cover

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF

SCHOOL LIFE

BY IAN HAY

THE LIST OF CONTENTS

THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE

These sketches originally appeared in "Blackwood's
Magazine," to the proprietors of which I am indebted
for permission to reproduce them in book form.

IAN HAY

[1]

CHAPTER ONE

THE HEADMASTER

[3]

First of all there is the
Headmaster of Fiction. He is invariably called
"The Doctor," and he wears cap and gown even
when birching malefactors—which he does intermittently
throughout the day—or attending
a cricket match. For all we know he wears
them in bed.

He speaks a language peculiar to himself—a
language which at once enables you to recognise
him as a Headmaster; just as you may recognise
a stage Irishman from the fact that he
says "Begorrah!", or a stage sailor from the fact
that he has to take constant precautions with
his trousers. Thus, the "Doctor" invariably addresses
his cowering pupils as "Boys!"—a
form of address which in reality only survives
nowadays in places where you are invited to
"have another with me"—and if no audience
of boys is available at the moment, he addresses
a single boy as if he were a whole audience.
To influential parents he is servile and oleaginous,
and he treats his staff with fatuous pomposity.
Such a being may have existed—may
exist—but we have never met him.[4]
What of the Headmaster of Fact? To condense
him into a type is one of the most difficult
things in the world, for this reason. Most
of us have known only one Headmaster in our
lives—if we have known more we are not likely
to say so, for obvious reasons—and it is difficult
for Man (as distinct from Woman), to argue
from the particular to the general. Moreover,
the occasions upon which we have met
the subject of our researches at close quarters
have not been favourable to dispassionate character-study.
It is difficult to form an unbiassed
or impartial judgment of a man out of material
supplied solely by a series of brief interviews
spread over a period of years—interviews at
which his contribution to the conversation has
been limited to a curt request that you will bend
over, and yours to a sequence of short sharp
ejaculations.

However, some of us have known more than
one Headmaster, and upon us devolves the solemn
duty of distilling our various experiences
into a single essence.

What are the characteristics of a great Headmaster?
Instinct at once prompts us to premise
that he must be a scholar and a gentleman. A
gentleman, undoubtedly, he must be; but nowadays[5]
scholarship—high classical scholarship—is
a hindrance rather than a help. To supervise
the instruction of modern youth a man
requires something more than profound learning:
he must possess savoir faire. If you set a
great scholar—and a great scholar has an unfortunate
habit of being nothing but a great
scholar—in charge of the multifarious interests
of a public school, you are setting a razor to cut
grindstones. As well appoint an Astronomer
Royal to command an Atlantic liner. He may
be on terms of easy familiarity with the movements
of the heavenly bodies, yet fail to understand
the right way of dealing with refractory
stokers.

A Headmaster is too busy a personage to
keep his own scholarship tuned up to concert
pitch; and if he devotes adequate time to this
object—and a scholar must practise almost as
diligently as a pianist or an acrobat if he is to
remain in the first flight—he will have little
leisure left for less intellectual but equally vital
duties. Nowadays in great public schools the
Head, although he probably takes the Sixth
for an hour or two a day, delegates most of his
work in this direction to a capable and up-to-date
young man fresh from the University, and[6]
devotes his energies to such trifling details as
the organisation of school routine, the supervision
of the cook, the administration of justice,
the diplomatic handling of the Governing
Body, and the suppression of parents.

So far then we are agreed—the great advantage
of dogmatising in print is that one can take
the agreement of the reader for granted—that
a Headmaster must be a gentleman, but not necessarily
a scholar—in the very highest sense of
the word. What other virtues must he possess?
Well, he must be a majestic figurehead. This
is not so difficult as it sounds. The dignity which
doth hedge a Headmaster is so tremendous
that the dullest and fussiest of the race can
hardly fail to be impressive and awe-inspiring
to the plastic mind of youth. More than one
King Log has left a name behind him, through
standing still in the limelight and keeping his
mouth shut. But then he was probably lucky in
his lieutenants.

Next, he must have a sense of humour. If he
cannot see the entertaining side of youthful depravity,
magisterial jealousy, and parental fussiness,
he will undoubtedly go mad. A sense of
humour, too, will prevent him from making a
fool of himself, and a Headmaster must never[7]
do that. It also engenders Tact, and Tact is the
essence of life to a man who has to deal every
day with the ignorant, and the bigoted, and the
sentimental. (These adjectives are applicable
to boys, masters, and parents, and may be applied
collectively or individually with equal
truth.) Not that all humorous people are tactful:
bitter experience of the practical joker has
taught us that. But no person can be tactful
who cannot see the ludicrous side of things.
There is a certain Headmaster of to-day, justly
celebrated as a brilliant teacher and a born organiser,
who is lacking—entirely lacking—in
that priceless gift of the gods, a sense of humour,
with which is incorporated Tact. Shortly after
he took up his present appointment, one of the
most popular boys in the school, while leading
the field in a cross-country race, was run over
and killed by an express train which emerged
from a tunnel as he ran across the line, within
measurable distance of accomplishing a record
for the course.

Next morning the order went forth that the
whole school were to assemble in the great hall.
They repaired thither, not unpleasantly thrilled.
There would be a funeral oration, and boys
are curiously partial to certain forms of emotionalism.[8]
They like to be harangued before a
football-match, for instance, in the manner of
the Greeks of old. These boys had already had
a taste of the Head's quality as a speaker, and
they felt that he would do their departed hero
justice. They reminded one another of the moving
words which the late Head had spoken
when an Old Boy had fallen in battle a few years
before under particularly splendid circumstances.
They remembered how pleased the Old
Boy's father and mother had been about it.
Their comrade, whom they had revered and
loved as recently as yesterday, would receive a
fitting farewell too; and they would all feel the
prouder of the school for the words that they
were about to hear. They did not say this aloud,
for the sentimentality of boys is of the inarticulate
kind, but the thought was uppermost in their
minds.

Presently they were all assembled, and the
Head appeared upon his rostrum. There was
a deathlike stillness: not a boy stirred.

Then the Head spoke.

"Any boy," he announced, "found trespassing
upon the railway-line in future will be expelled.
You may go."

They went. The organisation of that school[9]
is still a model of perfection, and its scholarship
list is exceptionally high. But the school has
never forgiven the Head, and never will so long
as tradition and sentiment count for anything
in this world.

So far, then, we have accumulated the following
virtues for the Headmaster. He must be a
gentleman, a picturesque figure-head, and must
possess a sense of humour.

He must also, of course, be a ruler. Now
you may rule men in two ways—either with a
rapier or a bludgeon; but a man who can gain
his ends with the latter will seldom have recourse
to the former. The Headmaster who
possesses on the top of other essential qualities
the power of being uncompromisingly and
divinely rude, is to be envied above all men.
For him life is full of short cuts. He never
argues. "L'école, c'est moi," he growls, and
no one contradicts him. Boys idolise him. In
his presence they are paralysed with fear, but
away from it they glory in his ferocity of mien
and strength of arm. Masters rave impotently
at his brusquerie and absolutism; but A says
secretly to himself: "Well, it's a treat to see
the way the old man keeps B and C up to the
collar." As for parents, they simply refuse to[10]
face him, which is the head and summit of that
which a master desires of a parent.

Such a man is Olympian, having none of the
foibles or soft moments of a human being. He
dwells apart, in an atmosphere too rarefied for
those who intrude into it. His subjects never
regard him as a man of like passions with
themselves: they would be quite shocked if such an
idea were suggested to them. I once asked a
distinguished alumnus of a great school, which
had been ruled with consummate success for
twenty-four years by such a Head as I have
described, to give me a few reminiscences of
the great man as a man—his characteristics,
his mannerisms, his vulnerable points, his
tricks of expression, his likes and dislikes, and
his hobbies.

My friend considered.

"He was a holy terror," he announced, after
profound meditation.

"Quite so. But in what way?"

My friend thought again.

"I can't remember anything particular about
him," he said, "except that he was a holy terror—and
the greatest man that ever lived!"

"But tell me something personal about him.
How did his conversation impress you?"[11]

"Conversation? Bless you, he never conversed
with anybody. He just told them what he
thought about a thing, and that settled it. Besides,
I never exchanged a word with him in
my life. But he was a great man."

"Didn't you meet him all the time you were
at school?"

"Oh yes, I met him," replied my friend with
feeling—"three or four times. And that reminds
me, I can tell you something personal
about him. The old swine was left-handed! A
great man, a great man!"

Happy the warrior who can inspire worship
on such sinister foundations as these!

The other kind has to prevail by another
method—the Machiavellian. As a successful
Headmaster of my acquaintance once brutally
but truthfully expressed it: "You simply have
to employ a certain amount of low cunning if
you are going to keep a school going at all."
And he was right. A man unendowed with the
divine gift of rudeness would, if he spent his
time answering the criticisms or meeting the
objections of colleagues or parents or even
boys, have no time for anything else. So he
seeks refuge either in finesse or flight. If a parent
rings him up on the telephone, he murmurs[12]
something courteous about a wrong number
and then leaves the receiver off the hook. If a
housemaster, swelling with some grievance or
scheme of reform, bears down upon him upon
the cricket field on a summer afternoon, he
adroitly lures him under a tree where another
housemaster is standing, and leaves them there
together. If an enthusiastic junior discharges
at his head some glorious but quite impracticable
project, such as the performance of a pastoral
play in the school grounds, or the enforcement
of a vegetarian diet upon the School for
experimental purposes, he replies: "My dear
fellow, the Governing Body will never hear of
it!" What he means is: "The Governing Body
shall never hear of it."

He has other diplomatic resources at his call.
Here is an example.

A Headmaster once called his flock together
and said:

"A very unpleasant and discreditable thing
has happened. The municipal authorities have
recently erected a pair of extremely ornate and
expensive—er—lamp-posts outside the residence
of the Mayor of the town. These lamp-posts
appear to have attracted the unfavourable
notice of the School. Last Sunday evening,[13]
between seven and eight o'clock, they were
attacked and wrecked, apparently by volleys of
stones."

There was a faint but appreciative murmur
from those members of the School to whom the
news of this outrage was now made public for
the first time. But a baleful flash from the
Head's spectacles restored instant silence.

"Several parties of boys," he continued,
"must have passed these lamp-posts on that
evening, on their way back to their respective
houses after Chapel. I wish to see all boys who
in any way participated in the outrage in my
study directly after Second School. I warn
them that I shall make a severe example of
them." His voice rose to a blare. "I will not
have the prestige and fair fame of the School
lowered in the eyes of the Town by the vulgar
barbarities of a parcel of ill-conditioned little
street-boys. You may go!"

The audience rose to their feet and began to
steal silently away. But they were puzzled.
The Old Man was no fool as a rule. Did he
really imagine that chaps would be such mugs
as to own up?

But before the first boy reached the door the
Head spoke again.[14]

"I may mention," he added very gently, "that
the attack upon the—er—lamp-posts was witnessed
by a gentleman resident in the neighbourhood,
a warm friend of the School. He
was able to identify one of the culprits, whose
name is in my possession. That is all."

And quite enough too! When the Head visited
his study after Second School, he found
seventeen malefactors meekly awaiting chastisement.

But he never divulged the name of the boy
who had been identified, or for that matter the
identity of the warm friend of the School. I
wonder!

One more quality is essential to the great
Headmaster. He must possess the Sixth
Sense. He must see nothing, yet know everything
that goes on in the School. Etiquette
forbids that he should enter one of his colleague's
houses except as an invited guest; yet
he must be acquainted with all that happens inside
that house. He is debarred by the same
rigid law from entering the form-room or studying
the methods and capability of any but the
most junior form-masters; and yet he must
know whether Mr. A. in the Senior Science[15]
Set is expounding theories of inorganic chemistry
which have been obsolete for ten years, or
whether Mr. B. in the Junior Remove is accustomed
meekly to remove a pool of ink from the
seat of his chair before beginning his daily
labours. He must not mingle with the boys,
for that would be undignified; yet he must, and
usually does, know every boy in the School by
sight, and something about him. He must
never attempt to acquire information by obvious
cross-examination either of boy or master,
or he will be accused of prying and interference;
and he can never, or should never, discuss
one of his colleagues with another. And yet
he must have his hand upon the pulse of the
School in such wise as to be able to tell which
master is incompetent, which prefect is untrustworthy,
which boy is a bully, and which
House is rotten. In other words, he must
possess a Red Indian's powers of observation
and a woman's powers of intuition. He must be
able to suck in school atmosphere through his
pores. He must be able to judge of a man's
keenness or his fitness for duty by his general
attitude and conversation when off duty. He
must be able to read volumes from the demeanour
of a group in the corner of the quadrangle,[16]
from a small boy's furtive expression, or even
from the timbre of the singing in chapel. He
must notice which boy has too many friends,
and which none at all.

Such are a few of the essentials of the great
Headmaster, and to the glory of our system be
it said that there are still many in the land. But
the type is changing. The autocratic Titan of
the past has been shorn of his locks by two Delilahs—Modern
Sides and Government Interference.

First, Modern Sides.

Time was when A Sound Classical Education,
Lady Matron, and Meat for Breakfast
formed the alpha and omega of a public school
prospectus. But times have changed, at least in
so far as the Sound Classical Education is concerned.
The Headmaster of the old school, who
looks upon the classics as the foundation of all
education, and regards modern sides as a sop to
the parental Cerberus, finds himself called upon
to cope with new and strange monsters.

First of all, the members of that once despised
race, the teachers of Science. Formerly
these maintained a servile and apologetic existence,
supervising a turbulent collection of
young gentlemen whose sole appreciation of
[17]this branch of knowledge was derived from the
unrivalled opportunities which its pursuit afforded
for the creation of horrible stenches and
untimely explosions. Now they have uprisen,
and, asseverating that classical education is a
pricked bubble, ask boldly for expensive apparatus
and a larger tract of space in the time-table.

Then the parent. He has got quite out of
hand lately. In days past things were different.
Usually an old public-school boy himself, and
proudly conscious that Classics had made him
"what he was," the parent deferred entirely to
the Headmaster's judgment, and entrusted his
son to his care without question or stipulation.
But a new race of parents has arisen, men who
avow, modestly but firmly, that they have been
made not by the Classics but by themselves,
and who demand, with a great assumption of
you-can't-put-me-off-with-last-season's-goods,
that their offspring shall be taught something
up-to-date—something which will be "useful"
in an office.

Again, there is our old friend the Man in the
Street, who, through the medium of his favourite
mouthpiece, the halfpenny press, asks the
Headmaster very sternly what he means by[18]
turning out "scholars" who are incapable of
writing an invoice in commercial Spanish, and
to whom double entry is Double Dutch.

And lastly there is the boy himself, whose
utter loathing and horror of education as a
whole has not blinded him to the fact that the
cultivation of some branches thereof calls for
considerably less effort than that of others, and
who accordingly occupies the greater part of
his weekly letter home with fervent requests to
his parents to permit him to drop Classics and
take up modern languages or science.

The united agitations of this incongruous
band have called into existence the Modern Side—Delilah
Number One. Now for Number Two.

Until a few years ago the State confined its
ebullience in matters educational to the Board
Schools. But with the growth of national education
and class jealousy—the two seem to go
hand-in-hand—the working classes of this
country began to point out to the Government,
not altogether unreasonably, that what is sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander. "Why,"
they inquired bitterly, "should we be the only
people educated? Must the poor always be oppressed,
while the rich go free? What about
these public schools of yours—the seminaries[19]
of the bloated and pampered Aristocracy? You
leave us alone for a bit, and give them a turn,
or we may get nasty!" So a pliable Government,
remembering that public-school masters
are not represented in Parliament while the
working-classes are, obeyed. They began by
publicly announcing that in future all teachers
must be trained to teach. To give effect to this
decree, they declared their intention of immediately
introducing a Bill to provide that after a
certain date no Headmaster of any school, high
or low, would be permitted to engage an assistant
who had not earned a certificate at a training
college and registered himself in a mysterious
schedule called 'Column B,' paying a guinea
for the privilege.

The prospective schoolmasters of the day—fourth-year
men at Oxford and Cambridge,
inexperienced in the ways of Government Departments—were
deeply impressed. Most of
them hurriedly borrowed a guinea and registered
in Column B. They even went further.
In the hope of forestalling the foolish virgins
of their profession, they attended lectures and
studied books which dealt with the science of
education. They became attachés at East End
Board-Schools, where, under the supervision[20]
of a capable but plebeian Master of Method,
they endeavoured to instruct classes of some
sixty or seventy babbling six-year-olds in the
elements of reading and writing, in order that
hereafter they might be better able to elucidate
Cicero and Thucydides to scholarship candidates
at a public school.

Others, however—the aforementioned foolish
virgins—whose knowledge of British politics
was greater than their interest in the Theory
of Education, decided to 'wait and see.' That is
to say, they accepted the first vacancy at a
public school which presented itself and settled
down to work upon the old lines, a year's seniority
to the good. In a just world this rashness
and improvidence would have met with its due
reward—namely, ultimate eviction (when the
Bill passed) from a comfortable berth, and a
stern command to go and learn the business of
teaching before presuming to teach. But unfortunately
the Bill never did pass: it never so
much as reached its First Reading. It lies now
in some dusty pigeon-hole in the Education
Office, forgotten by all save its credulous victims.
The British Exchequer is the richer by
several thousand guineas, contributed by a class
to whom of course a guinea is a mere bagatelle;[21]
and here and there throughout the public
schools of this country there exist men who,
when they first joined the Staff, had the mysterious
formula, "Reg. Col. B.," printed upon
their testimonials, and discoursed learnedly to
stupefied Headmasters about brain-tracks and
psychology, and the mutual stimulus of co-sexual
competition, for a month or two before
awakening to the one fundamental truth which
governs public-school education—namely, that
if you can keep boys in order you can teach
them anything; if not, all the Column B.'s
in the Education Office will avail you nothing.

That was all. The incident is ancient history
now. It was a capital practical joke, perpetrated
by a Government singularly lacking in humour
in other respects; and no one remembers it
except the people to whom the guineas belong.
But it gave the Headmasters of the country a
bad fright. It provides them with a foretaste of
the nuisance which the State can make of itself
when it chooses to be paternal. So such of the
Headmasters as were wise decided to be upon
their guard for the future against the blandishments
of the party politician. And they were
justified; for presently the Legislature stirred[22]
in its sleep and embarked upon yet another
enterprise.

Philip, king of Macedon, used to say that no
city was impregnable whose gates were wide
enough to admit a single mule-load of gold.
Similarly the Board of Education decided that
no public school, however haughty or exclusive,
could ever again call its soul its own once the
Headmaster (of his own free will, or overruled
by the Governing Body) had been asinine
enough to accept a "grant." So they approached
the public schools with fair words. They
said:—

"How would you like a subsidy, now, wherewith
to build a new science laboratory? What
about a few State-aided scholarships? Won't
you let us help you? Strict secrecy will be observed,
and advances made upon your note of
hand alone"—or words to that effect.

The larger and better-endowed public
schools, conscious of a fat bank-balance and a
long waiting list of prospective pupils, merely
winked their rheumy eyes and shook their
heavy heads.

"Timeo Danaos," they growled—"et dona
ferentes."

When this observation was translated to the[23]
Minister for Education, he smiled enigmatically,
and bided his time. But some of the
smaller schools, hard pressed by modern competition,
gobbled the bait at once. The mule-load
of gold arrived promptly, and close in its
train came Retribution. Inspectors swooped
down—clerkly young men who in their time
had passed an incredible number of Standards,
and were now receiving what was to them a
princely salary for indulging in the easiest and
most congenial of all human recreations—that
of criticising the efforts of others. There arrived,
too, precocious prize-pupils from the
Board Schools, winners of County Council
scholarships which entitled them to a few years'
"polish" at a public school—a polish but slowly
attained, despite constant friction with their new
and loving playmates.

But the great strongholds still held out. So
other methods were adopted. The examination
screw was applied.

