Time and Time Again Read Online Free PDF

First World War were ending an age. The Somme, Jutland, and Passchendaele came to him later as headlines in the daily papers that reached Brookfield about mid-morning, at which time the school butler clamped them to the stands in the reading-room. Not till the lunch hour did the boys get a hasty glimpse over the shoulders of other boys, and usually after they had satisfied a much greater eagerness to discover who was on the list for the afternoon's compulsory games. There was neither stupidity nor callousness in this--merely the knack (so often necessary in life) of putting first things second. Many of them had brothers and some fathers in the war; all knew that if it lasted long enough they would be in it themselves. Charles had joined the school cadet corps, and with more effort than zeal was picking up the rudiments of being a soldier, drilling twice a week under a ferocious sergeant who taught him exactly where to lunge into an enemy's body with a bayonet. He did not think he would be very good at it, and was comforted to learn from Old Boys on leave from the front that most fighting was done with other weapons. In the evenings, when drills and games and lessons were over for the day, he relaxed in his School House study talking to friends and drinking coffee-- sometimes, when he was on his own, reading poetry. He even wrote some, which was duly published in the Brookfeldian under the pseudonym 'Vincio'. It had no special merit.
    The school was then in charge of old 'Chips', who had been summoned from retirement to plug a hole in the wartime shortage of masters. Chips ran things with a benignity that made Brookfield more than tolerable to several boys who might otherwise have found it unpleasant. Charles was among them--by no means a misfit, but temperamentally not what many people would have called a typical public schoolboy. Since Chips doubted that such an animal existed Charles got along with him very well indeed, and it was Chips who made him a prefect despite warnings that boys who were bad at games were rarely good in authority. Charles, however, proved excellent-- somewhat on the lenient side, but wise in his decisions and a steady handler of crisis. One of his duties was to keep order in the junior dormitories during the hour before lights-out, and he found this easiest to do by being friendly and chatty. The youngsters liked him and called him 'Andy', a nickname that spread throughout the school. On Sunday nights he would read aloud a chapter from some favourite blood-curdler; he read well and enjoyed reading, and once, during a tense moment in Dracula, a listener fainted--an event which gave Charles singular and lasting renown.
    Considering that he was bad at games (which he pretended to enjoy, nevertheless, but which he actually detested), Charles was quite popular at Brookfield, and fairly, though not enormously, happy there. He made a few close friends who stayed friends in later years, and besides Chips there was another master who influenced him--a young Frenchman named Brunon who visited the school once a week to give art lessons to a few eccentrics. Art at Brookfield was an alternative to chemistry; on reaching the fifth form one could choose, and as the laboratory promised better fun than the studio, it was favoured by most. But Charles liked M. Brunon and was encouraged by him to develop an aptitude for painting, so that he whiled away many a pleasant hour in the school grounds, producing small water-colour landscapes so quickly that he would often give them away to onlookers and thus conciliate those who might otherwise have scoffed at such a hobby. One such painting by Charles hangs in the head's study at Brookfield today; it shows the school roofs beyond the trees in winter when clouds are rolling up for a storm. It is not as mediocre as the poetry he wrote (indeed, for his age, it shows distinct promise), but its chief interest perhaps is that a schoolboy should have wanted to go out in such weather