle, blood of his blood, his, his, his--for all time!
And, long ago, John, senior, had come to Harrow; had felt what John, junior, felt to the core--the dull, grinding wrench of separation, the sense, not yet to be analysed by a boy, of standing alone upon the edge of a river, indeed, into which he must