As most of us remember to our cost, we used
periodically in our youth at school to suffer from
an "examination week," during which a mysterious
power from outside was permitted to
inflict upon us examination papers upon every
subject upon earth, under the title of Oxford[24]
and Cambridge Locals—the High, the Middle,
and the Low—or, in Scotland, the Leaving
Certificate. These papers were set and corrected
by persons unknown, residing in London;
and we were supervised as we answered
them not by our own preceptors—they stampeded
joyously away to play golf—but by strange
creatures who took charge of the examination-room
with an air of uneasy assurance, suggestive
of a man travelling first-class with a third-class
ticket. In due course the results were
declared; and the small school which gained a
large percentage of Honourable Mentions was
able to underline the fact heavily in its prospectus.
These examinations were, if not organised,
at least recognised by the State; and once they
had pierced the battlements of a school an Inspector
invariably crawled through the breach
after them. Henceforth that school was subject
to periodical visitations and reports.

Naturally the Headmasters of the great public
schools clanged their gates and dropped
their portcullises against such an infraction of
the law that a Headmaster's school is his castle.
But, as already mentioned, the screw was applied.
The certificates awarded to successful
candidates in these examinations were made[25]
the key to higher things. Three Higher Grade
Certificates, for instance, were accepted in lieu
of certain subjects in Oxford Smalls and Cambridge
Little-go. The State pounced upon this
principle and extended it. The acquisition of a
sufficient number of these certificates now paved
the way to various State services. Extra marks
or special favours were awarded to young gentlemen
who presented themselves for Sandhurst
or Woolwich or the Civil Service bringing
their sheaves with them in the form of
Certificates. Roughly speaking, the more Certificates
a candidate produced the more enthusiastically
he was excused from the necessity of
learning the elements of his trade.

The governing bodies of various professions
took up the idea. For instance, if you produced
four Higher Certificates—say for Geography,
Botany, Electro-Dynamics, and Practical
Cookery—you were excused the preliminary
examination of the Society of Chartered Accountants.
(We need not pin ourselves down to
the absolute accuracy of these details: they are
merely for purposes of illustration.) Anyhow, it
was a beautiful idea. A Headmaster of my acquaintance
once assured me that he believed
that the possession of a complete set of Higher[26]
Grade Certificates for all the Local Examinations
of a single year would entitle the holder
to a seat in the reformed House of Lords.

In other words, it was still possible to get into
the Universities and Services without Certificates,
but it was very much easier to get in with
them.

So the great Headmasters climbed down.
But they made terms. They would accept the
Local Examinations, and they would admit Inspectors
within their fastnesses; but they respectfully
but firmly insisted upon having some
sort of say in the choice of the Inspector.

The Government met them more than half-way.
In fact, they fell in with the plan with
suspicious heartiness.

"Certainly, my dear sir," they said: "you
shall choose your own Inspector; and what is
more, you shall pay him! Think of that! The
man will be a mere tool in your hands—a hired
servant—and you can do what you like with
him."

It was an ingenious and comforting way of
putting things, and may be commended to the
notice of persons writhing in a dentist's chair;
for it forms an exact parallel: the description
applies to dentist and inspector equally. However,[27]
the Headmasters agreed to it; and now
all our great schools receive inspectorial visitations
of some kind. That is to say, upon an appointed
date a gentleman comes down from
London, spends the day as the guest of the
Headmaster; and after being conducted about
the premises from dawn till dusk, departs in the
gloaming with his brain in a fog and some sixteen
guineas in his pocket.

He is a variegated type, this Super-Inspector.
Frequently he is a clever man who has
failed as a schoolmaster and now earns a comfortable
living because he remembered in time
the truth of the saying: La critique est aisé,
l'art difficile. More often he is a superannuated
University professor, with a penchant for irrelevant
anecdote and a disastrous sense of humour.
Sometimes he is aggressive and dictatorial,
but more often (humbly remembering
where he is and who is going to pay for all this)
apprehensive, deferential, and quite inarticulate.
Sometimes he is a scholar and a gentleman,
with a real appreciation of the atmosphere
of a public school and a sound knowledge of the
principles of education. But not always. And
whoever he is and whatever he is, the Head
loathes him impartially and dispassionately.[28]

Such are some of the thorns with which the
pillow of a modern Headmaster is stuffed. His
greatest stumbling-block is Tradition—the
hoary edifices of convention and precedent,
built up and jealously guarded by Old Boys and
senior Housemasters. Of Parents we will treat
in another place.

What is he like, the Headmaster of to-day?

Firstly and essentially, he is no longer a despot.
He is a constitutional sovereign, like all
other modern monarchs; and perhaps it is better
so. Though a Head still exercises enormous
personal power, for good or ill, a school no
longer stands or falls by its Headmaster, as in
the old days, any more than a country stands or
falls by its King, as in the days of the Stuarts.
Public opinion, Housemasters, the prefectorial
system—these have combined to modify his
absolutism. But though a bad Headmaster
may not be able to wreck a good school, it is
certain that no school can ever become great,
or remain great, without a great man at the
head of it.

Time has wrought other changes. Twenty
years ago no man could ever hope to reach the
summit of the scholastic universe who was not
in Orders and the possessor of a First Class[29]
Classical degree. Now the layman, the modern-side
man, above all the man of affairs, are raising
their heads.

Under these new conditions, what manner of
man is the great Head of to-day?

He is essentially a man of business. A clear
brain and a sense of proportion enable him to
devise schemes of education in which the old
idealism and the new materialism are judiciously
blended. He knows how to draw up a
school time-table—almost as difficult and complicated
a document as Bradshaw—making
provision, hour by hour, day by day, for the
teaching of a very large number of subjects by
a limited number of men to some hundreds of
boys all at different stages of progress, in such
a way that no boy shall be left idle for a single
hour and no master be called upon to be in two
places at once.

He understands school finance and educational
politics, which are even more peculiar
than British party politics. He combines the
art of being able to rule upon his own initiative
for months at a time, and yet render a satisfactory
account of his stewardship to an ignorant
and inquisitive Governing Body which meets
twice a year.[30]

He is, as ever, an imposing figure-head; and
if he is, or has been, an athlete, so much the
easier for him in his dealings with the boys. He
possesses the art of managing men to an extent
sufficient to maintain his Housemasters in
some sort of line, and to keep his junior staff
punctual and enthusiastic without fussing or
herding them. He is a good speaker, and though
not invariably in Orders, he appreciates the
enormous influence that a powerful sermon in
Chapel may exercise at a time of crisis; and he
supplies that sermon himself.

He keeps a watchful eye upon an army of
servants, and does not shrink from the drudgery
of going through kitchen-accounts or laundry
estimates. He investigates complaints personally,
whether they have to do with a House's
morals or a butler's perquisites.

He keeps abreast of the educational needs
of the time. He is a persona grata at the Universities,
and usually knows at which University
and at which College thereof one of his boys
will be most likely to win a scholarship. In the interests
of the Army Class he maintains friendly
relations with the War Office, because, in
these days of the chronic reform of that institution,
to be in touch with the "permanent" military[31]
mind is to save endless trouble over examinations
which are going to be dropped or
schedules which are about to be abandoned
before they come into operation. He cultivates
the acquaintance of those in high places, not for
his own advancement, but because it is good for
the School to be able to bring down an occasional
celebrity, to present prizes or open a new
wing. For the same reason he dines out a good
deal—often when he has been on his feet since
seven o'clock in the morning—and entertains
in return, so far as he can afford it, people who
are likely to be able to do the School a good
turn. For with him it is the School, the School,
the School, all the time.

If he possesses private means of his own, so
much the better; for the man with a little spare
money in his pocket possesses powers of leverage
denied to the man who has none. I know of
a Headmaster who once shamed his Governing
Body into raising the salaries of the Junior Staff
to a decent standard by supplementing those
salaries out of his own slender resources for
something like five years.

And above all, he has sympathy and insight.
When a master or boy comes to him with a
grievance he knows whether he is dealing with[32]
a chronic grumbler or a wronged man. The
grumbler can be pacified by a word or chastened
by a rebuke; but a man burning under
a sense of real injustice and wrong will never be
efficient again until his injuries are redressed.
If a colleague, again, comes to him with a
scheme of work, or organisation, or even play,
he is quick to see how far the scheme is valuable
and practicable, and how far it is mere fuss and
officiousness. He is enormously patient over
this sort of thing, for he knows that an untimely
snub may kill the enthusiasm of a real worker,
and that a little encouragement may do wonders
for a diffident beginner. He knows how to
stimulate the slacker, be he boy or master; and
he keeps a sharp look-out to see that the willing
horse does not overwork himself. (This
latter, strange as it may seem, is the harder task
of the two.) And he can read the soul of that
most illegible of books—save to the understanding
eye—the boy, through and through. He
can tell if a boy is lying brazenly, or lying because
he is frightened, or lying to screen a
friend, or speaking the truth. He knows when
to be terrible in anger, and when to be indescribably
gentle.

Usually he is slightly unpopular. But he
[33]does not allow this to trouble him overmuch,
for he is a man who is content to wait for his
reward. He remembers the historic verdict of
"A beast, but a just beast," and chuckles.

Such a man is an Atlas, holding up a little
world. He is always tired, for he can never
rest. His so-called hours of ease are clogged by
correspondence, most of it quite superfluous,
and the telephone has added a new terror to his
life. But he is always cheerful, even when alone;
and he loves his work. If he did not, it would
kill him.

A Headmaster no longer regards his office
as a stepping-stone to a Bishopric. In the near
future, as ecclesiastical and classical traditions
fade, that office is more likely to be regarded as
a qualification for a place at the head of a Department
of State, or a seat in the Cabinet. A
man who can run a great public school can run
an Empire.[35]

CHAPTER TWO

THE HOUSEMASTER

[37]

To the boy, all masters (as
distinct from The Head) consist of one class—namely,
masters. The fact that masters are
divisible into grades, or indulge in acrimonious
diversities of opinion, or are subject to the
ordinary weaknesses of the flesh (apart from
chronic shortness of temper) has never occurred
to him.

This is not so surprising as it sounds. A
schoolmaster's life is one long pose. His perpetual
demeanour is that of a blameless enthusiast.
A boy never hears a master swear—at
least, not if the master can help it; he seldom
sees him smoke or drink; he never hears him
converse upon any but regulation topics, and
then only from the point of view of a rather
bigoted archangel. The idea that a master in
his private capacity may go to a music-hall, or
back a horse, or be casual in his habits, or be
totally lacking in religious belief, would be quite
a shock to a boy.

It is true that when half-a-dozen ribald spirits
are gathered round the Lower Study fire
after tea, libellous tongues are unloosed. The
humorist of the party draws joyous pictures of[38]
his Housemaster staggering home to bed after
a riotous evening with an Archdeacon, or being
thrown out of the Empire in the holidays. But
no one in his heart takes these legends seriously—least
of all their originator. They are
merely audacious irreverences.

All day and every day the boy sees the master,
impeccably respectable in cap and gown,
rebuking the mildest vices, extolling the dullest
virtues, singing the praises of industry and
application, and attending Chapel morning and
evening. A boy has little or no intuition: he
judges almost entirely by externals. To him a
master is not as other men are: he is a special
type of humanity endowed with a permanent
bias towards energetic respectability, and grotesquely
ignorant of the seamy side of life. The
latter belief in particular appears to be quite ineradicable.

But in truth the scholastic hierarchy is a most
complicated fabric. At the summit of the Universe
stands the Head. After him come the
senior masters—or, as they prefer somewhat
invidiously to describe themselves, the permanent
staff—then the junior masters. The whole
body are divided and subdivided again into little
groups—classical men, mathematical men,[39]
science men, and modern-language men—each
group with its own particular axe to grind and
its own tender spots. Then follow various specialists,
not always resident; men whose life is
one long and usually ineffectual struggle to convince
the School—including the Head—that
music, drawing, and the arts generally are subjects
which ought to be taken seriously, even
under the British educational system.

As already noted, after the Head—quite literally—come
the Housemasters. They are always
after him: one or other of the troop is perpetually
on his trail; and unless the great man
displays the ferocity of the tiger or the wisdom
of the serpent, they harry him exceedingly.

Behold him undergoing his daily penance—in
audience in his study after breakfast. To him
enter severally:

A., a patronising person, with a few helpful
suggestions upon the general management of
the School. He usually begins: "In the old
Head's day, we never, under any circumstances——"

B., whose speciality is to discover motes in
the eyes of other Housemasters. He announces
that yesterday afternoon he detected a member
of the Eleven fielding in a Panama hat. "Are[40]
Panama hats permitted by the statutes of the
School? I need hardly say that the boy was not
a member of my House."

C., a wobbler, who seeks advice as to whether
an infraction of one of the rules of his House
can best be met by a hundred lines of Vergil or
public expulsion.

D., a Housemaster pure and simple, urging
the postponement of the Final House-Match,
D.'s best bowler having contracted an ingrowing
toe-nail.

E., another, insisting that the date be adhered
to—for precisely the same reason.

(He receives no visit from F., who holds that
a Housemaster's House is his castle, and would
as soon think of coming to the fountain-head
for advice as he would of following the advice
if it were offered.)

G., an alarmist, who has heard a rumour that
smallpox has broken out in the adjacent village,
and recommends that the entire school be vaccinated
forthwith.

H., a golfer, suggesting a half-holiday, to
celebrate some suddenly unearthed anniversary
in the annals of Country or School.

Lastly, on the telephone, I., a valetudinarian,
to announce that he is suffering from double[41]
pneumonia, and will be unable to come into
School until after luncheon.

To be quite just, I. is the rarest bird of all.
The average schoolmaster has a perfect passion
for sticking to his work when utterly unfit
for it. In this respect he differs materially from
his pupil, who lies in bed in the dawning hours,
cudgelling his sleepy but fertile brain for a disease
which

(1) Has not been used before.

(2) Will incapacitate him for work all morning.

(3) Will not prevent him playing football in
the afternoon.

But if a master sprains his ankle, he hobbles
about his form-room on a crutch. If he contracts
influenza, he swallows a jorum of ammoniated
quinine, puts on three waistcoats, and totters
into school, where he proceeds to disseminate
germs among his not ungrateful charges. Even
if he is rendered speechless by tonsillitis, he
takes his form as usual, merely substituting
written invective (chalked up on the blackboard),
for the torrent of verbal abuse which he
usually employs as a medium of instruction.

It is all part—perhaps an unconscious part—of
his permanent pose as an apostle of what is[42]
strenuous and praiseworthy. It is also due to a
profound conviction that whoever of his colleagues
is told off to take his form for him will
indubitably undo the work of many years within
a few hours.

Besides harrying the head and expostulating
with one another, the Housemasters wage unceasing
war with the teaching staff.

The bone of contention in every case is a
boy, and the combat always follows certain
well-defined lines.

A form-master overtakes a Housemaster
hurrying to morning chapel, and inquires carelessly:

"By the way, isn't Binks tertius your boy?"

The Housemaster guardedly admits that
this is so.

"Well, do you mind if I flog him?"

"Oh, come, I say, isn't that rather drastic?
What has he done?"

"Nothing—not a hand's-turn—for six
weeks."

"Um!" The Housemaster endeavours to
look severely judicial. "Young Binks is rather
an exceptional boy," he observes. (Young Binks
always is.) "Are you quite sure you know him?"

The form-master, who has endured Master[43]
Binks' society for nearly two years, and knows
him only too well, laughs caustically.

"Yes," he says, "I do know him: and I quite
agree with you that he is rather an exceptional
boy."

"Ah!" says the Housemaster, falling into the
snare. "Then——"

"An exceptional young swab," explains the
form-master.

By this time they have entered the Chapel,
where they revert to their daily task of setting
an example by howling one another down in
the Psalms.

After Chapel the Housemaster takes the
form-master aside and confides to him the intelligence
that he has been a Housemaster for
twenty-five years. The form-master, suppressing
an obvious retort, endeavours to return to
the question of Binks; but is compelled instead
to listen to a brief homily upon the management
of boys in general. As neither gentleman has
breakfasted, the betting as to which will lose
his temper first is almost even, with odds slightly
in favour of the form-master, being the younger
and hungrier man. However, it is quite certain
that one of them will—probably both. The
light of reason being thus temporarily obscured,[44]
they part, to meditate further repartees and
complain bitterly of one another to their colleagues.

But it is very seldom that Master Binks profits
by such Olympian differences as these. Possibly
the Housemaster may decline to give the
form-master permission to flog Binks, but in
nine cases out of ten, being nothing if not conscientious,
he flogs Binks himself, carefully explaining
to the form-master afterwards, by implication
only, that he has done so not from
conviction, but from an earnest desire to bolster
up the authority of an inexperienced and incompetent
colleague. But these quibbles, as already
observed, do not help the writhing Binks
at all.

However, a Housemaster contra mundum,
and a Housemaster in his own House, are very
different beings. We have already seen that
a bad Headmaster cannot always prevent a
School from being good. But a House stands or
falls entirely by its Housemaster. If he is a
good Housemaster it is a good House: if not,
nothing can save it. And therefore the responsibility
of a Housemaster far exceeds that of a
Head.

Consider. He is in loco parentis—with[45]
apologies to Stalky!—to some forty or fifty of
the shyest and most reserved animals in the
world; one and all animated by a single desire—namely,
to prevent any fellow-creature from
ascertaining what is at the back of their minds.
Schoolgirls, we are given to understand, are
prone to open their hearts to one another, or to
some favourite teacher, with luxurious abandonment.
Not so boys. Up to a point they are
frankness itself: beyond that point lie depths
which can only be plumbed by instinct and
intuition—qualities whose possession is the only
test of a born Housemaster. All his flock must
be an open book to him: he must understand
both its collective and its individual tendencies.
If a boy is inert and listless, the Housemaster
must know whether his condition is due
to natural sloth or some secret trouble, such as
bullying or evil companionship. If a boy appears
dour and dogged, the Housemaster has to decide
whether he is shy or merely insolent.
Private tastes and pet hobbies must also be
borne in mind. The complete confidence of a
hitherto unresponsive subject can often be won
by a tactful reference to music or photography.
The Housemaster must be able, too, to distinguish
between brains and mere precocity, and[46]
to separate the fundamentally stupid boy from
the lazy boy who is pretending to be stupid—an
extremely common type. He must cultivate
a keen nose for the malingerer, and at the same
time keep a sharp look-out for fear lest the conscientious
plodder should plod himself silly. He
must discriminate between the whole-hearted
enthusiast and the pretentious humbug who
simulates keenness in order to curry favour.
And above all, he must make allowances for
heredity and home influence. Many a Housemaster
has been able to adjust his perspective
with regard to a boy by remembering that the
boy has a drunken father, or a neurotic mother,
or no parents at all.

He must keep a light hand on House politics,
knowing everything, yet doing little, and saying
almost nothing at all. If a Housemaster
be blatantly autocratic; if he deputes power to
no one; if he prides himself upon his iron discipline;
if he quells mere noise with savage
ferocity and screws down the safety-valve implacably
upon healthy ragging, he will reap his
reward. He will render his House quiet, obedient—and
furtive. Under such circumstances
prefects are a positive danger. Possessing special
privileges, but no sense of responsibility,[47]
they regard their office merely as a convenient
and exclusive avenue to misdemeanour.

On the other hand, a Housemaster must not
allow his prefects unlimited authority, or he
will cease to be master in his own House. In
other words, he must strike an even balance
between sovereign and deputed power—an
undertaking which has sent dynasties toppling
before now.

In addition to all this, he must be an Admirable
Crichton. Whatever his own particular
teaching subject may be, he will be expected,
within the course of a single evening's "prep,"
to be able to unravel a knotty passage in Æschylus,
"unseen," solve a quadratic equation on
sight, compose a chemical formula, or complete
an elegiac couplet. He must also be prepared
at any hour of the day or night to explain how
leg-breaks are manufactured, recommend a list
of novels for the House library, set a broken
collar-bone, solve a jig-saw puzzle in the Sick-room,
assist an Old Boy in the choice of a
career, or prepare a candidate for Confirmation.
And the marvel is that he always does it—in
addition to his ordinary day's work in school.

And what is his remuneration? One of the
rarest and most precious privileges that can be[48]
granted to an Englishman—the privilege of
keeping a public house!

Let me explain. For the first twenty years
of his professional career a schoolmaster works
as a mere instructor of youth. By day he teaches
his own particular subject; by night he looks
over proses or corrects algebra papers. In his
spare time he imparts private instruction to
backward boys or scholarship candidates. Probably
he bears a certain part in the supervision
of the School games. He is possibly treasurer
of one or two of the boys' own organisations—the
Fives Club or the Debating Society—and
as a rule he is permitted to fill up odd moments
by sub-editing the School magazine or organising
sing-songs. He cannot as a rule afford to
marry; so he lives the best years of his life in
two rooms, looking forward to the time, in the
dim and hypothetical future, when he will possess
what the ordinary artisan usually acquires
on passing out of his teens—a home of his own.

