Music as I have told you was peculiarly my brother’s own idiom. With the prospect of singing, even in such circumstances, his courage appeared to come back. He obeyed at once and began to sing:
Ride, ride through the day,
Ride through the moonlight,
Ride, ride through the night
Far, far . . .
The opening notes were perhaps a trifle uncertain but before the end of the first line his gift for music confidently took over. By the second line his little tune sounded well and truly launched. But he didn’t realize, poor devil, that the very faultlessness of his performance was the worst thing that could have happened. The essence of his role in the proceedings was that of scapegoat. He should not only look like one but also behave accordingly. Anything else destroyed his value as a symbol and deprived the crowd of any justification for its fun. The boys, quick to feel that the clear voice singing with such unusual authority was cheating the design of its ritual, uttered an extraordinary howl of disapproval.
My brother faltered. Even at my distance from the scene dismay was plain in his attitude. He tried once again to sing but the din was too much for him. So he stopped altogether, his long arms dangling like sawdust limbs at his side, and stared in bewilderment from one end of the quadrangle to the other, searching wildly, so a sudden sickness in my stomach told me, for my face. At that moment the crowd felt itself again to be in command.
The howl of disapproval became a roar of relieved delight and the school now began to press towards the troughs chanting joyfully:
Greenie’s a liar and a cheat,
He can’t sing a note.
Greenie’s a fraud: drown him,
Drown him in the moat!
For a moment my brother’s white face remained outlined against the afternoon fire flaming along the red-brick quadrangle wall, his eyes ceaselessly searching the screaming, whistling mob of schoolboys. Then he vanished like the last shred of sail of a doomed ship into a grasping sea. I don’t know if you have ever listened to a crowd screaming when you have been alone and divorced from the emotion which motivates it? At any time it is a sobering experience. But when the scream is directed against your own flesh and blood – At that moment my heart, my mind, my own little growth of time all seemed, suddenly, to wither.
I could not see what was happening. My experience told me that my brother was being ducked vigorously in the troughs as we had all been before him. I knew the ‘drown’ in the chant really meant ‘duck’. All the same I was extremely nervous. I watched the struggle and tumult of yelling heads and shoulders by the water-trough, wondering whether it would never end.
Then suddenly again the crowd went motionless and silent. Some of the broader shoulders by the trough heaved, an arm shot up holding aloft a damp coat and shirt, and behind it was slowly lifted my brother’s gasping face and naked torso.
‘Look chaps!’ a voice near him rang out with a curious intonation. ‘Look! Greenie has a boggeltjie.’fn2
For a second there was silence as the boys stared at my brother held dripping in their midst. Then, as if at a signal, they all began to laugh and shake and twist and turn with hysterical merriment.
I had never seen my school go to these lengths before. I stood at the window as if nailed to the floor while the merriment transformed itself into one of the favoured chants:
Greenie has a boggeltjie,
boggeltjie, boggeltjie,
Greenie has a boggeltjie: one
two and three and
Greenie has –
Then it stopped. The noise fizzled out and the crowd in the quadrangle became uneasily still. A window on the second-floor of the main building had been thrown open. The head and shoulders of the English master were leaning far out of it.
‘Who, might I ask,’ he demanded in a voice precise and icy with anger, ‘Who is in charge here this afternoon?’
‘I am, sir,’ the head of a certain house answered contritely.
‘Well, dismiss your rabble and report to me in my rooms at once,’ the master told him slamming down the window.
However, there was scarcely need to dismiss the school. It needed no telling that it had exceeded itself. It was dispersing of its own accord, taking my brother away with it.
I remained at the window for a while in a state of irresolute agitation. I wanted to rush out and do something to make good what had just happened. I was angry and humiliated and wanted to take it out of all and sundry in the school, not excluding my brother. I wanted also to rush out and comfort my brother. But it all came back to the fact that I still had a duty in the laboratory to perform. The fact of duty won. I tidied up the laboratory, set up the apparatus for the next morning’s experiment and in the process came to the convenient conclusion that by far the best way of helping my brother would be to make light of his experience.
It was evening before I saw him again. He was coming out of the matron’s room carrying a complete change of clothing on his arm. The long corridor was lit only by the reflected flames of a cataclysmic sunset flickering in the tall windows over the main stairway at the far end of the landing. My brother, recognizing my steps, stood still in the open doorway. The light from the Matron’s room fell sideways on his face and left the rest of him indistinct in the rising night-shadow. He stood so still that his face looked like an antique mask hanging on the door behind him. I expected him to greet me as he always did but on this occasion he just stood there, silent.
‘Well,’ I said, assuming the gay nonchalance that I’d decided would be good for him. ‘How did you get on today?’
‘Then you weren’t there?’ His question was flat.
‘Not where?’ I answered seeking respite in evasion.
‘At the round-up.’ He peered hard at me in the twilight.
‘Oh, there!’ I replied easily. ‘No, I was in the science lab most of the afternoon. Had a job for the Science master to do. In fact, I’ve only just finished.’
I stopped. Something in his face, looking up at me out of a past and forgotten dimension of time, stopped me. We stared at each other in a silence so great that I could even hear the Matron’s alarm clock ticking on her table inside the room.
‘I see,’ he said at last with, for one so young, an odd note of finality in his voice. ‘Well, I must hurry or I’ll be late for supper.’
He walked straight past me and ran for the stairs. I was so taken by surprise that I never stopped him. I might even have followed him if the Matron, hearing my voice, hadn’t asked me in to discuss some petty matter.
I saw him again late that night. He was in bed and either asleep or pretending to be. Twenty-four hours before I would without hesitation have called him by name, softly. Now, somehow, I had not the confidence to do so; and so my last natural opportunity for coming to terms with myself vanished.
The school, however, did not abandon the incident with ease. For a few days I was continually being stopped by fellows with sheepish faces all muttering some sort of an apology.
On the night after the round-up at the Monitors’ meeting the Captain of the school addressed me amid a murmur of approval, saying: ‘I’m sure I needn’t tell you, old man, what the school feels about this afternoon. We’re horribly ashamed of letting you down, particularly seeing how you trusted us,’ and so on.
Yet no one begged my brother’s pardon. I seemed to gain in popularity by the incident, but not so my brother. To him the school behaved as if it blamed him, and not itself, for the outrage, almost as if he had tricked them into doing something which otherwise they would never ever have dreamed of doing.
As for myself, that night, just as I was about to drop asleep comforted by the warmth of my reception at the Monitors’ meeting and the Captain’s concern for my feelings, I suddenly heard my young brother’s voice saying again in a tone that I had never heard before: ‘I see.’