For instance, he came home one day with the information that a dog that was not a bull-terrier was not worth calling a dog.
Fan's grandson had been carried off in earliest prime by a chicken-bone that had pierced his vitals, and Cyril did indeed persuade his father to buy a bull-terrier.
The animal was a superlative of forbidding ugliness, but father and son vied with each other in stern critical praise of his surpassing beauty, and Constance, from good nature, joined in the pretence.
He was called Lion, and the shop, after one or two untoward episodes, was absolutely closed to him.
But the most striking of Cyril's successes had to do with the question of the annual holiday.
He spoke of the sea soon after becoming a schoolboy.
It appeared that his complete ignorance of the sea prejudicially affected him at school.
Further, he had always loved the sea; he had drawn hundreds of three-masted ships with studding-sails set, and knew the difference between a brig and a brigantine.
When he first said:
"I say, mother, why can't we go to Llandudno instead of Buxton this year?" his mother thought he was out of his senses.
For the idea of going to any place other than Buxton was inconceivable!
Had they not always been to Buxton?
What would their landlady say?
How could they ever look her in the face again?
Besides ... well ...!
They went to Llandudno, rather scared, and hardly knowing how the change had come about.
But they went.
And it was the force of Cyril's will, Cyril the theoretic cypher, that took them.
III
The removal of the Endowed School to more commodious premises in the shape of Shawport Hall, an ancient mansion with fifty rooms and five acres of land round about it, was not a change that quite pleased Samuel or Constance.
They admitted the hygienic advantages, but Shawport Hall was three-quarters of a mile distant from St. Luke's Square--in the hollow that separates Bursley from its suburb of Hillport; whereas the Wedgwood Institution was scarcely a minute away.
It was as if Cyril, when he set off to Shawport Hall of a morning, passed out of their sphere of influence.
He was leagues off, doing they knew not what.
Further, his dinner-hour was cut short by the extra time needed for the journey to and fro, and he arrived late for tea; it may be said that he often arrived very late for tea; the whole machinery of the meal was disturbed.
These matters seemed to Samuel and Constance to be of tremendous import, seemed to threaten the very foundations of existence.
Then they grew accustomed to the new order, and wondered sometimes, when they passed the Wedgwood Institution and the insalubrious Cock Yard--once sole playground of the boys--that the school could ever have 'managed' in the narrow quarters once allotted to it.
Cyril, though constantly successful at school, a rising man, an infallible bringer-home of excellent reports, and a regular taker of prizes, became gradually less satisfactory in the house.
He was 'kept in' occasionally, and although his father pretended to hold that to be kept in was to slur the honour of a spotless family, Cyril continued to be kept in; a hardened sinner, lost to shame.
But this was not the worst.
The worst undoubtedly was that Cyril was 'getting rough.'
No definite accusation could be laid against him; the offence was general, vague, everlasting; it was in all he did and said, in every gesture and movement.
He shouted, whistled, sang, stamped, stumbled, lunged.
He omitted such empty rites as saying 'Yes' or 'Please,' and wiping his nose.
He replied gruffly and nonchalantly to polite questions, or he didn't reply until the questions were repeated, and even then with a 'lost' air that was not genuine.
His shoelaces were a sad sight, and his finger-nails no sight at all for a decent woman; his hair was as rough as his conduct; hardly at the pistol's point could he be forced to put oil on it.
In brief, he was no longer the nice boy that he used to be.
He had unmistakably deteriorated.
Grievous!
But what can you expect when YOUR boy is obliged, month after month and year after year, to associate with other boys?
After all, he was a GOOD boy, said Constance, often to herself and now and then to Samuel.
For Constance, his charm was eternally renewed.
His smile, his frequent ingenuousness, his funny self-conscious gesture when he wanted to 'get round' her--these characteristics remained; and his pure heart remained; she could read that in his eyes.
Samuel was inimical to his tastes for sports and his triumphs therein.
But Constance had pride in all that.
She liked to feel him and to gaze at him, and to smell that faint, uncleanly odour of sweat that hung in his clothes.
In this condition he reached the advanced age of thirteen.
And his parents, who despite their notion of themselves as wide-awake parents were a simple pair, never suspected that his heart, conceived to be still pure, had become a crawling, horrible mass of corruption.
One day the head-master called at the shop.
Now, to see a head- master walking about the town during school-hours is a startling spectacle, and is apt to give you the same uncanny sensation as when, alone in a room, you think you see something move which ought not to move.
Mr. Povey was startled. Mr. Povey had a thumping within his breast as he rubbed his hands and drew the head-master to the private corner where his desk was.