At length, after many days, provided that a
sufficient number of colleagues die or get superannuated,
comes his reward, and he enters upon
the realisation of his dreams. He is now a
Housemaster, with every opportunity (and full
permission) to work himself to death.

[49]

Still, you say, the labourer is worthy of his
hire. A man occupying a position so onerous
and responsible as this will be well remunerated.

What is his actual salary?

In many cases he receives no salary, as a
Housemaster, at all. Instead, he is accorded
the privilege of running his new home as a combined
lodging-house and restaurant. His spare
time (which the reader will have gathered is
more than considerable) is now pleasantly occupied
in purchasing beef and mutton and selling
them to Binks tertius. As his tenure of the
House seldom exceeds ten or fifteen years, he
has to exercise considerable commercial enterprise
in order to make a sufficient "pile" to retire
upon—as Binks tertius sometimes discovers
to his cost. In other words, a scholar and
gentleman's reward for a life of unremitting
labour in one of the most exacting yet altruistic
fields in the world is a licence to enrich himself
for a period of years by "cornering" the daily
bread of the pupils in his charge. And yet we
feel surprised, and hurt, and indignant, when
foreigners suggest that we are a nation of shopkeepers.

The life of a Housemaster is a living example
of the lengths to which the British passion[50]
for undertaking heavy responsibilities and
thankless tasks can be carried. Daily, hourly,
he finds himself in contact (and occasional collision)
with boys—boys for whose moral and
physical welfare he is responsible; who in theory
at least will regard him as their natural enemy;
and who occupy the greater part of their leisure
time in criticising and condemning him and
everything that is his—his appearance, his
character, his voice, his wife; the food that he
provides and the raiment that he wears. He is
harried by measles, mumps, servants, tradesmen,
and parents. He feels constrained to invite
every boy in his House to a meal at least
once a term, which means that he is almost
daily deprived of the true-born Briton's birthright
of being uncommunicative at breakfast.
His life is one long round of colourless routine,
tempered by hair-bleaching emergencies.

But he loves it all. He maintains, and ultimately
comes to believe, that his House is the
only House in the School in which both justice
and liberty prevail, and his boys the only boys
in the world who know the meaning of hard
work, good food, and esprit de corps. He pities
all other Housemasters, and tells them so at
frequent intervals; and he expostulates paternally[51]
and sorrowfully with form-masters who
vilify the members of his cherished flock in half-term
reports.

And his task is not altogether thankless. Just
as the sun never sets upon the British Empire,
so it never sets upon all the Old Boys of a great
public school at once. They are gone out into
all lands: they are upholding the honour of the
School all the world over. And wherever they
are—London, Simla, Johannesburg, Nairobi,
or Little Pedlington Vicarage—they never lose
touch with their old Housemaster. His correspondence
is enormous; it weighs him down: but
he would not relinquish a single picture postcard
of it. He knows that wherever two or three
of his Old Boys are gathered together, be it in
Bangalore or Buluwayo, the talk will always
drift round in time to the old School and the
old House. They will refer to him by his nickname—"Towser,"
or "Potbelly," or "Swivel-Eye,"—and
reminiscences will flow.

"Do you remember the old man's daily gibe
when he found us chucking bread at dinner?
'Hah! There will be a bread pudding tomorrow!'"

"Do you remember the jaw he gave us when
the news came about Macpherson's V.C.?"[52]

"Do you remember his Sunday trousers?
Oh, Lord!"

"Do you remember how he tanned Goat
Hicks for calling The Frog a cochon? Fourteen,
wasn't it?"

"Do you remember the grub he gave the
whole House the time we won the House-match
by one wicket, with Old Mike away?"

"Do you remember how he broke down at
prayers the night little Martin died?"

"Do you remember his apologising to that
young swine Sowerby before the whole House
for losing his temper and clouting him over the
head? That must have taken some doing. We
rooted Sowerby afterwards for grinning."

"I always remember the time," interpolates
one of the group, "when he scored me off for
roller-skating on Sunday."

"How was that?"

"Well, it was this way. I had got leave of
morning Chapel on some excuse or other, and
was skating up and down the Long Corridor,
having a grand time. The old man came out of
his study—I thought he was in Chapel—and
growled, looking at me over his spectacles—you
remember the way?——"

"Yes, rather. Go on!"[53]

"He growled:—'Boy, do you consider roller-skating
a Sunday pastime?' I, of course, looked
a fool, and said, 'No, sir.' 'Well,' chuckled the
old bird, 'I do: but I always make a point of
respecting a man's religious scruples. I will
therefore confiscate your skates.' And he did!
He gave them back to me next day, though."

"I always remember him," says another, "the
time I nearly got sacked. By rights I ought to
have been, but I believe he got me off at the last
moment. Anyhow, he called me into his study
and told me I wasn't to go after all. He didn't
jaw me, but said I could take an hour off school
and go and telegraph home that things were all
right. My people had been having a pretty bad
time over it, I knew, and so did he. I was pretty
near blubbing, but I held out. Then, just as I
got to the door, he called me back. I turned
round, rather in a funk that the jaw was coming
after all. But he growled out:—

"'It's a bit late in the term. The exchequer
may be low. Here is sixpence for the telegram.'

"This time I did blub. Not one man in a
million would have thought of the sixpence.
As a matter of fact, fourpence-halfpenny was
all I had in the world."[54]

And so on. His ears—especially his right
ear—must be burning all day long.

Of course all Housemasters are not like this.
If you want to hear about the other sort, take
up The Lanchester Tradition, by Mr. G. F.
Bradby, and make the acquaintance of Mr.
Chowdler—an individual example of a great
type run to seed. And there is Dirty Dick, in
The Hill.

When he has fulfilled his allotted span as a
Housemaster, our friend retires—not from
school-mastering, but from the provision trade.
With his hardly-won gains he builds himself a
house in the neighbourhood of the school, and
lives there in a state of otium cum dignitate. He
still takes his form: he continues to do so until
old age descends upon him, or a new broom at
the head of affairs makes a clean sweep of the
"permanent" staff.

He is mellower now. He no longer washes
his hands of all responsibility for the methods
of his colleagues, or thanks God that his boys
are not as other masters' boys are. He does not
altogether enjoy his work in school: he is getting
a little deaf, and is inclined to be testy. But[55]
teaching is his meat and his drink and his father
and his mother. He sticks to it because it holds
him to life.

Though elderly now, he enjoys many of the
pleasures of middle age. For instance, he has
usually married late, so his children are still
young; and he is therefore spared the pain,
which most parents have to suffer, of seeing the
brood disperse just when it begins to be needed
most. Or perhaps he has been too devoted to
his world-wide family of boys to marry at all. In
that case he lives alone; but you may be sure
that his spare bedroom is seldom empty. No
Old Boy ever comes home from abroad without
paying a visit to his former Housemaster. Rich,
poor, distinguished, or obscure—they all come.
They tell him of their adventures; they recall
old days; they deplore the present condition of
the School and the degeneracy of the Eleven;
they fight their own battles over again. They
confide in him. They tell him things they would
never tell their fathers or their wives. They
bring him their ambitions, and their failures—not
their successes; those are for others to speak
of—even their love-affairs. And he listens to
them all, and advises them all, this very tender
and very wise old Ulysses. To him they are[56]
but boys still, and he would not have them otherwise.

"The heart of a Boy in the body of a Man,"
he says—"that is a combination which can never
go wrong. If I have succeeded in effecting
that combination in a single instance, then I
have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain.
[57]

CHAPTER THREE

SOME FORM-MASTERS

[59]

NUMBER ONE THE NOVICE

Arthur Robinson, B.A., late exhibitioner
of St. Crispin's College, Cambridge,
having obtained a First Class, Division Three,
in the Classical Tripos, came down from the
University at the end of his third year and decided
to devote his life to the instruction of
youth.

In order to gratify this ambition as speedily
as possible, he applied to a scholastic agency
for an appointment. He was immediately furnished
with type-written notices of some thirty
or forty. Almost one and all, they were for
schools which he had never heard of; but the
post in every case was one which the Agency
could unreservedly recommend. At the foot of
each notice was typed a strongly worded appeal
to him to write (at once) to the Headmaster,
explaining first and foremost that he had heard
of this vacancy through our Agency. After that
he was to state his degree (if any); if a member
of the Church of England; if willing to participate
in School games; if musical; and so on.
He was advised, if he thought it desirable, to
enclose a photograph of himself.[60]

A further sheaf of such notices reached him
every morning for about two months; but as
none of them offered him more than a hundred-and-twenty
pounds a year, and most of them
a good deal less, Arthur Robinson, who was a
sensible young man, resisted the temptation,
overpowering to most of us, of seizing the very
first opportunity of earning a salary, however
small, simply because he had never earned anything
before, and allowed the notices to accumulate
upon one end of his mantelpiece.

Finally he had recourse to his old College
tutor, who advised him of a vacancy at Eaglescliffe,
a great public school in the west of England,
and by a timely private note to the Headmaster
secured his appointment.

Next morning Arthur Robinson received
from the directorate of the scholastic agency—the
existence of which he had almost forgotten—a
rapturous letter of congratulation, reminding
him that the Agency had sent him notice
of the vacancy upon a specified date, and delicately
intimating that their commission of five
per cent. upon the first year's salary was payable
on appointment. Arthur, who had long
since given up the task of breasting the Agency's
morning tide of desirable vacancies, mournfully[61]
investigated the heap upon the mantelpiece,
and found that the facts were as stated.
There lay the notice, sandwiched between a
document relating to the advantages to be derived
from joining the staff of a private school
in North Wales, where material prosperity was
guaranteed by a salary of eighty pounds per
annum, and social success by the prospect of
meat-tea with the Principal and his family; and
another, in which a clergyman (retired) required
a thoughtful and energetic assistant (one hundred
pounds a year, non-resident) to aid him in
the management of a small but select seminary
for backward and epileptic boys.

Arthur laid the matter before his tutor, who
informed him that he must pay up, and be a
little less casual in his habits in future. He
therefore wrote a reluctant cheque for ten
pounds, and having thus painfully imbibed the
first lesson that a schoolmaster must learn—namely,
the importance of attending to details—departed
to take up his appointment at
Eaglescliffe.

He arrived the day before term began, to
find that lodgings had been apportioned to him
at a house in the village, half a mile from the
School. His first evening was spent in making[62]
the place habitable. That is to say, he removed
a number of portraits of his landlady's relatives
from the walls and mantelpiece, and stored
them, together with a collection of Early Victorian
heirlooms—wool-mats and prism-laden
glass vases—in a cupboard under the window-seat.
In their place he set up fresh gods; innumerable
signed photographs of young men,
some in frames, some in rows along convenient
ledges, others bunched together in a sort of
wire entanglement much in vogue among the
undergraduates of that time. Some of these
photographs were mounted upon light-blue
mounts, and these were placed in the most conspicuous
position. Upon the walls he hung a
collection of framed groups of more young
men, with bare knees and severe expressions,
in some of which Arthur Robinson himself
figured.

After that, having written to his mother and
a girl in South Kensington, he walked up the
hill in the darkness to the Schoolhouse, where
he was to be received in audience by the Head.

The great man was sitting at ease before his
study fire, and exhibited unmistakable signs of
recent slumber.

"I want you to take Remove B, Robinson,"[63]
he said. "They are a mixed lot. About a quarter
of them are infant prodigies—Foundation
Scholars—who make this form their starting-point
for higher things; and the remainder are
centenarians, who regard Remove B as a sort
of scholastic Chelsea Hospital, and are fully
prepared to end their days there. Stir 'em up,
and don't let them intimidate the small boys into
a low standard of work. Their subjects this
term will be Cicero de Senectute and the Alcestis,
without choruses. Have you any theories
about the teaching of boys?"

"None whatever," replied Arthur Robinson
frankly.

"Good! There is only one way to teach
boys. Keep them in order: don't let them play
the fool or go to sleep; and they will be so
bored that they will work like niggers merely
to pass the time. That's education in a nutshell.
Good night!"

Next morning Arthur Robinson invested
himself in an extremely new B.A. gown, which
seemed very long and voluminous after the
tattered and attenuated garment which he had
worn at Cambridge—usually twisted into a
muffler round his neck—and walked up to[64]
School. (It was the last time he ever walked:
thereafter, for many years, he left five minutes
later, and ran.) Timidly he entered the Common
Room. It was full of masters, some twenty
or thirty of them, old, young, and middle-aged.
As many as possible were grouped round the
fire—not in the orderly, elegant fashion of
grown-up persons; but packed together right
inside the fender, with their backs against the
mantelpiece. Nearly everyone was talking,
and hardly anyone was listening to anyone
else. Two or three—portentously solemn elderly
men—were conferring darkly together
in a corner. Others were sitting upon the table
or arms of chairs, reading newspapers, mostly
aloud. No one took the slightest notice of Arthur
Robinson, who accordingly sidled into an
unoccupied corner and embarked upon a self-conscious
study of last term's time-table.

"I hear they have finished the new Squash
Courts," announced a big man who was almost
sitting upon the fire. "Take you on this afternoon,
Jacker?"

"Have you got a court?" inquired the gentleman
addressed.

"Not yet, but I will. Who is head of Games
this term?"

[65]

"Etherington major, I think."

"Good Lord! He can hardly read or write,
much less manage anything. I wonder why
boys always make a point of electing congenital
idiots to their responsible offices. Warwick,
isn't old Etherington in your House?"

"He is," replied Warwick, looking up from
a newspaper.

"Just tell him I want a Squash Court this
afternoon, will you?"

"I am not a District Messenger Boy," replied
Mr. Warwick coldly. Then he turned upon
a colleague who was attempting to read his
newspaper over his shoulder.

"Andrews," he said, "if you wish to read this
newspaper I shall be happy to hand it over to
you. If not, I shall be grateful if you will refrain
from masticating your surplus breakfast in my
right ear."

Mr. Andrews, scarlet with indignation, moved
huffily away, and the conversation continued.

"I doubt if you will get a court, Dumaresq,"
said another voice—a mild one. "I asked for
one after breakfast, and Etherington said they
were all bagged."

"Well, I call that the limit!" bellowed that
single-minded egotist, Mr. Dumaresq.[66]

"After all," drawled a supercilious man
sprawling across a chair, "the courts were built
for the boys, weren't they?"

"They may have been built for the boys,"
retorted Dumaresq with heat, "but they were
more than half paid for by the masters. So put
that in your pipe, friend Wellings, and——"

"Your trousers are beginning to smoke," interpolated
Wellings calmly. "You had better
come out of the fender for a bit and let me
in."

So the babble went on. To Arthur Robinson,
still nervously perusing the time-table, it all
sounded like an echo of the talk which had prevailed
in the Pupil Room at his own school
barely five years ago.

Presently a fresh-faced elderly man crossed
the room and tapped him on the shoulder.

"You must be Robinson," he said. "My
name is Pollard, also of St. Crispin's. Come and
dine with me to-night, and tell me how the old
College is getting on."

The ice broken, the grateful Arthur was introduced
to some of his colleagues, including
the Olympian Dumaresq, the sarcastic Wellings,
and the peppery Warwick. Next moment
a bell began to ring upon the other side of the[67]
quadrangle, as there was a general move for the
door.

Outside, Arthur Robinson encountered the
Head.

"Good morning, Mr. Robinson!" (It was a
little affectation of the Head's to address his
colleagues as 'Mr.' when in cap and gown: at
other times his key-note was informal bonhomie).
"Have you your form-room key?"

"Yes, I have."

"In that case I will introduce you to your
flock."

At the end of the Cloisters, outside the locked
door of Remove B, lounged some thirty young
gentlemen. At the sight of the Head these
ceased to lounge, and came to an attitude of uneasy
attention.

The door being opened, all filed demurely in
and took their seats, looking virtuously down
their noses. The Head addressed the intensely
respectable audience before him.

"This is Mr. Robinson," he said gruffly.
"Do what you can for him."

He nodded abruptly to Robinson, and left
the room.

As the door closed, the angel faces of Remove
B relaxed.[68]

"A-a-a-a-a-ah!" said everybody, with a sigh
of intense relief.

Let us follow the example of the Head, and
leave Arthur Robinson, for the present, to
struggle in deep and unfathomed waters.

NUMBER TWO THE EXPERTS

Mr. Dumaresq was reputed to
be the hardest slave-driver in Eaglescliffe. His
eyes were cold and china blue, and his voice
was like the neighing of a war-horse. He disapproved
of the system of locked form-rooms—it
wasted at least forty seconds, he said, getting
the boys in—so he made his head boy keep
the key and open the door the moment the
clock struck.

Consequently, when upon this particular
morning Mr. Dumaresq stormed into his room,
every boy was sitting at his desk.

"Greek prose scraps!" he roared, while still
ten yards from the door.

Instantly each boy seized a sheet of school
paper, and having torn it into four pieces selected
one of the pieces and waited, pen in
hand.

"If you do this," announced Mr. Dumaresq[69]
truculently, as he swung into the doorway,
"you will be wise."

Every boy began to scribble madly.

"If you do not do this," continued Mr. Dumaresq,
"you will not be wise. If you were to
do this you would be wise. If you were not to
do this you would not be wise. If you had done
this you would have been wise. If you had
not done this you would not have been wise.
Collect!"

The head boy sprang to his feet, and feverishly
dragging the scraps from under the hands
of his panting colleagues, laid them on the
master's desk. Like lightning Mr. Dumaresq
looked them over.

"Seven of you still ignorant of the construction
of the simplest conditional sentence!" he
bellowed. "Come in this afternoon!"

He tossed the papers back to the head boy.
Seven of them bore blue crosses, indicating an
error. There may have been more than one mistake
in the paper, but one was always enough
for Mr. Dumaresq.

"Now sit close!" he commanded.

"Sitting close" meant leaving comparatively
comfortable and secluded desks, and crowding
in a congested mass round the blackboard, in[70]
such wise that no eye could rove or mouth gape
without instant detection.

"Viva voce Latin Elegiacs!" announced Mr.
Dumaresq, with enormous enthusiasm. He declaimed
the opening couplet of an English lyric.
"Now throw that into Latin form. Adamson,
I'm speaking to you! Don't sit mooning
there, gaper. Think! Think!

Say something! Wake up! How are you going
to get over 'maypole'? No maypoles in Rome.
Tell him, somebody! 'Saturnalia'—not bad.
(Crabtree, stand up on the bench, and look at
me, not your boots.) Why won't 'Saturnalia'
do? Will it scan? Think! Come along, come
along!"

In this fashion he hounded his dazed pupils
through couplet after couplet, until the task
was finished. Then, dashing at the blackboard,
he obliterated the result of an hour's labour
with a sweep of the duster.

"Now go to your desks and write out a fair
copy," he roared savagely.

So effective were Mr. Dumaresq's methods
[71]
of inculcation that eighteen out of his thirty
boys succeeded in producing flawless fair copies.
The residue were ferociously bidden to an "extra"
after dinner. Mr. Dumaresq's "extras" were
famous. He held at least one every day, not
infrequently for the whole form. He possessed
the one priceless attribute of the teacher: he
never spared himself. Other masters would set
impositions or give a boy the lesson to write
out: Dumaresq, denying himself cricket or
squash, would come into his form-room and
wrestle with perspiring defaulters all during a
hot afternoon until the task was well and truly
done. Boys learned more from him in one term
than from any other master in a year; but their
days were but labour and sorrow. During the
previous term a certain particularly backward
member of his form had incurred some damage—to
wit, a fractured collar-bone—during the
course of a house-match. The pain was considerable,
and when dragged from the scrummage
he was in a half-fainting condition. He revived
as he was being carried to the Sanatorium.

"What's up?" he inquired mistily.

"Broken neck, inflammation of the lungs,
ringworm, and leprosy, old son," announced
one of his bearers promptly. "You are going to
[72]
the San."

"Good egg!" replied the injured warrior.
"I shall get off Dummy's extra after tea!"

Then with a contented sigh, he returned to
a state of coma.

By way of contrast, Mr. Cayley.

