The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon Read Online Free PDF Page A

customary bus and he had only taken it because it offered an easy escape from his Headmaster.
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    The bus took him as far as the Westbank roundabout and here he descended and set out across the Tedington Common to Wyckham Ridge, where he could enter the new housing estate from the north and pass through it to the older residential district where he and his family occupied a detached, five-bedroomed house in a select cul-de-sac called 'Beechway'.
    Sermon topped the ridge that looked down over Wyckham Rise and there he suddenly stopped and sat down on a seat, realising that before he moved another step towards Sybil and the children he must do some objective thinking about what had occurred that afternoon.
    The very first thing that struck him was that perhaps he had not burned his boats after all. He remembered the desolate look in the Headmaster's eye when he announced that he was leaving and it seemed to him that this look betrayed a far deeper-rooted fear than apprehension about what Lane-Perkins' father might do when his son arrived home with sticking-plaster on his head. Clearly the Reverend Hawley was dismayed by the thought of losing him, and if he willed it, what had taken place that afternoon could probably be glossed over and forgiven, a thought that led Mr. Sermon to ask himself, calmly and objectively, if he really did want to break the pattern of his life.
    At this point, Mr. Sermon made a desperate attempt to concentrate and to continue to think calmly and objectively, but he found the effort beyond him. Objective thought was alien to a man absorbed, year after year, in helping to run a miniature world. It could not be nourished in the soil Mr. Sermon had been tilling for the past twenty-five years-what had Cooper II done with his gym shoes? Would Drake House beat Frobisher in the semi-final? Why had Truscott done so badly in Common Entrance when he had walked away with the History prize two years in succession? Every time Mr. Sermon embarked upon the main stream of his own future he drifted into an irrelevant backwater and had to find his way out again. Then, when he was fairly launched in the current once more, he swirled into a kind of delta studded with islands and sandbanks representing people and problems unrelated to one another, so that he could never determine which was the main stream and which a mere creek.
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    He sat there a long time sweating with the effort of concentration and then he made what seemed to him a fortuitous decision. He would stop drifting and study the islands one by one, isolating them from one another and thus getting them into their correct perspective.
    The first island was Napier Hall College and its chieftain, the Reverend Victor Hawley. This did not delay him overlong. He had quite decided what he thought about the school and its Headmaster. The one bored him and the other irritated him to a degree that reinforced his spot decision to turn his back on them, come what might.
    The next island was Lane-Perkins and his father. Mr. Sermon had met Lane-Perkins' father, a loud, cheerful individual reputed to have made a fortune as a bookmaker. He neither liked nor disliked Lane-Perkins Senior. Until that moment he had been a mere parent and as such the responsibility of the Head. But now it was necessary that he should think seriously of Lane-Perkins Senior and what might result if the man made an issue of the sticking-plaster. Curiously enough the possibility did not worry Mr. Sermon very much. Surely Magistrates would understand the fearful pressures to which schoolmasters were subjected, and even if they found the charge proved, dismiss it with a caution or a trifling fine ?
    Having successfully isolated these two islands of thought, Mr. Sermon plunged into the mill-race of his immediate professional future. What was he chasing? What did he really want to do? Where did he want to go and at what goal, if any, was he aiming ? He found the answers to these questions far more