Payment Deferred (1926) by C. S. Forester

Author:C. S. Forester [Forester, C. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141198118
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

After this episode matters went for some time exactly as Mr Marble would have wished. John’s application to enter Sydenham College was favourably received, and he went there without further demur. He was not quite sixteen. There was more trouble about Winnie. Mr Marble obtained from scholastic agents a list of all the more expensive girls’ schools, but his endeavours to enter Winnie in one of them were baulked for some time. They displayed a not unnatural reluctance to receive in their midst a girl of nearly fifteen who hailed from an address in a dubious street in a south London suburb, and who had been educated so far at a Council school and at a secondary school. But at last a Berkshire school accepted her—it was incidentally the most expensive of all—and then there was a flurrying and a scurrying to get ready the vast outfit that the rules of the school demanded. There was a special type of gymnasium frock to be obtained, and day clothes and evening clothes and, crowning glory of all, a riding-habit and boots. Mr Marble was delighted. He certainly seemed prouder of Winnie’s outfit than she was herself.

And so, after Easter, the same day that Mr and Mrs Marble, he dressed in his very best to impress the other girls’ parents and the other girls, she rather tearful, with her appearance not justifying the amount spent on it, saw Winnie off from Paddington, John put on the blue and black cap of Sydenham College and set off on his two-mile walk thither, not feeling at all happy, with all the mysteries of Rugby football and the prevailing etiquette of the new school before him.

True, his father had been jolly decent to him lately. He had given him nearly all the pocket-money he wanted, while in a tiny lock-up garage at the end of Malcolm Road there reposed the giant two-cylinder motor bicycle that his heart had yearned for. John had averaged a hundred miles a day on it for the last week, delighting in learning its mechanical whims, making gallant and occasionally successful attempts to climb hills in ‘top’, and finding all the wonderful bits of country that lie near London just out of reach of the ordinary bicycle. It was a good way of forgetting saying good-bye to the old school, where he had been happy for nearly five years—and saying good-bye to his old friends, too.

John was violently unhappy. It was not altogether the new school that made him so, not by any means. It was affairs at home. His father was drunk five nights out of seven, and that was the least of his troubles. Most times Mr Marble’s drunkenness did not disturb the rest of the family as much as might be expected, for on those occasions he kept himself very strictly to himself—shut up in the drawing-room gazing out over the backyard. Only twice had John to interfere actively between his mother and his father, fearing that he

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