As Mr. Cayley approached his form-room,
which lay round a quiet corner, he was made
aware of the presence of his pupils by sounds
of turmoil; but being slightly deaf, took no
particular note of the fact. Presently he found
himself engulfed in a wave of boys, each of
whom insisted upon shaking him by the hand.
Some of them did so several times, but Mr.
Cayley, whom increasing years had rendered a
trifle dim-sighted, did not observe this. Cheerful
greetings fell pleasantly but confusedly upon
his ears.

"How do you do, sir? Welcome back to
another term of labour, sir! Very well, no thank
you! Stop shoving, there! Don't you see you
are molesting Mr. Methuselah Cayley, M.A.?
Permit me to open the door for you, sir! Now
then, all together! Use your feet a bit more in
the scrum!"

By this time the humorist of the party had
[73]
possessed himself of the key of the door; but
having previously stopped up the keyhole with
paper, was experiencing some difficulty in inserting
the key into the lock.

"Make haste, Woolley," said Mr. Cayley
gently.

"I fear the porter has inserted some obstruction
into the interstices of the aperture, sir,"
explained Master Woolley, in a loud and respectful
voice. "He bungs up the hole in the
holidays—to keep the bugs from getting in,"
he concluded less audibly.

"What was that, Woolley?" asked Mr. Cayley,
thinking he had not heard aright.

Master Woolley entered with relish upon
one of the standard pastimes of the Upper
Fourth.

"I said some good tugs would get us in, sir,"
he replied, raising his voice, and pulling paper
out of the lock with a buttonhook.

Mr. Cayley, who knew that his ears were as
untrustworthy as his eyes, but fondly imagined
that his secret was his own, now entered his
form-room upon the crest of a boisterous wave
composed of his pupils, who, having deposited
their preceptor upon his rostrum, settled down
in their places with much rattling of desks and
[74]
banging of books.

Mr. Cayley next proceeded to call for silence,
and when he thought he had succeeded,
said:

"As our new Latin subject books have not
yet been distributed, I shall set you a short passage
of unprepared translation this morning."

"Would it not be advisable, sir," suggested
the head boy—the Upper Fourth addressed
their master with a stilted and pedantic preciosity
of language which was an outrageous parody
of his own courtly and old-fashioned utterance—"to
take down our names and ages, as is
usually your custom at the outset of your infernal
havers?"

"Of what, Adams?"

"Of your termly labours, sir," said Adams,
raising his voice courteously.

Mr. Cayley acquiesced in this proposal, and
the form, putting their feet up on convenient
ledges and producing refreshment from the secret
recesses of their persons, proceeded to crack
nuts and jokes, while their instructor laboured
with studious politeness to extract from them information
as to their initials and length of days.
It was not too easy a task, for every boy in the
room was conversing, and not necessarily with
[75]
his next-door neighbour. Once a Liddell and
Scott lexicon (medium size) hurtled through
space and fell with a crash upon the floor.

Mr. Cayley looked up.

"Someone," he remarked with mild severity,
"is throwing india-rubber."

Name-taking finished, he made another attempt
to revert to the passage of unprepared
translation. But a small boy, with appealing
eyes and a wistful expression, rose from his seat
and timidly deposited a large and unclean object
upon Mr. Cayley's desk.

"I excavated this during the holidays, sir," he
explained; "and thinking it would interest you, I
made a point of preserving it for your inspection."

Instant silence fell upon the form. Skilfully
handled, this new diversion was good for quite
half an hour's waste of time.

"This is hardly the moment, Benton," replied
Mr. Cayley, "for a disquisition on geology,
but I appreciate your kindness in thinking
of me. I will examine this specimen this afternoon,
and classify it for you."

But Master Benton had no intention of permitting
this.

"Does it belong to the glacial period, sir?"
he inquired shyly. "I thought these marks
[76]
might have been caused by ice-pressure."

There was a faint chuckle at the back of the
room. It proceeded from the gentleman whose
knife Benton had borrowed ten minutes before
in order to furnish support for his glacial theory.

"It is impossible for me to say without my
magnifying-glass," replied Mr. Cayley, peering
myopically at the stone. "But from a cursory
inspection I should imagine this particular specimen
to be of an igneous nature. Where did you
get it?"

"In the neck!" volunteered a voice.

Master Benton, whose cervical vertebræ the
stone had nearly severed in the course of a
friendly interchange of missiles with a playmate
while walking up to school, hastened to cover
the interruption.

"Among the Champion Pills, sir," he announced
gravely.

"The Grampian Hills?" said Mr. Cayley,
greatly interested. He nodded his head. "That
may be so. Geologically speaking, some of
these hills were volcanoes yesterday."

"There was nothing about it in the Daily
Mail this morning," objected a voice from the
back benches.

"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Cayley, looking
[77]
up.

"It sounds like a fairy tale, sir," amended the
speaker.

"And so it is!" exclaimed Mr. Cayley, the
geologist in him aroused at last. "The whole
history of Nature is a fairy tale. Cast your minds
back for a thousand centuries." ...

The form accepted this invitation to the extent
of dismissing the passage of unprepared
translation from their thoughts for ever, and
settling down with a grateful sigh, began to
search their pockets for fresh provender. The
seraph-like Benton slipped back into his seat.
His mission was accomplished. The rest of the
hour was provided for.

Three times in the past five years Mr. Cayley's
colleagues had offered to present him
with a testimonial. He could never understand
why.

Mr. Bull was a young master, and an international
football-player. Being one of the few
members of the staff at Eaglescliffe who did not
possess a first-class degree, he had been entrusted
with the care of the most difficult form
in the school—the small boys, usually known
as The Nippers.

[78]
A small boy is as different from a middle-sized
boy as chalk from cheese. He possesses
none of the latter's curious dignity and self-consciousness.
He has the instincts of the puppy,
and appreciates being treated as such. That is
to say, he is physically incapable of sitting still
for more than fifteen minutes at a time; he is
never happy except in the company of a drove
of other small boys; and he is infinitely more
amenable to fortiter in re than to the suaviter
in modo where the enforcement of discipline
is concerned. Above all, he would rather have
his head smacked than be ignored.

Mr. Bull greeted his chattering flock with a
hearty roar of salutation, coupled with a brisk
command to them to get into their places and
be quick about it. He was answered by a shrill
and squeaky chorus, and having thrown open
the form-room door herded the whole swarm
within, assisting stragglers with a genial cuff or
two; the which, coming from so great a hero,
were duly cherished by their recipients as marks
of special favour.

Having duly posted up the names and tender
ages of his Nippers in his mark-book, Mr. Bull
announced:

"Now we must appoint the Cabinet Ministers
[79]
for the term."

Instantly there came a piping chorus.

"Please, sir, can I be Scavenger?"

"Please, sir, can I be Obliterator?"

"Please, sir, can I be Window-opener?"

"Please, sir, can I be Inkslinger?"

"Please, sir, can I be Coalheaver?"

"Shut up!" roared Mr. Bull, and the babble
was quelled instantly. "We will draw lots as
usual."

Lots were duly cast, and the names of the
fortunate announced. Mr. Bull was not a great
scholar: some of the "highbrow" members of
the Staff professed to despise his humble attainments.
But he understood the mind of extreme
youth. Tell a small boy to pick up waste-paper,
or fill an inkpot, or clean a blackboard, and he
will perform these acts of drudgery with natural
reluctance and shirk them when he can. But
appoint him Lord High Scavenger, or Lord
High Inkslinger, or Lord High Obliterator,
with sole right to perform these important duties
and power to eject usurpers, and he will value
and guard his privileges with all the earnestness
and tenacity of a permanent official.

Having arranged his executive staff to his
satisfaction, Mr. Bull announced:—

[80]
"We'll do a little English literature this
morning, and start fair on ordinary work this
afternoon. Sit absolutely still for ten minutes
while I read to you. Listen all the time, for I
shall question you when I have finished. After
that you shall question me—one question each,
and mind it is a sensible one. After that, a
breather; then you will write out in your own
words a summary of what I have read. Atten-shun!"

He read a hundred lines or so of The Passing
of Arthur, while the Nippers, restraining itching
hands and feet, sat motionless. Then followed
question time, which was a lively affair;
for questions mean marks, and Nippers will sell
their souls for marks. Suddenly Mr. Bull shut
the book with a snap.

"Out you get!" he said. "The usual run—round
the Founder's Oak and straight back.
And no yelling, mind! Remember, there are
others." He took out his watch. "I give you
one minute. Any boy taking longer will receive
five thousand lines and a public flogging.
Off!"

There was a sudden unheaval, a scuttle of
feet, and then solitude.

The last Nipper returned panting, with his
[81]
lungs full of oxygen and the fidgets shaken out
of him, within fifty-seven seconds, and the work
of the hour proceeded.

Each master had his own methods of maintaining
discipline. Mr. Wellings, for instance,
ruled entirely by the lash of his tongue. A
schoolboy can put up with stripes, and he rather
relishes abuse; but sarcasm withers him to the
marrow. In this respect Mr. Wellings' reputation
throughout the school—he was senior
mathematical master, and almost half the boys
passed through his hands—was that of a "chronic
blister."

Newcomers to his sets, who had hitherto regarded
the baiting of subject-masters as a mild
form of mental recuperation between two bouts
of the Classics, sometimes overlooked this fact.
If they had a reputation for lawlessness to keep
up they sometimes endeavoured to make themselves
obnoxious. They had short shrift.

"Let me see," Wellings would drawl, "I am
afraid I can't recall your name for the moment.
Have you a visiting card about you?"

Here the initiated would chuckle with anticipatory
relish, and the offender, a little taken
aback, would either glare defiantly or efface
[82]
himself behind his book.

"I am addressing you, sir—you in the back
bench, with the intelligent countenance and the
black-edged finger-nails," Wellings would continue
in silky tones. "I asked you a question
just now. Have you a visiting card about you?"

A thousand brilliant repartees would flash
through the brain of the obstreperous one. But
somehow, in Wellings' mild and apologetic presence,
they all seemed either irrelevant or fatuous.
He usually ended by growling, "No."

"Then what is your name—or possibly title?
Forgive me for not knowing."

"Corbett." It is extraordinary how ridiculous
one's surname always sounds when one is compelled
to announce it in public.

"Thank you. Will you kindly stand up, Mr.
Corbett, in order that we may study you in
greater detail?" (Mr. Wellings had an uncanny
knack of enlisting the rest of the form on his
side when he dealt with an offender of this
type.) "I must apologise for not having heard
of you before. Indeed, it is surprising that one
of your remarkable appearance should hitherto
have escaped my notice in my walks abroad.
The world knows nothing of its greatest men:
how true that is! However, this is no time for
[83]
moralising. What I wanted to bring to your
distinguished notice is this—that you must not
behave like a yahoo in my mathematical set.
During the past ten minutes you have kicked
one of your neighbours and cuffed another: you
have partaken of a good deal of unwholesome
and (as it came out of your pocket) probably
unclean refreshment; and you have indulged
in several childish and obscene gestures. These
daredevil exploits took place while I was writing
on the blackboard; but I think it only fair
to mention to you that I have eyes in the back
of my head—a fact upon which any member
of this set could have enlightened you. But
possibly they do not presume to address a person
of your eminence. I have no idea, of course,
with what class of society you are accustomed
to mingle; but here—here—that sort of thing
is simply not done, really! I am so sorry! But
the hour will soon be over, and then you can go
and have a nice game of shove-halfpenny, or
whatever your favourite sport is, in the gutter.
But at present I must ask you to curb your
natural instincts. That is all, thank you very
much. You may sit down now. Observe from
time to time the demeanour of your companions,
and endeavour to learn from them. They
[84]
do not possess your natural advantages in the
way of brains and beauty, but their manners
are better. Let us now resume our studies."

Mr. Wellings used to wonder plaintively in
the Common Room why his colleagues found
it necessary to set so many impositions.

Lastly, Mr. Klotz. Mr. Klotz may be described
as a Teutonic survival—a survival of
the days when it was de rigueur to have the
French language taught by a foreigner of some
kind. Not necessarily by a Frenchman—that
would have been pandering too slavishly to
Continental idiosyncrasy—but at least by some
one who could only speak broken English. Mr.
Klotz was a Prussian, so possessed all the
necessary qualifications.

His disciplinary methods were modelled
upon those of the Prussian Army, of which he
had been a distinguished ornament—a fact of
which he was fond of reminding his pupils, and
which had long been regarded by those guileless
infants as one of the most valuable weapons
in their armoury of time-wasting devices.

Mr. Klotz, not being a resident master, had
no special classroom or key: he merely visited
each form-room in turn. He expected to find
[85]
every boy in his seat ready for work upon his
arrival; and as he was accustomed to enforce
his decrees at the point of the bayonet—or its
scholastic equivalent—sharp scouts and reliable
sentries were invariably posted to herald
his approach.

Behold him this particular morning marching
into Remove A form-room, which was situated
at the top of a block of buildings on the
south side of the quadrangle, with the superb
assurance and grace of a Prussian subaltern
entering a beer-hall.

Having reached his desk, Mr. Klotz addressed
his pupils.

"He who rount the corner looked when op
the stairs I game," he announced, "efter lonch
goms he!"

The form, some of them still breathless from
their interrupted rag, merely looked down their
noses with an air of seraphic piety.

"Who was de boy who did dat?" pursued
Mr. Klotz.

No reply.

"Efter lonch," trumpeted Mr. Klotz, "goms
eferypoty!"

At once a boy rose in his place. His name
was Tomlinson.

[86]
"It was me, sir," he said.

"Efter lonch," announced Mr. Klotz, slightly
disappointed at being robbed of a holocaust,
"goms Tomleenson. I gif him irrecular
verps."

Two other boys rose promptly to their feet.
Their names were Pringle and Grant. They
had not actually given the alarm, but they
had passed it on.

"It was me too, sir," said each.

"Efter lonch," amended Mr. Klotz, "goms
Tomleenson, Brinkle, unt Grunt. Now I take
your names unt aitches."

This task accomplished, Mr. Klotz was upon
the point of taking up Chardenal's First French
Course, when a small boy with a winning manner
(which he wisely reserved for his dealings
with masters) said politely:—

"Won't you tell us about the Battle of Sedan,
sir, as this is the first day of term?"

The bait was graciously accepted, and for
the next hour Mr. Klotz ranged over the historic
battle-field. It appeared that he had been
personally responsible for the success of the
Prussian arms, and had been warmly thanked
for his services by the Emperor, Moltke, and
Bismarck.

[87]
"You liddle Engleesh boys," he concluded,
"you think your Army is great. In my gontry
it would be noding—noding! Take it away!
Vat battles has it fought, to compare——"

The answer came red-hot from thirty British
throats:

"Waterloo!" (There was no "sir" this time.)

"Vaterloo?" replied Mr. Klotz condescendingly.
"Yes. But vere would your Engleesh
army haf been at Vaterloo without Blucher?"
He puffed out his chest. "Tell me dat, Brinkle!"

"Blucher, sir?" replied Master Pringle deferentially.
"Who was he, sir?"

"You haf not heard of Blucher?" gasped Mr.
Klotz in genuine horror.

The form, who seldom encountered Mr.
Klotz without hearing of Blucher, shook their
heads with polite regret. Suddenly a hand shot
up. It was the hand of Master Tomlinson, who
it will be remembered had already burned his
boats for the afternoon.

"Do you mean Blutcher, sir?" he inquired.

"Blutcher? Himmel! Nein!" roared Mr.
Klotz. "I mean Blucher."

"I expect he was the same person, sir," said
Tomlinson soothingly. "I remember him now.
He was the Russian who——"

[88]
"Prussian!" yelled the infuriated Mr. Klotz.

"I beg your pardon, sir—Prussian. I thought
they were the same thing. He was the Prussian
general whom Lord Wellington was relying on
to back him up at Waterloo. But Blutcher—Blucher
lost his way—quite by accident, of
course—and did not reach the field until the
fight was over."

"He stopped to capture a brewery, sir, didn't
he?" queried Master Pringle, coming to his intrepid
colleague's assistance.

"It was bad luck his arriving late," added
Tomlinson, firing his last cartridge; "but he
managed to kill quite a lot of wounded."

Mr. Klotz had only one retort for enterprises
of this kind. He rose stertorously to his feet,
crossed the room, and grasping Master Tomlinson
by the ears, lifted him from his seat and
set him to stand in the middle of the floor. Then
he returned for Pringle.

"You stay dere," he announced to the pair,
"ontil the hour is op. Efter lonch——"

But in his peregrinations over the battlefield
of Sedan, Mr. Klotz had taken no note of
the flight of time. Even as he spoke, the clock
struck.

"The hour is up now, sir!" yelled the delighted
form.

And they dispersed with tumult, congratulating
Pringle and Tomlinson upon their pluck
and themselves upon a most profitable morning.

But it is a far cry to Sedan nowadays. The
race of Klotzes has perished, and their place is
occupied by muscular young Britons, who have
no reminiscences and whose pronunciation,
[91]
both of English and German, is easier to understand.

CHAPTER FOUR

[93]

BOYS

NUMBER I. THE GOVERNMENT

"There's your journey money,
Jackson. Good-bye, and a pleasant holiday!"

"Thank you, sir. The same to you!" replies
Jackson dutifully.

They shake hands, and the Housemaster
adds:—

"By the way, I shall want you to join the prefects
next term."

"Me, sir? Oh!"

"Yes. Endeavour to get accustomed to the
idea during the holidays. It will make a big
difference in your life here. I am not referring
merely to sausages for tea. Try and think out
all that it implies."

Then follows a brief homily. Jackson knows
it by heart, for it never varies, and he has heard
it quoted frequently, usually for purposes of
derision.

"The prefect in a public school occupies the
same position as the non-commissioned officer
in the Army. He is promoted from the ranks;
he enjoys privileges not available to his former
associates; and he is made responsible to those
[94]
above him not merely for his own good behaviour
but for that of others. Just as it would
be impossible to run an army without non-commissioned
officers, so it would be impossible,
under modern conditions, to run a public school
without prefects."

Jackson shifts his feet uneasily, after the immemorial
fashion of schoolboys undergoing a
"jaw."

"But I want to warn you of one or two
things," continues the wise old Housemaster.

Jackson looks up quickly. This part of the
exhortation is new. At least, he has never heard
it quoted.

"You will have certain privileges: don't abuse
them. You will have certain responsibilities:
don't shirk them. And above all, don't endeavour
to run with the hare and hunt with the
hounds. You will be strongly tempted to do so.
Your old associates will regard you with suspicion—even
distrust; and that will sting. In
your anxiety to show to them that your promotion
has not impaired your capacity for friendship,
you may be inclined to stretch the Law in
their favour from time to time, or even ignore it
altogether. On the other hand, you must beware
of over-officiousness towards those who are not
[95]
your friends. A little authority is a dangerous
thing. So walk warily at first. That's all. Good
night, old man."

They shook hands again, and Jackson returned
soberly to his study, which he shared
with his friend Blake. The two had entered
the School the same day: they had fought their
way up side by side from its lowest walks to a
position of comparative eminence; and their
friendship, though it contained no David and
Jonathan elements—very few schoolboy friendships
do—had survived the severe test of two
years of study-companionship. Jackson was
the better scholar, Blake the better athlete of
the two. Now, one was taken and the other left.

Blake, cramming miscellaneous possessions
into his grub-box in view of the early departure
on the morrow, looked up.

"Hallo!" he remarked. "You've been a long
time getting your journey-money. Did the old
Man try to cut you down?"

"No.... He says I'm to be a prefect next
term."

"Oh! Congratters!" said Blake awkwardly.

"Thanks. Has he made you one too?" asked
Jackson.

[96]
"No."

"Oh. What rot!"

Presently Jackson's oldest friend, after an
unhappy silence, rose and went out. He had
gone to join the proletariat round the Hall fire.
The worst of getting up in the world is that you
have to leave so many old comrades behind
you. And worse still, the comrades frequently
persist in believing that you are glad to do so.

Such is the cloak of Authority, as it feels to
a thoughtful and sensitive boy who assumes it
for the first time.

Of course there are others. Hulkins, for instance.
In his eyes the prefectorial system was
created for his express convenience and glorification.
He opens his study door and bawls:

"Fa-a-a-ag!"

A dozen come running. The last to arrive
is bidden to remove Hulkins' boots from his
feet and bring slippers. The residue have barely
returned to their noisy fireside when Hulkins'
voice is uplifted again. This time he requires
blotting-paper, and the last comer in the
panting crowd is sent into the next study to
purloin some. The rest have hardly regained
their fastness when there is a third disturbance,
[97]
and there is Hulkins howling like a lost soul for
matches. And so, with infinite uproar and waste
of labour, the great man's wants are supplied.
It does the fags no harm, but it is very, very bad
for Hulkins.

Frisby is another type. He is not afraid of
assuming responsibility. He is a typical new
broom. He dots the i's and crosses the t's of
all the tiresome little regulations in the House.
He sets impositions to small boys with great
profusion, and sees to it that they are shown
up punctually. If it is his turn to take roll-call,
he descends to the unsportsmanlike device of
waiting upon the very threshold of the Hall
until the clock strikes, and then coming in and
shutting the door with a triumphant bang in
the faces of those who had reckoned on the
usual thirty seconds' grace. He ferrets out the
misdemeanours of criminals of fourteen, and
gibbets them. He is terribly efficient—but his
vigilance and zeal stop suddenly short at the
prospect of a collision with any malefactor
more than five feet high.

Then there is Meakin. He receives his prefectship
with a sigh of relief. For four years he
has led a hunted and precarious existence in
the lower walks of the House. His high-spirited
[98]
playmates have made him a target for missiles,
derided his style of running, broken his
spectacles, raided his study, wrecked his collection
of beetles, and derived unfailing joy from
his fluent but impotent imprecations. Now, at
last, he sees peace ahead. He will be left to himself,
at any rate. They will not dare to rag a prefect
unless the prefect endeavours to exert his
authority unduly, and Meakin has no intention
whatever of doing that. To Frisby, Office is a
sharp two-edged sword; to Meakin, it is merely
a shield and buckler.

Then there is Flabb. He finds a prefect's lot
a very tolerable one. He fully appreciates the
fleshpots in the prefect's room; and he feels that
it is pleasant to have fags to whiten his cricket-boots
and make toast for his tea. He maintains
friendly relations with the rest of the House,
and treats small boys kindly. He performs his
mechanical duties—roll-call, supervision of
Prep, and the like—with as little friction as
possible. But he does not go out of his way to
quell riots or put down bullying; and when any
unpleasantness arises between the Prefects and
the House, Flabb effaces himself as completely
as possible.

Finally, there is Manby, the head of the
[99]
House. He is high up in the Sixth, and a good
all-round athlete. He weighs twelve stone ten,
and fears nothing—except a slow ball which
comes with the bowler's arm. To him government
comes easily. The House hangs upon his
lightest word, and his lieutenants go about their
business with assurance and despatch. He is a
born organiser and a natural disciplinarian. His
prestige overawes the unofficial aristocracy of
the House—always the most difficult section.
And he stands no nonsense. A Manby of my acquaintance
once came upon twenty-two young
gentlemen in a corner of the cricket-field, who,
having privily abandoned the orthodox game
arranged for their benefit that afternoon, were
indulging in a pleasant but demoralising pastime
known as "tip-and-run." Manby, addressing
them as "slack little swine, a disgrace to the
House," chastised them one by one, and next
half-holiday made them play tip-and-run under
a broiling sun and his personal supervision from
two o'clock till six.

A House with a Manby at the head of it is
safe. It can even survive a weak Housemaster.
Greater Britain is run almost entirely by Manbys.

[100]
Taking it all round, the prefectorial machine
works well. It is by no means perfect, but it is
infinitely more efficient than any other machine.
The chief bar to its smooth running is the inherent
loyalty of boys to one another and their
dislike of anything which savours of tale-bearing.
Schoolboys have no love for those who go
out of their way to support the arm of the Law,
and a prefect naturally shrinks from being
branded as a master's jackal. Hence, that ideal—a
perfect understanding between a Housemaster
and his prefects—is seldom achieved.
What usually happens is that when the Housemaster
is autocratically inclined he runs the
House himself, while the prefects are mere lay
figures; and when the Housemaster is weak or
indolent the prefects take the law into their own
hands and run the House, often extremely efficiently,
with as little reference to their titular
head as possible. He is a great Housemaster
who can co-operate closely with his prefects
without causing friction between the prefects
and the House, or the prefects and himself.

But sometimes an intolerable strain is thrown
upon the machine—or rather, upon the most
sensitive portions of it.

[101]
Look at this boy, standing uneasily at the
door of his study, with his fingers upon the
handle. Outside, in the passage, a riot is in progress.
It is only an ordinary exuberant "rag":
he himself has participated in many such. But
the Law enjoins that this particular passage
shall be kept perfectly quiet between the hours
of eight and nine in the evening; and it is this
boy's particular duty, as the only prefect resident
in the passage, to put the Law into effect.

He stands in the darkness of his study, nerving
himself. The crowd outside numbers ten
or twelve; but he is not in the least afraid of
that. This enterprise calls for a different kind
of courage, and a good deal of it. Jackson is not
a particularly prominent member of the House,
except by reason of his office: others far more
distinguished than himself are actually participating
in the disturbance outside. It will be of
no avail to emerge wrathfully and say: "Less
row, there!" He said that three nights ago.
Two nights ago he said it again, and threatened
reprisals. Last night he named various offenders
by name, and stated that if the offence
was repeated he would report them to the
Housemaster. To-night he has got to do it.
The revellers outside know this: the present
[102]
turmoil is practically a challenge. To crown all,
he can hear, above the din, in the very forefront
of battle, the voice of Blake, once his own
familiar friend.

With Blake Jackson had reasoned privily
only that afternoon, warning him that the House
would go to pot if its untitled aristocracy took
to inciting others, less noble, to deeds of lawlessness.
Blake had replied by recommending
his late crony to return to his study and boil his
head. And here he was, leading to-night's riot.

What will young Jackson do? Watch him
well, for from his action now you will be able to
forecast the whole of his future life.

He may remain mutely in his study, stop his
ears, and allow the storm to blow itself out. He
may appear before the roysterers and utter vain
repetitions, thereby salving his conscience without
saving his face. Or he may go out like a
man and fulfil his promise of last night. It
sounds simple enough on paper. But consider
what it means to a boy of seventeen, possessing
no sense of perspective to tone down the magnitude
of the disaster he is courting. Jackson
hesitates. Then, suddenly:

"I'll be damned if I take it lying down!" he
mutters.

[103]
He draws a deep breath, turns the handle,
and steps out. Next moment he is standing in
the centre of a silent and surly ring, jotting
down names.

"You five," he announces to a party of comparatively
youthful offenders, "can come to the
prefect's room after prayers and be tanned.
You three"—he indicates the incredulous
Blake and two burly satellites—"will have to
be reported. I'm sorry, but I gave you fair
warning last night."

He turns on his heel and departs in good
order to his study, branded—for life, he feels
convinced—as an officious busybody, a presumptuous
upstart, and worst of all, a betrayer
of old friends. He has of his own free will cast
himself into the nethermost Hell of the schoolboy—unpopularity—all
to keep his word.

And yet for acts of mere physical courage
they give men the Victoria Cross.

NUMBER II. THE OPPOSITION

To conduct the affairs of a nation requires
both a Government and an Opposition. So it
is with school politics. The only difference is
that the scholastic Opposition is much franker
[104]
about its true aims.

The average schoolboy, contemplating the
elaborate arrangements made by those in authority
for protecting him from himself—rules,
roll-calls, bounds, lock-ups, magisterial discipline
and prefectorial supervision—decides that
the ordering and management of the school can
be maintained without any active assistance
from him; and he plunges joyously into Opposition
with all the abandon of a good sportsman
who knows that the odds are heavily against
him. He breaks the Law, or is broken by the
Law, with equal cheerfulness.

The most powerful member of the Opposition
is the big boy who has not been made a
prefect, and is not likely to be made a prefect.
He enjoys many privileges—some of them
quite unauthorised—and has no responsibilities.
He is one of the happiest people in the
world. He has reached the age and status at
which corporal punishment is supposed to be
too degrading to be feasible: this immunity
causes him to realise that he is a personage of
some importance; and when he is addressed
rudely by junior form-masters he frequently
stands upon his dignity and speaks to his Housemaster
about it. His position in the House
depends firstly upon his athletic ability, and
[105]
secondly upon the calibre of the prefects. Given
a timid set of prefects, and an unquestioned
reputation in the football world, Master Bullock
has an extremely pleasant time of it. He
possesses no fags, but that does not worry him.
I once knew a potentate of this breed who improvised
a small gong out of the lid of a biscuit-tin,
which he hung in his study. When he beat
upon this with a tea-spoon, all within earshot
were expected to (and did) come running for
orders. Such as refrained were chastised with
a toasting-fork.

Then comes a great company of which the
House recks nothing, and of whom House history
has little to tell—the Cave-Dwellers, the
Swots, the Smugs, the Saps. These keep within
their own lurking-places, sedulously avoiding
the noisy conclaves which crowd sociably round
the Hall fire. For one thing, the conversation
there bores them intensely, and for another they
would seldom be permitted to join in it. The
rôle of Sir Oracle is strictly confined to the athletes
of the House, though the Wag and the
Oldest Inhabitant are usually permitted to offer
observations or swell the chorus. But the Cave-Dwellers,
never.

[106]
The curious part about it is that not by any
means all the Cave-Dwellers are "Swots." It
is popularly supposed that any boy who exhibits
a preference for the privacy of his study devotes
slavish attention therein to the evening's Prep,
thus stealing a march upon his more sociable
and less self-centred brethren. But this is far
from being the case. Many of the Cave-Dwellers
dwell in caves because they find it more pleasant
to read novels, or write letters, or develop photographs,
or even do nothing, than listen to stale
House gossip or indulge in everlasting small
cricket in a corridor.

They are often the salt of the House, but they
have no conception of the fact. They entertain
a low opinion of themselves: they never expect
to rise to any great position in the world: so they
philosophically follow their own bent, and leave
the glory and the praise to the athletes and their
umbræ. It comes as quite a shock to many of
them, when they leave school and emerge into
a larger world, to find themselves not only liked
but looked up to; while the heroes of their
schooldays, despite their hairy arms and club
ties, are now dismissed in a word as "hobbledehoys."

Then comes the Super-Intellectual—the
[107]
"Highbrow." He is a fish out of the water with
a vengeance, but he does exist at school—somehow.
He congregates in places of refuge with
others of the faith; and they discuss the English
Review, and mysterious individuals who are
only referred to by their initials—as G. B. S. and
G. K. C. Sometimes he initiates these discussions
because they really interest him, but more
often, it is to be feared, because they make him
feel superior and grown-up. Somewhere in the
school grounds certain youthful schoolmates of
his, inspired by precisely similar motives but
with different methods of procedure, are sitting
in the centre of a rhododendron bush smoking
cigarettes. In each case the idea is the same—namely,
a hankering after meats which are not
for babes. But the smoker puts on no side about
his achievements, whereas the "highbrow"
does. He loathes the vulgar herd and holds it
aloof. He does not inform the vulgar herd of
this fact, but he confides it to the other highbrows,
and they applaud his discrimination. Intellectual
snobbery is a rare thing among boys,
and therefore difficult to account for. Perhaps
the pose is a form of reaction. It is comforting,
for instance, after you have been compelled to
dance the can-can in your pyjamas for the delectation
[108]
of the Lower Dormitory, to foregather
next morning with a few kindred spirits and discourse
pityingly and scathingly upon the gross
philistinism of the lower middle classes.

No, the lot of the æsthete at school is not altogether
a happy one, but possibly his tribulations
are not without a certain beneficent effect.
When he goes up to Oxford or Cambridge he
will speedily find that in the tolerant atmosphere
of those intellectual centres the prig is
not merely permitted to walk the earth but to
flourish like the green bay-tree. Under the intoxicating
effects of this discovery the recollection
of the robust and primitive traditions of
his old School—and the old School's method
of instilling those traditions—may have a sobering
and steadying effect upon him. No man
ever developed his mind by neglecting his
body, and if the memory of a coarse and ruthless
school tradition can persuade the Super-Intellectual
to play hockey or go down to the
river after lunch, instead of sitting indoors
drinking liqueurs and discussing Maupassant
with a coterie of the elect, then the can-can in
the Lower Dormitory has not been danced altogether
in vain.

[109]
Then come the rank and file. There are many
types. There is the precocious type, marked
out for favourable notice by aptitude at games
and attractive manners. Such an one stands in
danger of being taken up by older boys than
himself; which means that he will suffer the fate
of all those who stray out of their proper station.
At first he will be an object of envy and dislike;
later, when his patrons have passed on elsewhere,
he may find himself friendless.

At the opposite end of the scale comes the
Butt. His life is a hard one, but not without its
compensations; for although he is the target of
all the practical humour in the House, his post
carries with it a certain celebrity; and at any
rate a Butt can never be unpopular. So he is
safe at least from the worst disaster that can befall
a schoolboy. Besides, you require a good
deal of character to be a Butt.

And there is the Buffoon. He is distinct from
the Butt, because a Butt is usually a Butt malgré
lui, owing to some peculiarity of appearance
or temperament; whereas the Buffoon is
one of those people who yearn for notice at any
price, and will sell their souls "to make fellows
laugh." You may behold him, the centre of a
grinning group, tormenting some shy or awkward
[110]
boy—very often the Butt himself; while
in school he is the bugbear of weak masters.
The larger his audience the more exuberant
he becomes: he reaches his zenith at a breaking-up
supper or in the back benches on Speech
Day. One is tempted to feel that when reduced
to his own society he must suffer severely from
depression.

Then there is the Man of the World. He is
a recognised authority on fast life in London
and Bohemian revels in Paris. He is a patron
of the drama, and a perfect mine of unreliable
information as to the private life of the originals
of the dazzling portraits which line his study—and
indeed half the studies in the House. The
picture-postcard, as an educative and refining
influence, has left an abiding mark upon the
youth of the present day. We of an older and
more rugged civilisation, who were young at a
period when actresses' photographs cost two
shillings each, were compelled in those days to
restrict our gallery of divinities to one or two
at the most. (Too often our collection was second-hand,
knocked down for sixpence at some
end-of-term auction, or reluctantly yielded in
composition for a long-outstanding debt by a
friend in the throes of a financial crisis.) But
[111]
nowadays, with the entire Gaiety chorus at a
penny apiece, the youthful connoisseur of female
beauty has emancipated himself from the pictorial
monogamy (or at the most, bigamy) of an
earlier generation. He is a polygamist, a pantheist.
He can erect an entire feminine Olympus
upon his mantelpiece for the sum of half-a-crown.
And yet, bless him, he is just as unsophisticated
as we used to be—no more and no
less. The type does not change.

Lastly, comes the little boy—the Squeaker,
the Tadpole, the Nipper, what you will. His
chief characteristic is terrific but short-lived
enthusiasm for everything he undertakes, be
it work, play, a friendship, or a private vendetta.

He begins by taking education very seriously.
He is immensely proud of his first set of
books, and writes his name on nearly every
page, accompanied by metrical warnings to intending
purloiners. He equips himself with a
perfect arsenal of fountain-pens, rubber stamps,
blue pencils, and ink-erasers. He starts a private
mark-book of his own, to check possible
carelessness or dishonesty on the part of his
form-master. Then he gets to work, with his
books disposed around him and his fountain-pen
[112]
playing all over his manuscript. By the
end of a fortnight he has lost all his books, and
having broken his fountain-pen, is detected in
a pathetic attempt to write his exercise upon a
sheet of borrowed paper with a rusty nib held
in his fingers or stuck into a splinter from off
the floor.

It is the same with games. Set a company
of small boys to play cricket, and their solemnity
at the start is almost painful. Return in half
an hour, and you will find that the stately contest
has resolved itself into a reproduction of
the parrot-house at the Zoo, the point at issue
being a doubtful decision of the umpire's.
Under the somewhat confiding arrangement
which obtains in Lower School cricket, the umpire
for the moment is the gentleman whose
turn it is to bat next; so litigation is frequent.
Screams of "Get out!" "Stay in!" "Cads!"
"Liars!" rend the air, until a big boy or a master
strolls over and quells the riot.

The small boy's friendships, too, are of a
violent but ephemeral nature. But his outstanding
characteristic is a passion for organising
secret societies of the most desperate and
mysterious character, all of which come speedily
to a violent or humiliating dissolution.

[113]
I was once privileged to be introduced into
the inner workings of a society called "The
Anarchists." It was not a very original title,
but it served its time, for the days of the Society
were few and evil. Its aims were sanguinary
and nebulous; the Rules consisted almost entirely
of a list of the penalties to be inflicted
upon those who transgressed them. For instance,
under Rule XXIV any one who broke
Rule XVII was compelled to sit down for five
minutes upon a chair into the seat of which a
pot of jam had been emptied. (Economists will
be relieved to hear that the jam was afterwards
eaten by the executioners, the criminal being
very properly barred from participating.)

The Anarchists had a private code of signals
with which to communicate with one another
in the presence of outsiders—in Prep, for
instance. The code was simplicity itself. A
single tap with a pencil upon the table denoted
the letter A; two taps, B; and so on. As may
be imagined, Y and Z involved much mental
strain; and as the transmitter of the message
invariably lost count after fourteen or fifteen
taps, and began all over again without any
attempt either at explanation or apology, the
gentleman who was acting as receiver usually
[114]
found the task of decoding his signals a matter
of extreme difficulty and some exasperation.
Before the tangle could be straightened out a
prefect inevitably swooped down and awarded
both signallers fifty lines for creating a disturbance
in Preparation.

However, the Anarchists, though they finished
after the manner of their kind, did not
slip into oblivion so noiselessly as some of their
predecessors. In fact, nothing in their inky
and jabbering life became them like their leaving
of it.

One evening the entire brotherhood—there
were about seven of them—were assembled in
a study which would have held four comfortably,
engaged in passing a vote of censure upon
one Horace Bull, B.A., their form-master.
Little though he knew it, Bull had been a
marked man for some weeks. The Czar of all
the Russias himself could hardly have occupied
a more prominent position in the black books
of Anarchy in general. To-day he had taken a
step nearer his doom by clouting one Nixon
minor, Vice-President of the Anarchists, on the
side of the head.

It was during the geography hour. Mr. Bull
had asked Nixon to define a watershed. Nixon,
[115]
who upon the previous evening had been too
much occupied with his duties as Vice-President
of the Anarchists to do much Prep, had
replied with a seraphic smile that a watershed
was "a place to shelter from the rain." As an
improvised effort the answer seemed to him an
extremely good one; but Mr. Bull had promptly
left his seat, addressed Nixon as a "cheeky
little hound," and committed the assault complained
of.

"This sort of thing," observed Rumford
tertius, the President, "can't go on. What shall
we do?"

"We might saw one of the legs of his chair
through," suggested one of the members.

"Who's going to do it?" inquired the President.
"We'll only get slain."

Silence fell, as it usually does when the question
of belling the cat arrives at the practical
stage.

"We could report him to the Head," said
another voice. "We might get him the sack for
assault—even quod! We could show Nixon's
head to him. It would be a sound scheme to
make it bleed a bit before we took him up."

The speaker fingered a heavy ruler lovingly,
but Mr. Nixon edged coldly out of reach.

[116]
"Certainly," agreed the President, "Bashan
ought to be stopped knocking us about in
form."

"I'd rather have one clout over the earhole,"
observed an Anarchist who so far had not
spoken, "than be taken along to Bashan's study
and given six of the best. That is what the result
would be. Hallo, Stinker, what's that?"

The gentleman addressed—a morose, unclean,
and spectacled youth of scientific proclivities—was
the latest recruit to the gang. He
had been admitted at the instance of Master
Nixon, who had pointed out that it would be a
good thing to enrol as a member some one who
understood "Chemistry and Stinks generally."
He could be used for the manufacture of bombs,
and so on.

Stinker had produced from his pocket a
corked test-tube, tightly packed with some dark
substance.

"What's that?" inquired the Anarchists in
chorus. (They nearly always talked in chorus.)

"It's a new kind of explosive," replied the inventor
with great pride.

"I hope it's better than that new kind of
stinkpot you invented for choir-practice," remarked
a cynic from the corner of the study.
[117]
"That was a rotten fraud, if you like! It smelt
more like lily-of-the-valley than any decent
stink."

"Dry up, Ashley minor!" rejoined the inventor
indignantly. "This is a jolly good bomb.
I made it to-day in the Lab, while The Badger
was trying to put out a bonfire at the other
end."

"Where does the patent come in?" inquired
the President judicially.

"The patent is that it doesn't go off all at
once."

"We know that!" observed the unbelieving
Ashley.

"Do you chuck it or light it?" asked Nixon.

"You light it. At least, you shove it into the
fire, and it goes off in about ten minutes. You
see the idea? If Bashan doesn't see us put anything
into the form-room fire, he will think it
was something wrong with the coal."

The Anarchists, much interested, murmured
approval.

"Good egg!" observed the President. "We'll
put it into the fire to-morrow morning before he
comes in, and after we have been at work ten
minutes or so the thing will go off and blow the
whole place to smithereens."

[118]
"Golly!" gobbled the Anarchists.

"What about us, Stinker?" inquired a cautious
conspirator. "Shan't we get damaged?"

Stinker waved away the objection.

"We shall know it's coming," he said; "so
we shall be able to dodge. But it will be a nasty
jar for Bashan."

There was a silence, full of rapt contemplation
of to-morrow morning. Then the discordant
voice of Ashley minor broke in.

"I don't believe it will work. All your inventions
are putrid, Stinker."

"I'll fight you!" squealed the outraged scientist,
bounding to his feet.

"I expect it'll turn out to be a fire-extinguisher,
or something like that," pursued the
truculent Ashley.

"Hold the bomb," said Stinker to the President,
"while I——"

"Sit down," urged the other Anarchists,
drawing in their toes. "There's no room here.
Ashley minor, chuck it!"

"It won't work," muttered Ashley doggedly.

Suddenly a brilliant idea came upon Stinker.

"Won't work, won't it?" he screamed. "All
right, then! We'll shove it into this fire now, and
you see if it doesn't work!"

[119]
Among properly constituted Anarchistic
Societies it is not customary, when the efficacy
of a bomb is in dispute, to employ the members
as a corpus vile. But the young do not fetter
themselves with red-tape of this kind. With one
accord Stinker's suggestion was acclaimed, and
the bomb was thrust into the glowing coals of
Rumford's study fire. The brotherhood, herded
together within a few feet of the grate—the apartment
measured seven feet by six—breathed
hard and waited expectantly.

Five minutes passed—then ten.

"It ought to be pretty ripe now," said the inventor
anxiously.

The President, who was sitting next the window,
prudently muffled his features in the curtain.
The others drew back as far as they could—about
six inches—and waited.

Nothing happened.

"I am sure it will work all right," declared
the inventor desperately. "Perhaps the temperature
of this fire——"

He knelt down, and began to blow upon the
flickering coals. There was a long and triumphant
sniff from Master Ashley.

"I said it was only a rotten stinkp—" he began.

[120]
BANG!

There is a special department of Providence
which watches over the youthful chemist. The
explosion killed no one, though it blew the
coals out of the grate and the pictures off the
walls.

The person who suffered most was the inventor.
He was led, howling but triumphant,
to the Sanatorium.

"Luckily, sir," explained Rumford to Mr.
Bull a few days later, in answer to a kindly
inquiry as to the extent of the patient's injuries,
"it was only his face."

[121]

CHAPTER FIVE

[123]

THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE

I

One of the most pathetic
spectacles in the world is that of grown-up persons
legislating for the young. Listening to
these, we are led to suspect that a certain section
of the human race—the legislative section—must
have been born into the world aged
about forty, sublimely ignorant of the requirements,
limitations, and point of view of infancy
and adolescence.

In what attitude does the ordinary educational
expert approach educational problems?
This question induces another. What is an educational
expert?

The answer is simple. Practically everybody.

All parents are educational experts: we have
only to listen to a new boy's mother laying
down to a Headmaster the lines upon which
his school should be conducted to realise that.
So are all politicians: we discover this fact by
following the debates in the House of Commons.
So are the clergy; for they themselves
have told us so. So, presumably, are the writers
of manuals and text-books. So are the dear old
[124]
gentlemen who come down to present prizes
upon Speech Day. Practically the only section
of humanity to whom the title is denied are the
people who have to teach. It is universally admitted
by the experts—it is their sole point of
agreement—that no schoolmaster is capable of
forming a correct judgment of the educational
needs of his charges. He is hidebound,
"groovy"; he cannot break away from tradition.

"What can you expect from a tripe-dresser,"
inquire the experts in chorus, "but a eulogy of
the stereotyped method of dressing tripe?"

So, ignoring the teacher, the experts lay their
heads—one had almost said their loggerheads—together,
and evolve terrific schemes of education.
Each section sets about its task in characteristic
fashion. The politician, with his natural
acumen, gets down to essentials at once.

"The electorate of this country," he says to
himself, "do not care one farthing dip about
Education as such. Now, how can we galvanise
Education into a vote-catching machine?"

He reflects.

"Ah! I have it!" he cries presently. "Religion!
That'll ginger them up!"

So presently an Education Bill is introduced
into the House of Commons. Nine out of its
[125]
ten clauses deal purely with educational matters
and are passed without a division; and the intellectual
teeth of the House fasten greedily upon
Clause Number Ten, which deals with the half-hour
per day which is to be set aside for religious
instruction. The question arises: What attitude
are the youth of the country to be taught
to adopt towards their Maker? Are they to
praise Him from a printed page, or merely listen
to their teacher doing so out of his own head?
Are they to learn the Catechism? Is the Lord's
Prayer to be regarded as an Anglican or Nonconformist
orison?

Everybody is most conciliatory at first.

"A short passage of Scripture," suggest the
Anglicans; "a Collect, mayhap; and a few words
of helpful instruction—eh? Something quite
simple and non-contentious, like that?"

"We are afraid that that is sectarian religion,"
object the Nonconformists. "A simple chapter
from the Bible, certainly—maybe a hymn. But
no dogmatic teaching, if you please!"

"But that is no religion at all!" explain the
Anglicans, with that quickness to appreciate
another's point of view which has always distinguished
the Church of England.

After a little further unpleasantness all round,
[126]
a deadlock is reached. Then, with that magnificent
instinct for compromise which characterises
British statesmanship, another suggestion
is put forward. Why not permit all the clergy of
the various denominations to enter the School
and minister to the requirements of their various
young disciples? "An admirable notion,"
says everybody. But difficulties arise. Are this
heavenly host to be admitted one by one, or in
a body? If the former, how long will it take to
work through the entire rota, and when will the
ordinary work of the day be expected to begin?
If the latter, is the School to be divided, for
devotional purposes, into spiritual water-tight
compartments by an arrangement of movable
screens, or what? So the battle goes on. By this
time, as the astute politician has foreseen, every
one has forgotten that this is an Education Bill,
and both sides are hard at work manufacturing
party capital out of John Bull's religious susceptibilities.
Presently the venue is shifted to
the country, where the electorate are asked upon
a thousand platforms if the Church which inaugurated
Education in our land, and built most
of the schools, is to be ousted from her ancient
sphere of beneficent activity; and upon a thousand
more, whether the will of the People or the
[127]
Peers is to prevail. (It simplifies politics very
greatly to select a good reliable shibboleth and
employ it on all occasions.) Finally the Bill is
thrown out or talked out, and the first nine
clauses perish with it.

That is the political and clerical way of dealing
with Education. The parent's way we will
set forth in another place.

The writer of manuals and text-books concerns
himself chiefly with the right method of
unfolding his subject to the eager eyes of the
expectant pupil. "There is a right way and a
wrong way," he is careful to explain; "and if
you present your subject in the wrong way the
pupil will derive no educational benefit from it
whatever." At present there is a great craze
for what is known as "practical" teaching. For
instance, in our youth we were informed, ad
nauseam, that there is a certain fixed relation
between the circumference of a circle and its
diameter, the relation being expressed by a
mysterious Greek symbol pronounced "pie."
The modern expert scouts this system altogether.
No imaginary pie for him! He is a practical
man.

Take several ordinary tin canisters, he commands,
a piece of string, and a ruler; and without
[128]
any other aids ascertain the circumference
and diameter of these canisters. Work out in
each case the numerical relation between the circumference
and diameter. What conclusion do
you draw from the result?

We can only draw one, and that is that no
man who has never been a boy should be permitted
to write books of instruction for the
young. For what would the "result" be? Imagine
a company of some thirty or forty healthy
happy boys, each supplied gratuitously with
several tin canisters and a ruler, set down for
the space of an hour and practically challenged
to create a riot. Alexander's Rag-Time Band
would be simply nowhere!

As for the last gang of experts—the dear old
gentlemen who come down to give away prizes
on Speech Day—they do not differ much as a
class. They invariably begin by expressing a
wish that they had enjoyed such educational
facilities as these in their young days.

"You live in a palace, boys!" announces the
old gentleman. "I envy you." (Murmurs of
"Liar!" from the very back row.)

After that the speaker communicates to his
audience a discovery which has been communicated
to the same audience by different speakers
[129]
since the foundation of the School—to this
effect, that Education (derivation given here,
with a false quantity thrown in) is a "drawing
out" and not a "putting-in." Why this fact
should so greatly excite Speech Day orators is
not known, but they seldom fail to proclaim it
with intense and parental enthusiasm. Then,
after a few apposite remarks upon the subject
of mens sana in corpore sano—a flight of originality
received with murmurs of anguish by
his experienced young hearers—the old gentleman
concludes with a word of comfort to "the
less successful scholars." It is a physical impossibility,
he points out, when there is only
one prize, for all the boys in the class to win it;
and adds that his experience of life has been
that not every boy who wins prizes at school
becomes Prime Minister in after years. All of
which is very helpful and illuminating, but does
not solve the problem of Education to any great
extent.

So much for the experts. Their name is Legion,
for they are many, and they speak with
various and dissonant voices. But they have
one thing in common. All their schemes of education
are founded upon the same amazing
fallacy—namely, that a British schoolboy is a
[130]
person who desires to be instructed. That is
the rock upon which they all split. That is why
it was suggested earlier in these pages that educational
experts are all born grown-up.

Let us clear our minds upon this point once
and for all. In nine cases out of ten a schoolmaster's
task is not to bring light to the path of
an eager, groping disciple, but to drag a reluctant
and refractory young animal up the slopes
of Parnassus by the scruff of his neck. The
schoolboy's point of view is perfectly reasonable
and intelligible. "I am lazy and scatterbrained,"
he says in effect. "I have not as yet
developed the power of concentration, and I
have no love of knowledge for its own sake.
Still, I have no rooted objection to education,
as such, and I suppose I must learn something
in order to earn a living. But I am much too
busy, as a growing animal, to have any energy
left for intellectual enterprise. It is the business
of my teacher to teach me. To put the matter
coarsely, he is paid for it. I shall not offer him
effusive assistance in his labours, but if he succeeds
in keeping me up to the collar against my
will, I shall respect him for it. If he does not, I
shall take full advantage of the circumstance."

That is the immemorial attitude of the growing
[131]
boy. When he stops growing, conscience
and character begin to develop, and he works
because he feels he ought to or because he has
got into the habit of doing so, and not merely
because he must. But until he reaches that age
it is foolish to frame theories of education based
upon the idea that a boy is a person anxious to
be educated.

Let us see how such a theory works, say, in
the School laboratory. A system which will extract
successful results from a class of boys engaged
in practical chemistry will stand any test
we care to apply to it. Successful supervision
of School science is the most ticklish business
that a master can be called upon to undertake.
We will follow our friend Brown minor to the
laboratory, and witness him at his labours.

He takes his place at the working bench, and
sets out his apparatus—test-tubes, beakers, and
crucibles. He lights all the bunsen burners
within reach. Presently he is provided with a
sample of some crystalline substance and bidden
to ascertain its chemical composition.

"How shall I begin, sir?" he asks respectfully.

"Apply the usual tests: I told you about them
yesterday in the lecture-room. Take small portions
[132]
of the substance: ascertain if they are soluble.
Observe their effect on litmus. Test them
with acid, and note whether a gas is evolved.
And so on. That will keep you going for the
present. I'll come round to you again presently."

And off goes the busy master to help another
young scientist in distress.

Brown minor gets to work. He takes a portion
of the crystalline substance and heats it
red-hot, in the hope that it will explode; and
treats another with concentrated sulphuric acid
in order to stimulate it into some interesting
performance. At the same time he maintains a
running fire of sotto voce conversation and chaff
with his neighbours—a laboratory offers opportunities
for social intercourse undreamed of in
a form-room—and occasionally leaves his own
task in order to assist, or more often to impede,
the labours of another. When he returns to his
place he not infrequently finds that his last decoction
(containing the balance of the crystalline
substance) has boiled over, and is now lying
in a simmering pool upon the bench, or that
another chemist has called and appropriated
the vessel in which the experiment was proceeding,
emptying its contents down the sink.
Not a whit disturbed, he fills up the time with
[133]
some work of independent research, such as
the manufacture of a Roman candle or the preparation
of a sample of nitro-glycerine. At the
end of the hour he reports progress to his instructor,
expressing polite regret at having
failed as yet to solve the riddle of the crystalline
substance; and returns whistling to his
form-room, where he jeers at those of his companions
who have spent the morning composing
Latin Verses.

No, it is a mistake to imagine that the young
of the human animal hungers and thirsts after
knowledge.

Arthur Robinson, B.A., of whom previous
mention has been made, soon discovered this
fact; or rather, soon recognised it; for he was
not much more than a boy himself. He was an
observant and efficient young man, and presently
he made further discoveries.

The first was that boys, for teaching purposes,
can be divided into three classes:

(A) Boys whose conduct is uniformly good,
and whose industry is continuous. Say fifteen
per cent.

For example, Master Mole. He was invariably
punctual; his work was always well prepared;
[134]
and he endured a good deal of what
toilers in another walk of life term "peaceful
picketing" for contravening one of the fundamental
laws of schoolboy trades-unionism by
continuing to work when the master was out of
the room.

(B) Boys whose conduct is uniformly good—except
perhaps in the matter of surreptitious
refreshment—but who will only work so long
as they are watched. Say sixty per cent.

Such a one was Master Gibbs. By long practice
he had acquired the art of looking supremely
alert and attentive when in reality his
thoughts were at the back of beyond. When
engaged in writing work his pen would move
across the page with mechanical regularity,
what time both eyes were fixed upon a page
torn from a comic paper and secreted under his
manuscript. He gave no trouble whatever, but
was a thorn in the flesh of any conscientious
teacher.

(C) Boys who are not only idle, but mischievous.
Say twenty-five per cent.

There was Page, whose special line was the
composition of comic answers to questions.
Some of his efforts were really praiseworthy;
but like all adventurous spirits he went too far
[135]
at last. The rod descended upon the day when
he translated cæruleæ puppes "Skye terriers";
and thereafter Master Page joked no more.
But it was a privation for both boy and master.

Then there was Chugleigh, whose strong
suit was losing books. He was a vigorous and
muscular youth, more than a little suspected of
being a bully; but he appeared to be quite incapable
of protecting his own property. Sometimes
he grew quite pathetic about it. He gave
Mr. Robinson to understand, almost with tears,
that his books were at the mercy of any small
boy who cared to snatch them from him. Certainly
he never had any in form.

"I see you require State protection," said
Arthur Robinson one morning, when Chugleigh
put in an appearance without a single
book of any kind, charged with a rambling
legend about his locker and a thief in the night.
He scribbled an order. "Take this to the librarian,
and get a set of new books."

Mr. Chugleigh, much gratified—the new
books would be paid for by an unsuspicious
parent and could be sold second-hand at the
end of the term—departed, presently to return
with five new volumes under his arm.

"Write your name in them all," said Mr.
[136]
Robinson briskly.

Chugleigh obeyed, as slowly as possible.

"Now bring all the books here."

Chugleigh did so, a little puzzled.

"For the future," announced Mr. Robinson,
unmasking his batteries, "in order to give you
a fair chance in this dishonest world, you shall
have two sets of the books in use in this form.
I will keep one set for you. The others you
may keep or lose as you like, but whenever you
turn up here without a book I shall be happy to
hire you out the necessary duplicates, at a
charge of threepence per book per hour. This
morning you will require a Cæsar, a grammar,
and a Latin Prose book. That will be ninepence.
Will you pay cash, or shall I knock it
off your pocket-money at the end of the week?"

He locked up the remaining two books in
his desk, and the demoralised Chugleigh resumed
his seat amid loud laughter.

II

The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit of
other precious things in life, occasionally leads
its votaries into tortuous ways. Cribbing, for
instance.

[137]
All boys crib more or less. It is not suggested
that the more sinful forms of this species of
self-help are universal, or even common. But
the milder variations are practised by all, with
the possible exception of the virtuous fifteen
per cent. previously mentioned.

The average boy's attitude towards cribbing
is precisely the same as his attitude towards
other types of misdemeanour: that is to say, he
regards it as one of these things which is perfectly
justifiable if his form-master is such a
weakling as to permit it. It is all part of the eternal
duel between the teacher and the taught.

"Do I scribble English words in the margin
of my Xenophon?" asks the boy. "Certainly.
Do I surreptitiously produce loose pages of
Euclid from my pocket and copy them out,
when I am really supposed to have learned
them by heart? Of course. Why should I,
through sheer excess of virtue, handicap myself
in the race to escape the punishment of failure,
simply because the highly qualified expert
who is paid to supervise my movements fails in
his plain duty?"

So he cribs.

But his attitude towards the matter is quite
consistent, for when he rises to a position of
[138]
trust and authority in the school, he ceases to
crib—at least flagrantly. The reason is that he
is responsible now not so much to a master as
to his own sense of right and wrong; and he
has made the discovery which all of us make in
the end—that the little finger of our conscience
is often thicker than the hardest taskmaster's
loins.

There are two forms of cribbing, and school
opinion differentiates very sharply between
them. There is cribbing to gain marks, and
there is cribbing to save trouble or avoid punishment.
The average boy, who is in the main
an honest individual, holds aloof from the former
practice because he feels that it is unsportsmanlike—rather
like stealing, in fact; but he
usually acquiesces without a struggle in the
conveniences offered by the second. For instance,
he refrains from furtively copying from
his neighbour, for he regards that as the meanest
kind of brain-sucking. (If the neighbour
pushes his paper towards him with a friendly
smile, that of course is a different matter.) But
he is greatly addicted to a more venial crime
known as "paving." The paver prepares his
translation in the orthodox manner, but whenever
he has occasion to look up a word in a lexicon
[139]
he scribbles its meaning in the margin of
the text, or, more frequently, just over the word
itself, to guard against loss of memory on the
morrow.

Much less common is the actual use of cribs—the
publications of the eminent house of
Bohn, and other firms of less reliability and
repute. Most boys have sufficient honesty and
common sense to realise that getting up work
with a translation is an unprofitable business,
though at the same time they are often unable
to resist the attractions of such labour-saving
appliances. Their excuse is always the same,
and it is not a bad one.

"If the School Library," they say, "contains
Jowett's Thucydides and Jebb's Sophocles for
all the Sixth to consult, why should not we, in
our humbler walk of scholarship, avail ourselves
of the occasional assistance of Kiddem's Keys
to the Classics?"

So much for the casual cribber. The professional—the
chronic—exercises an ingenuity,
and devotes an amount of time and labour to
the perfecting of his craft which, if applied directly
to his allotted task, would bring him out
at the top of his form. In a little periodical entitled
The Light Green, published in Cambridge
[140]
thirty years ago by a young Johnian named
Hilton (who might have rivalled Calverley
himself had he lived to maturity), we have a brilliant
little portrait of the professional cribber,
executed in the style of The Heathen Chinee. It
is called The Heathen Passee.

In the crown of his cap

Were the Furies and Fates,

And an elegant map

Of the Dorian States:

And we found in his palms, which were hollow,

What are common in palms—that is dates.

But he is a rare bird, the confirmed cribber,
with his algebraical formulæ written on his
finger-nails, and history notes attached to
unreliable elastic arrangements which shoot up
his sleeve out of reach at critical moments. The
ordinary boy does not crib unless he is pressed
for time or in danger of summary execution.
He usually limits his enterprises to co-operative
preparation—that is to say, the splitting up
an evening's work into sections, each section
being prepared by one boy and translated to
the other members of the syndicate afterwards—to
the gleaning of discarded lines and superfluous
tags from the rough copies of cleverer
boys' Latin Verses, and to the acceptance of a[141]
whispered "prompt" from a good Samaritan
when badly cornered by a question.

But we may note that cribbing is not confined
to schoolboys. The full perfection of the art
is only attained in the pass-examinations of the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Then
all considerations of conscience or sportsmanship
are flung aside, and the cribber cribs, not
to gain distinction or outstrip his rivals, but to
get over a troublesome fence by hook or crook
and have done with it. There was once a Freshman
at Cambridge whose name began with M.
This accident of nomenclature placed him during
his Little Go examination in the next seat
to a burly young man whom he recognised with
a thrill of awe as the President of the C.U.B.C.,
whose devotion to aquatic sports had so far
prevented him from clearing the academic fence
just mentioned, and who now, at the beginning
of his third year, was entering, in company with
a collection of pink-faced youths fresh from
school, upon his ninth attempt to satisfy the
examiners in Part One of the Previous Examination.

Our friend, having completed his first paper,
quitted the Senate House and returned to his
rooms, to fortify himself with luncheon before[142]
the next. During the progress of that meal a
strange gyp called upon him, and proffered a
note, mysteriously.

"From Mr. M——, sir," he said, mentioning
the name of the Freshman's exalted neighbour
in the examination room.

The Freshman opened the note with trembling
fingers. Was it possible that he had been
singled out as a likely oar already?

The note was brief, but to the point. It said:

"Dere Sir,

Please write larger.

Yours truly,

J. M——."

III

However, this is a digression. Let us return
for the last time to Arthur Robinson's three
divisions of youthful humanity. Class A he
found extraordinarily dull. They required little
instruction and no supervision; in fact, they
were self-educators of the most automatic type.
Class B were a perpetual weariness to the flesh.
They gave no trouble, but their apathy was appalling.
However, a certain amount of entertainment
could be extracted from studying their[143]
methods of evading work or supplying themselves
with refreshment. There was the ingenious
device of Master Jobling, for instance. Mr.
Robinson noted that this youth was in the
habit, during lecture-time, of sitting with his
elbows resting on his desk and his chin buried
in his hands, his mouth, or a corner thereof, being
covered by his fingers. His attitude was one
of rapt attention, and his eyes were fixed unwinkingly
upon the lecturer. Such virtue, coming
from Master Jobling, roused unworthy suspicions
in the breast of Arthur Robinson. He
observed that although the youth's attitude was
one of rigid immobility, his facial muscles were
agitated from time to time by a slight convulsive
movement. Accordingly, one day, he stepped
swiftly across the room, and taking Master
Jobling by the hair, demanded an explanation.
It was forthcoming immediately, in the form of
a long thin indiarubber tube, of the baby's-bottle
variety; one end of which was held between
Master Jobling's teeth, while the other communicated,
via his right sleeve, with a bottle of
ginger-beer secreted somewhere in the recesses
of his person. From this reservoir he had been
refreshing himself from time to time by a process
of suction.[144]

Mr. Robinson, who believed in making the
punishment fit the crime, purchased a baby's
"soother" from the chemist's, and condemned
Jobling to put it to its rightful use during every
school-hour for the rest of the week. He was
only allowed to remove it from his lips in order
to answer a question.

Class C, the professional malefactors, Mr.
Robinson found extremely attractive. They appeared
to possess all the character and quite half
the brains of the form. But this is a permanent
characteristic of the malefactor, and is most discouraging
to the virtuous.

Once, early in his career, Robinson was badly
caught. On entering his form-room one winter
evening, when darkness had fallen and the gas
was ablaze, his eye fell upon the great plate-glass
window which filled the south wall of the
room. Form-room windows are not usually supplied
with blinds, and this window stood black
and opaque against the darkness of night.
Right in the centre of the glass was a great
white star, which radiated out in all directions
in a series of splintered cracks.

Mr. Robinson knew well what had happened.
Some one had hurled a stone inkpot against the
window. Only last week he had had occasion[145]
to discourage target-practice of this kind by exemplary
measures. He addressed the crowded
form angrily.

"Who broke that window?"

"It is not broken, sir," volunteered a polite
voice.

Arthur Robinson was a young man who did
not suffer impudence readily.

"This is not precisely the moment," he rapped
out, "for nice distinctions. The window is
cracked, starred, splintered—anything you
like. I want the name of the boy who damaged
it. At once, please!"

Silence. Yet it was not the sullen, obstinate
silence which prevails when boys are endeavouring
to screen one another. One would almost
have called it silent satisfaction. But Arthur
Robinson was too angry and not sufficiently experienced
to note the distinction. Naming each
boy by name, he demanded of him whether or
no he had broken the window. Each boy politely
denied the impeachment. One or two were
courteous to the point of patronage.

Suddenly, from the back bench, came a faint
chuckle. Arthur Robinson, conscious of a sickly
feeling down his spine, rose to his feet and
approached the splintered window. The form[146]
watched him with breathless joy. Hot faced, he
rubbed one of the rays of the star with his fingers.
It promptly disappeared.

The window was undamaged. The star was
artistically executed in white chalk.

Malefactors have their weak spots, too.

One afternoon Mr. Robinson held an "extra."
That is to say, he brought in a body of sinful
youths, composed of the riff-raff of his form, for
a period of detention, and set them a stiff imposition
to write out. About half-way through
the weary hour he produced from his locked
desk an old cigarette-box containing sundry
coins. Laying these out before him, he proceeded
to count them. The perfunctory scratching
of pens ceased, and the assembled company,
most of whom had been unwilling contributors
to the fund under review, gazed with lack-lustre
eyes at their late property.

"Fourteen-and-nine," announced Mr. Robinson
cheerfully. "That is the sum which I
have collected from you this term in return for
the loan of such useful articles as pens and
blotting-paper. I know my charges are high;
but then I am a monopolist to people who are
foolish enough to come in here without their
proper equipment. Again, though threepence[147]
may seem a fancy price for a small piece of
blotting-paper, it is better to pay threepence
for a piece of blotting-paper than use your
handkerchief, which is worth a shilling. However,
the total is fourteen-and-nine. What shall
we do with it? Christmas is only a fortnight off,
and I propose, with your approval, to send this
contribution of yours to a society which provides
Christmas dinners for people who are less
lavishly provided for in that respect than ourselves.
If it interests you at all, I will get the
Society's full title and address and read them
to you."

Arthur Robinson was out of the room for
perhaps three minutes. When he returned he
was immediately conscious, from the guilty
stillness which reigned, and the self-conscious
air of detachment with which everybody was
writing, that something was amiss. He glanced
sharply at the little pile of money on his desk.

It had grown from fourteen-and-ninepence
to twenty-seven-and-sixpence.

Life is full of compensations—even for
schoolmasters.
[149]

CHAPTER SIX

SCHOOL STORIES

[151]

One of the most striking features
of the present-day cult of The Child is the
fact that whereas school stories were formerly
written to be read by schoolboys, they are now
written to be read—and are read with avidity—by
grown-up persons.

This revolution has produced some abiding
results. In the first place, school stories are
much better written than they were. Secondly,
a certain proportion of the limelight has
been shifted from the boy to the master, with
the result that school life is now presented in
a more true and corporate manner. Thirdly,
school stories have become less romantic, less
sentimental, more coldly psychological. They
are tinged with adult worldliness, and, too
often, with adult pessimism. As literature they
are an enormous advance upon their predecessors;
but what they have gained in savoir faire
they appear to have lost in joie de vivre.

Let us enter upon the ever-fascinating task
of comparing the old with the new.

To represent the ancients we will take that
immortal giant, Tom Brown. With him, as they
say in legal circles, Eric. Many people will say,
and they will be right, that Tom Brown would
make a much braver show for the old brigade[152]
if put forward alone, minus his depressing companion.
But we must bear in mind that it takes
more than one book to represent a literary era.
We will therefore call upon Tom Brown and
Eric Williams between them to represent the
schoolboy of a bygone age.

Most of us make Tom Brown's acquaintance
in early youth. We fortify ourselves with
a course of him before going to school for the
first time—at the age of twelve or thereabouts—and
we quickly realise, even at that tender
age, that there were giants in those days.

Have you ever considered Tom Brown's
first day at school? No? Then observe. He
was called at half-past two in the morning, at
the Peacock Inn, Islington, and by three o'clock
was off as an "outside" upon the Tally-Ho
Coach, in the small hours of a November morning,
on an eighty-mile drive to Rugby.

He arrived at his destination just in time to
take dinner in Hall, chaperoned by his new
friend East; and then, duce Old Brooke, plunged
into that historic football match between the
Schoolhouse and the School—sixty on one side
and two hundred on the other. Modern gladiators
who consider "two thirty-fives" a pretty
stiff period of play will be interested to note that
[153]this battle raged for three hours, and that the
Schoolhouse were filled with surprise and rapture
at achieving a goal after only sixty minutes'
play. ("A goal in an hour! Such a thing had
not been done in a Schoolhouse match these
five years.")

In the course of the game Tom was knocked
over while stopping a rush, and as the result of
spending some minutes at the bottom of a heap
of humanity composed of a goodly proportion
of his two hundred opponents, was finally hauled
out "a motionless body." However, he recovered
sufficiently to be able to entertain East
to tea and sausages in the Lower Fifth School.
After a brief interval for ablution came supper,
followed by a free-and-easy musical entertainment
in the Schoolhouse hall, which included
singing, a good deal of indiscriminate beer-drinking,
and the famous speech of Old Brooke.
Tom, it is hardly necessary to say, obliged with
a song—"with much applause."

Then came prayers, and Tom's first glimpse
of the mighty Arnold. (We may note here that
a new boy of the old days was not apparently
troubled by tiresome regulations upon the subject
of reporting himself to his housemaster on
arrival.) Even then Tom's first day from home[154]
was not over, for before retiring to his slumber
he was tossed in a blanket three times. Not a
bad record for a boy of twelve! And yet we flatter
ourselves that we live a strenuous life.

Customs have changed in many respects
since Tom Brown's time. Public schoolboys of
eighteen or nineteen do not now wear beards,
neither do they carry pea-shooters. Our athletes
array themselves for battle in the shortest
of shorts and the thinnest of jerseys. The participators
in the three-hour Schoolhouse match
merely took off their jackets and hung them
upon the railings or trees. We are told, however,
with some pride, that those who meant
real work added their hats, waistcoats, neck-handkerchiefs,
and braces! What of those who
did not? Again, a captain does not nowadays
"administer toco" upon the field of battle to
subordinates who have failed to prevent the
enemy from scoring a try. Again, no master of
to-day would dare to admit to a boy that he
"does not understand" cricket, or for that matter
draw parallels between cricket and Aristophanes
for the benefit of an attentive audience
in a corner of the playing-field during a school
match.

But we accept all these incidents in Tom[155]
Brown without question. We never dream of
doubting that they occurred, or could have occurred.
Arthur, we admit, is a rare bird, but he
is credible. Even East's religious difficulties,
or rather his anxiety to discuss them, are made
convincing. The reason is that Tom Brown
contains nothing that is alien from human nature—schoolboy
human nature. It is the real
thing all through. Across the ages Tom Brown
of Rugby speaks to Brown minor (also, possibly,
of Rugby) with the voice of a brother. Details
may have changed, but the essentials are
the same. "How different," we say, "but oh,
how like!"

Not so at all times with Eric, or Little by
Little. Here we miss the robust philistinism of
the eternal schoolboy, and the atmosphere of
reality which pervades Tom Brown. We feel
that we are not living a story, but merely reading
it. Eric does not ring true. We suspect
the reverend author—to employ an expression
which his hero would never have used—of
"talking through his hat."

None of us desire to scoff at true piety or
moral loftiness, but we feel instinctively that
in Eric these virtues are somewhat indecently
paraded. The schoolboy is essentially a matter-of-fact[156]
animal, and extremely reticent. He is
not usually concerned with the state of his soul,
and never under any circumstances anxious to
discuss the matter; and above all he abhors the
preacher and the prig. Eric, or Little by Little
is priggish from start to finish. Compare, for
instance, Eric's father and Squire Brown. Here
are the Squire's meditations as to the advice he
should give Tom before saying good-bye:

Now compare Eric's father in one of his public
appearances. That worthy but tiresome
gentleman suddenly descends upon the bully
Barker, engaged in chastising Eric.[157]

[158]

Poor Eric! What chance can a boy have had
whose egregious parent insisted upon outraging
every canon of schoolboy law on his behalf?
We are not altogether surprised to read, a little
later, that though from that day Eric was never
troubled with personal violence from Barker,
"rancour smouldered deep in the heart of the
baffled tyrant."

Then, as already noted, the atmosphere and
incidents of Eric fail to carry conviction. Making
every allowance for the eccentricities of
people who lived sixty years ago, the modern
boy simply refuses to credit the idea of members
of a "decent" school indulging in "a superior
titter" when one of their number performed the
everyday feat of breaking down in translation.
He finds it hard to believe that Owen (who is
labelled with damning enthusiasm "a boy of
mental superiority") would really report another
boy for kicking him, and quite incredible
that after the kicker had been flogged the virtuous
Owen should "have the keen mortification
of seeing 'Owen is a sneak' written up all about
the walls." As for Eric and Russell, sitting on
a green bank beside the sea and "looking into
one another's eyes and silently promising that
they will be loving friends for ever"—the spectacle[159]
makes the undemonstrative young Briton
physically unwell. Again, no schoolboy ever
called lighted candles "superfluous abundance
of nocturnal illumination"; and no schoolmaster
under any circumstances ever "laid a gentle
hand" upon a schoolboy's head. A hand, possibly,
but not a gentle one. Lower School boys
are not given Æschylus to read; and if they
were they would not waste their play-hours
discussing the best rendering of a particularly
knotty passage occurring in a lesson happily
over and done with.

If the first half of Eric is overdrawn and improbable,
the second is rank melodrama—and
bad melodrama at that. The trial scene is impossibly
theatrical, and Russell's illness and
death-bed deliverances are an outrage on
schoolboy reserve.

Listen again to one Montagu, a sixth-form
boy who has caught a gang of dormitory roysterers
preparing an apple-pie bed for him. Does
he call them "cheeky young swine," and knock
their heads together? No!

These silent, strong men!

Again, do, or did, English schoolboys ever
behave like this?

The characters in Eric are far superior to the
incidents. They may be exaggerated and irritating,
but they are consistently drawn. Wildney
is a true type, and still exists. Russell is a
fair specimen of a "good" boy, though it is difficult
to feel for him the tenderness which most of
us extend, perhaps furtively, to Arthur in Tom
Brown. But some of the masters are beyond
comprehension. Pious but depressing pedagogues[161]
of the type of Mr. Rose (who at moments
of crisis, it will be remembered, was usually
to be found upon his knees in the School
Library, oblivious of the greater privacy and
comfort offered by his bedroom) have faded
from our midst. Their place to-day is occupied
by efficient and unsentimental young men in
fancy waistcoats.

But the book for clear types is Tom Brown.
East, the two Brookes, and Arthur—we recognise
them all. There is Flashman the bully—an
epitome of all bullies. He is of an everlasting
pattern. And there is that curiously attractive
person Martin, the scientist, with his jackdaw
and his chemical research, and his chronic
impecuniosity. You remember how he used to
barter his allowance of candles for birds' eggs;
with the result that, in those pre-gas-and-electricity
days, he was reduced to doing his preparation
by the glow of the fire, or "by the light
of a flaring cotton wick, issuing from a ginger-beer
bottle full of some doleful composition"?
Lastly, there is Arnold himself. He is only revealed
to us in glimpses: he emerges now and
then like a mountain-peak from clouds; but is
none the less imposing for that.

What impression of bygone schoolboy life[162]
do Tom Brown and Eric make upon our
minds?

The outstanding sensation appears to be this,
that fifty years ago life at school was more
spacious than now—more full of incident and
variety. In those days a boy's spare time was
his own. How did he spend his half-holidays?
If he was a good boy—good in the bad sense of
the word—he went and sat upon a hill-top and
admired the scenery, or thought of his mother,
or possibly gripped another good boy by the
hand and said: "Let me call you Edwin, and
you shall always call me Eric." If he was a
normal healthy boy he went swimming, or bird-nesting,
or (more usually) poaching, and generally
encountered adventure by the way. If he
was a bad boy he retired with other malefactors
to a public-house, where he indulged in an orgy
of roast goose and brandy-and-water.

Nous avons changé tout cela. Compulsory
games have put an end to such licence, and in
so doing have docked a good deal of liberty as
well. The result has been to emphasize the
type at the expense of the individual. It is a
good type—a grand type—but it bears hardly
upon some of its more angular components.
The new system keeps the weak boy out of[163]
temptation and the idle boy out of mischief; but
the quiet, reflective, unathletic boy hates it. He
has little chance now to dream dreams or commune
with nature. Still, his chance comes later
in life; and as we all have to learn to toe the line
at some time or another, thrice blessed is he
who gets over the lesson in early youth.

The prefectorial system, too, has enlarged
boys' sense of responsibility, and has put an
end to many abuses which no master could
ever reach. But on the whole we may say of
the public-school boy throughout the ages that
plus que l'on le change, plus c'est la même chose.
Schoolboy gods have not altered. Strength,
fleetness of foot, physical beauty, loyalty to
one's House and one's School—youth still
worships these things. There is the same admiration
for natural brilliancy, be it in athletics
or conversation or scholarship, and the same
curious contempt for the plodder—even the
successful plodder—in all departments of life.
The weakest still goes to the wall. He is not
bumped against it so vigorously as he used to
be; but he still goes there, and always will.

Still, has the present generation developed
no new characteristics? Let us turn to a batch
of modern school stories, and see.[164]

We have many to choose from—Stalky, for
instance. Stalky has come in for a shower of
abuse from certain quarters. He hits the sentimentalist
hard. We are told that the book is
vulgar, that the famous trio are "little beasts."
(I think Mr. A. C. Benson said so.) Still, Mr.
Kipling never touches any subject which he
does not adorn, and in Stalky he brings out
vividly some of the salient features of modern
school life. He has drawn masters as they have
never been drawn before: the portraits may be
cruel, biassed, not sufficiently representative;
but how they live! He has put the case for the
unathletic boy with convincing truth. He depicts,
too, very faithfully, the curious camaraderie
which prevails nowadays between boys and
masters, and pokes mordant fun at the sycophancy
which this state of things breeds in a
certain type of boy—the "Oh, sir! and No, sir!
and Yes, sir! and Please, sir!" brigade—and
deals faithfully with the master who takes advantage
of out-of-school intimacy to be familiar
and offensive in school, addressing boys by
their nicknames and making humorous reference
to extra-scholastic incidents. And above
all Mr. Kipling knows the heart of a boy. He
understands, above all men, a boy's intense[165]
reserve upon matters that lie deepest within
him, and his shrinking from and repugnance to
unrestrained and blatant discussion of these
things. Do you remember the story of the fat
man—"the jelly-bellied flag-flapper"—who
came down to lecture to the school on patriotism?

It was a Union Jack, you will remember,
suddenly unfurled by way of peroration.

That is true, true, all through.

Then comes another class of school-story—the
school-story written primarily for boys.
Such are the books of Mr. Talbot Baines Reed.
These are regarded as somewhat vieux jeu at
the present day, but in their own particular
line they have never been bettered. They were
written to be read by comparatively young boys
in a semi-religious magazine; and anybody who
has ever attempted to write a tale which shall
be probable yet interesting, and racy yet moral,
will realise how admirably Mr. Reed has achieved
this feat—in such books as The Willoughby
Captains, The Master of the Shell, and
The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's.

Another excellent book is Godfrey Marten,
Schoolboy. Here Mr. Charles Turley achieves
success by the most commendable means. He
eschews the theatrical. His story contains no
death-bed heroics; no rescues from drowning;
no highly-coloured moral crises. He takes as[167]
his theme the humdrum daily life—and no one
who has not lived through it for weeks at a time
knows how humdrum it can be—of a public
school, and makes it interesting. He lacks fire,
it may be said, but he avoids the sentimentality
of the old school and the cynicism of the new.

Perhaps the best of all this class is The Bending
of a Twig, by Mr. Desmond Coke—an absolutely
faithful picture, drawn with unerring
instinct and refreshing humour. In fact it is so
much the real thing that at times it is a trifle
monotonous, just because school life at times is
a trifle monotonous. But those who know what
schoolboys are cannot fail to appreciate the intrinsic
merits of this book. It gently derides the
stagey incidents and emotional heroics of the
old style of school story. Here a small boy
comes to Shrewsbury primed with the lore of
Eric and Tom Brown and The Hill, fully expecting
to be tossed in a blanket or roasted on
sight. But nothing happens: he is merely ignored.
He has laboriously committed to memory
a quantity of Harrow slang from The Hill:
he finds this is meaningless at Shrewsbury.
He cannot understand the situation: he has to
unlearn all his lessons in sophistication. The
whole thing is admirably done.[168]

The story strikes a deeper note towards
the end. Here we are given a very vivid study
of the same boy, now head of his House, struggling
between his sense of duty and the fear of
unpopularity. Shall he tackle the disturbing element
boldly, invoking if necessary the assistance
of the Housemaster, or let things slide for
the sake of peace? Many a tragedy of the Prefect's
Room has hinged upon that struggle; and
although Mr. Coke's solution of the problem is
not heroic, it is probably all the more true to
life. Altogether a fine book, but from its very
nature a book for boys rather than grown-ups.

Coming to the type of school-story at present
in vogue, we have The Hill, deservedly ranking
as first-class. But The Hill is essentially a
book for Harrovians; and the more likely a
book is to appeal to members of one particular
school, the less likely it is to appeal to members
of any other school. (In this respect we may
note that Tom Brown forms an exception. But
then Tom Brown is an exceptional book.) If
The Hill had been written as a "general" school
story, with the identity of Harrow veiled, however
thinly, under a fictitious name, its glamour
and romance, together with its enthusiasm for[169]
all that is straight and strong and of old standing
and of good report, would have made it a
classic among school fiction. But non-Harrovians—and
there are a considerable number of
them—decline with natural insularity to follow
Mr. Vachell to his topmost heights. They are
conscious of a clannish, slightly patronising air
about The Hill, which is notably absent in
other stories which tell the tale of a particular
school. The reader is treated to pedantic little
footnotes, and given a good deal of information
which is either gratuitous or uninteresting. He
is made to understand that he is on The Hill
but not of it. He recognises frankly enough the
greatness of Harrow tradition and the glory of
Harrow history, but he rightly reserves his enthusiasm
over such things for his own school;
and there are moments when he feels inclined
to bawl out to the author that he envies Harrow
nothing—except perhaps Forty Years On.

In other words, The Hill, owing to the insistent
fashion in which it puts Harrow first
and general schoolboy nature second, must be
regarded more as a glorified prospectus than
as a representative novel of English school
life.

But The Hill stands high. It cannot be hid.[170]
It is supersentimental at times, but then so are
schoolboys. And the characters are clean-cut
and finely finished. Scaife is a memorable figure;
so is Warde. John Verney, like most virtuous
persons, is a bit of a bore at times; but the
Caterpillar, with his drawling little epigrams,
and their inevitable tag—"Not my own; my
Governor's!"—is a joy for ever. Lastly, the description
of the Eton and Harrow Match at
Lord's takes unquestionable rank as one of the
few things in this world which will never be
better done.

Two other books may be mentioned here, as
illustrating the tendency, already mentioned,
of modern school-novelists to shift the limelight
from the boy to the master. The first is
Mr. Hugh Walpole's Mr. Perrin and Mr.
Traill. A young man lacking means, and possessing
only a moderate degree, who feels inclined,
as many do, to drift into schoolmastering
as a pis aller, should read, mark, learn, and
inwardly digest this book. It draws a pitiless
picture of Common Room life in a third-rate
public school—the monotony; the discomfort;
the mutual antagonism and jealousy of a body
of men herded together year after year, condemned
to celibacy by want of means, and deprived[171]
of all prospect of advancement or change
of scene. It hammers in the undeniable truth
that in the great majority of cases a schoolmaster's
market value depreciates steadily from the
date of his first appointment. Mr. Perrin and
Mr. Traill is a very able book, but should not
be read by schoolmasters while recovering, let
us say, from influenza.

If the reader desires a further picture of the
amenities of the Common Room, viewed from
a less oblique angle, he can confidently be recommended
to turn to The Lanchester Tradition,
by Mr. G. F. Bradby. The Lanchester Tradition
is a comparatively short story, but it is all
pure gold. It is written with knowledge, insight,
and above all with an appreciation of that
broad tolerant humorous outlook on life which
alone can lubricate the soul-grinding wheels of
routine. In Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill we have
a young, able, and merciless critic exposing
some of the weaknesses of the public-school
system. In The Lanchester Tradition we have
a seasoned and experienced representative of
that system demonstrating that real character
can always rise superior to circumstance, and
that for all its creaking machinery and accompanying
friction the pedagogue's existence can[172]
be a very tolerable and at times a very uplifting
one. It is the old struggle between theory and
practice. Solvitur ambulando.

There are many other school stories of recent
date, of which no mention has been made in
this survey; but our excursions seem to have
covered a fairly representative field. What is
the prevailing characteristic of the new, as compared
with the old? It appears to be a very insistent
and rather discordant note of realism—the
sort of realism which leaves nothing unphotographed.
Romance and sentiment are
swept aside: they might fog the negative. Our
rising generation are not permitted to see visions
or dream dreams. And there is a tendency—mercifully
absent in most of the books which
we have described—to discuss matters which
are better not discussed, at any rate in a work
of fiction. There is a great vogue in these introspective
days for outspokenness upon intimate
matters. We are told that such matter should
not be excluded from the text, because it is
"true to life." So are the police reports in the
Sunday newspapers; but we do not present files
of these delectable journals to our sons and
daughters—let us not forget the daughters: the
sons go to school, but the daughters can only sit[173]
at home and read schoolboy stories—as Christmas
presents.

There is another marked characteristic of
modern school fiction—its intense topicality.
The slang, the allusions, the incidents—they
are all dernier cri. But the more up-to-date a
thing may be, whether it be a popular catchphrase
or a whole book, the more ephemeral is
its existence. A book of this kind reproduces
the spirit of the moment, often with surprising
fidelity; but after all it is only the spirit of the
moment. Its very applicability to the moment
unfits it for any other position. Books, speeches,
and jokes—very few of these breathe the
spirit not only of the moment but of all time.
When they do, we call them Classics. Tom
Brown is a Classic, and probably Stalky too.
They are built of material which is imperishable,
because it is quarried from the bed-rock
of human nature, which never varies, though
architectural fashions come and go.
[175]

CHAPTER SEVEN

"MY PEOPLE"

[176]

[177]

I

Under this comprenhensive
title the schoolboy groups the whole of his relatives,
of both sexes.

"Are your people coming for Speech Day?"
inquires Master Smith of Master Brown.

"Yes, worse luck!"

"It is a bore," agrees Smith. "I wanted you
to come and sit with me."

"Sorry!" says Brown, and the matter ends.
It never occurs to Brown to invite Smith to
join the family party. Such a proceeding would
be unheard of. A schoolboy with his "people"
in tow neither expects nor desires the society
of his friends. His father may be genial, his
mother charming, his sister pretty; but in the
jaundiced eyes of their youthful host they are
nothing more or less than a gang of lepers—to
be segregated from all communication with the
outer world; to be conveyed from one point to
another as stealthily as possible; and above all
to be kept out of the way of masters.

Later in life, say at the University, this diffidence
disappears. A pretty sister becomes an
asset; a pearl of price; a bait for luncheon parties
and a trap for theatre-tickets. Even a father,
provided he does not wear a made-up tie or take[178]
off his hat to the Dons, is tolerated. But at
school—never! Why?

The reason is that it is almost impossible to
give one's "people" their heads when on a visit
to School without opening the way for breaches
of etiquette and social outrages of the most
deplorable kind. Left to themselves, fathers
are addicted to entering into conversation with
casual masters—especially masters who in the
eyes of a boy are too magnificent to be approached
or too despicable to be noticed.
Mothers have been known to make unsolicited
overtures to some School potentate—yea, even
the Captain of the Eleven—because he happens
to have curly hair or be wearing a pretty blazer.
Sisters are capable of extending what the Lower
School terms "the R.S.V.P. eye" to the meanest
and most insignificant fag. These solecisms
shame Master Brown to his very soul. Consequently
he keeps his relatives in relentlessly
close order, herding them across the quadrangle
under a running fire of admonition and reproof.

"Yes, Dad, that's the Head. Look the other
way, or he'll notice you.... For goodness sake,
Mum, don't stop and talk to this fellow: he's
in the Boat. Who is that dear little boy with
brown eyes? Great Scott, how should I know[179]
all the rotten little ticks in the Lower School?...Sis,
what on earth did you go smiling and
grinning at that chap for? He is a master. He
took his hat off? Well, you must have begun it,
that's all! Think what an outsider he must consider
you!... What, Mum? Who are these two
nice-looking boys sitting on that bench? Not so
loud! They're the Captain of the Eleven and
the Secretary. Will I ask them to tea to amuse
Dolly? Certainly, if you don't mind my leaving
the School for good to-morrow morning!...This
is the cricket-ground. No, you can't go
and sit in the shade under those trees: it is
fearful side to go there. Stay about here. If you
see any people you know, from Town or anywhere,
you can talk to them; but whatever you
do, don't go making up to chaps. I'll find young
Griffin for you if you like. He'll be pretty sick;
but he knows you in the holidays, so I suppose
he has got to go through it. Sit here. Perhaps
you had better not speak to anybody while I'm
away, whether you know them or not. Sis,
remember about not making eyes at fellows.
They don't like that sort of thing from young
girls: they're different from your pals in Hyde
Park; so hold yourself in. I'll be back in a
minute."[180]

Then he departs in search of the reluctant
Griffin.

The only member of the staff to whom a boy
permits his "people" to address themselves is
his Housemaster. Him he regards as inevitable;
and consents gloomily to conduct his tainted
band to a ceremonial tea in the Housemaster's
drawing-room. There he sits miserably upon
the edge of a chair, masticating cake, and hoping
against hope that the ceremony will end before
his relatives have said or done something
particularly disastrous.

He is conscious, too, of a sad falling-off in his
own demeanour. Ten minutes ago he was a
miniature Grand Turk, patronising his parents
and ruffling it over his sister. Now he is a rather
grubby little hobbledehoy, conscious of large
feet and red hands, mumbling "Yes, sir," and
"No, sir," to a man whom he has been accustomed
to represent to his family as being wax
in his hands and a worm in his presence.

An observant philosopher once pointed out
that in every man there are embedded three
men: first, the man as he appears to himself;
second, the man as he appears to others; third,
the man as he really is. This classification of
points of view is particularly applicable to the[181]
scholastic world. Listen, for instance, to Master
Smith, describing to an admiring circle of sisters
and young brothers a scene from school life as
it is lived in the Junior Remove.

"Is the work difficult? Bless you, we don't
do any work: we just rot Duck-face. We simply
rag his soul out. What do we do to him? Oh, all
sorts of things. What sort? Well, the other day
he started up his usual song about the necessity
of absolute attention and concentration—great
word of Duck-face's, concentration—and gave
me an impot for not keeping my eyes fixed on
him all the time he was jawing. I explained to
him that anybody who attempted such a feat
would drop down dead in five minutes. How
dare I say such a thing to a master? Well, I
didn't say it in so many words, but he knew what
I meant all right. He got pretty red. After that
I tipped the wink to the other chaps, and we all
stared at him till he simply sweated. Oh, we
give him a rotten time!"

Mr. Duckworth's version of the incident, in
the Common Room, ran something like this.

"What's that, Allnutt? How is young Smith
getting on? Let me see—Smith? Oh, that youth!
I remember him now. Well, he strikes me as
being not far removed from the idiot type, but[182]
he is perfectly harmless. I don't expect ever to
teach him anything, of course, but he gives no
trouble. He is quite incapable of concentrating
his thoughts on anything for more than five
minutes without constant ginger from me. I
had to drop rather heavily upon him this morning,
and the results were most satisfactory. He
was attentive for quite half an hour. But he's a
dull customer."

What really happened was this. Mr. Duckworth,
who was a moderate disciplinarian and
an extremely uninspiring teacher, had occasion
to set Master Smith fifty lines for inattention.
Master Smith, glaring resentfully and muttering
muffled imprecations—symptoms of displeasure
which Mr. Duckworth, who was a man
of peace at any price, studiously ignored—remained
comparatively attentive for the rest of
the hour and ultimately showed up the lines.

All this time we have left our young friend
Master Brown sitting upon the edge of a chair
in his Housemaster's drawing-room, glaring
defiantly at everyone and wondering what awful
thing his "people" are saying now.

Occasionally scraps of conversation reach his
ears. (He is sitting over by the window with his
sister.) His mother is doing most of the talking.[183]
The heads of her discourse appear in the
main to be two—the proper texture of her son's
undergarments, and the state of his soul. The
Housemaster, when he gets a chance, replies
soothingly. The Matron shall be instructed to
see that nothing is discarded prematurely during
the treacherous early summer: he himself
will take steps to have Reggie—the boy blushes
hotly at the sound of his Christian name on
alien lips—prepared for confirmation with the
next batch of candidates.

Occasionally his father joins in.

"I expect we can safely leave that question
to Mr. Allnutt's discretion, Mary," he observes
drily. "After all, Reggie is not the only boy in
the House."

"No, I am sure he is not," concedes Mrs.
Brown. "But I know you won't object to hear
the mother's point of view, will you, Mr. Allnutt?"

"I fancy Mr. Allnutt has heard the mother's
point of view once or twice before," interpolates
Mr. Brown, with a sympathetic smile in
the direction of the Housemaster.

"Now, John," says Mrs. Brown playfully,
"don't interfere! Mr. Allnutt and I understand
one another perfectly, don't we, Mr. Allnutt?"[184]
She takes up her parable again with renewed
zest. "You see, Mr. Allnutt, what I mean is,
you are a bachelor. You have never had any
young people to bring up, so naturally you can't
quite appreciate, as I can——"

Mr. Allnutt, who has brought up about fifty
"young people" per annum for fifteen years,
smiles wanly, and bows to the storm. Master
Brown, almost at the limit of human endurance,
glances despairingly at his sister. That tactful
young person grasps the situation, and endeavours
to divert the conversation.

"What pretty cups those are on that shelf,"
she says in a clear voice to her brother. "Are
they Mr. Allnutt's prizes?"

"Yes," replies Master Brown, with a sidelong
glance towards his Housemaster. But that
much-enduring man takes no notice: his attention
is still fully occupied by Mrs. Brown, whom
he now darkly suspects of having a suitable bride
for him concealed somewhere in her peroration.

Master Brown and his sister rise to inspect
the collection of trophies more closely.

"What a lot he has got," says Miss Brown, in
an undertone now. "Was he a great athlete?"

"He thinks he was. When he gets in a bait
over anything it is always a sound plan to get[185]
him to talk about one of these rotten things. I
once got off a tanning by asking him how many
times he had been Head of the River. As a
matter of fact, most of these are prizes for chess,
or tricycling, or something like that."

So the joyous libel proceeds. Master Reggie
is beginning to cheer up a little.

"What is that silver bowl for?" inquires his
sister.

"Ah, it takes him about half an hour to tell
you about that. They won the race by two feet
in record time, and he was in a dead faint for a
week afterwards. As a matter of fact, Bailey
tertius, whose governor was up at Oxford with
the old Filbert"—etymologists will have no
difficulty in tracing this synonym to its source—"says
that he saw the race, and that Filbert
caught a crab and lost his oar about five yards
from the start and was a passenger all the way.
The men on the bank yelled to him to jump
out, but he was in too big a funk of being drowned,
and wouldn't. Of course he doesn't know
we know!" And so the joyous libel proceeds.

And yet, in Reggie Brown's last half-term
report we find the words:

A conscientious, but somewhat stolid and unimaginative
boy.[186]

II

But "people" do not visit the School solely
for the purpose of bringing social disaster upon
their offspring. Their first visit, at any rate, is
of a very different nature. On this occasion
they come in the capacity of what Headmasters
call "prospective parents"—that is, parents
who propose to inspect the School with a view
to entering a boy—and as such are treated with
the deference due to imperfectly hooked fish.

The prospective parent varies considerably.
Sometimes he is an old member of the School,
and his visit is a purely perfunctory matter. He
knows every inch of the place. He lunches with
the Head, has a talk about old times, and mentions
with proper pride that yet another of his
boys is now of an age to take up his nomination
for his father's old House.

Then comes another type—the youthful parent.
Usually he brings his wife with him. He
is barely forty, and has not been near a school
since he left his own twenty years ago. His
wife is pretty, and not thirty-five. Both feel
horribly juvenile in the presence of the Head.
They listen deferentially to the great man's[187]
pontifical observations upon the requirements
of modern education, and answer his queries as
to their firstborn's age and attainments with
trembling exactitude.

"I think we shall be able to lick him into
shape," concludes the Head, with gracious jocularity.
It is mere child's play to him, handling
parents of this type.

Then the male bird plucks up courage, and
timidly asks a leading question. The Head
smiles.

"Ah!" he remarks. "Now you are laying an
invidious task upon me. Who am I, to discriminate
between my colleagues' Houses?"

The young parents apologise precipitately,
but the Head says there is no need. In fact, he
goes so far as to recommend a House—in strict
confidence.

"Between ourselves," he says, "I consider
that the man here at the present moment is Mr.
Rotterson. Send your boy to him. I believe he
has a vacancy for next term, but you had better
see him at once. I will give you a note for him
now. There you are! Good morning!"

Off hurry the anxious pair. But the telephone
outstrips them.

"Is that you, Rotterson?" says the Head. "I[188]
have just despatched a brace of parents to you.
Impress them! There are prospects of more
to-morrow, so with any luck we ought to be
able to pull up your numbers to a decent level
after all."

"Thank you very much," says a meek voice
at the other end.

Then there is the bluff, hearty parent—the
man who knows exactly what he wants, and
does not hesitate to say so.

"I don't want my son taught any of your new-fangled
nonsense," he explains breezily. "Just
a good sound education, without frills! The
boy will have to earn his own living afterwards,
and I want you to teach him something which
will enable him to do so. Don't go filling him
up with Latin and Greek: give him something
which will be useful in an office. I know you
pedagogues stick obstinately to what you call
a good general grounding; but, if I may say
so, you ought to specialise a bit more. You're
too shy of specialisation, you know. But I say:
Find out what each boy in your School requires
for his future career, and teach him that!"

A Headmaster once replied to a parent of
this description:[189]

"Unfortunately, sir, the fees of this school
and the numbers of its Staff are calculated upon
a table d'hôte basis. If you want to have your
son educated à la carte, you must get a private
tutor for him."

Then there is the Utterly Impossible parent.
He is utterly impossible for one of two reasons—either
because he is a born faddist, or because
he has relieved Providence of a grave responsibility
by labelling himself "A Self-Made Man,
and Proud of It!"

The faddist is the sort of person who absorbs
Blue Books without digesting them, and sits
upon every available Board without growing
any wiser, and cherishes theories of his own
about non-competitive examinations, and cellular
underclothing, and the use of graphs, and,
generally speaking, about every subject on
which there is no particular reason why the layman
should hold any opinions at all. Such a
creature harries the scholastic profession into
premature senility. Him the Head always
handles in the same fashion. He delivers him
over at the first opportunity to a Housemaster,
and the Housemaster promptly takes him out
on to the cricket-field and, having introduced[190]
him to the greatest bore upon the Staff, leaves
the pair together to suffer the fate of the Kilkenny
cats.

The other sort of Utterly Impossible is not
so easily scotched. The ordinary snubs of polite
society are not for him. He is a plain man, he
mentions, and likes to put things on a business
footing. Putting things on a business footing
seems to necessitate—no one knows why—a
recital of the plain man's early struggles, together
with a resumé of his present bank-balance
and directorships. Not infrequently he brings
his son with him, and having deposited that
shrinking youth on a chair under the eyes both
of the Head and himself, proceeds to run over
his points with enormous gusto and unparental
impartiality.

"There he is!" he bellows. "Now you've got
him! Ram it into him! Learn him to be a scholar,
and I'll pay any bill you like to send in. I've got
the dibs. He's not a bad lad, as lads go, but he
wants his jacket dusted now and then. My father
dusted mine regular every Saturday night for
fifteen year, and it made me the man I am. I'm
worth——"

A condensed Budget follows. Then the
harangue is resumed.[191]

"So don't spare the rod—that's what I say.
Learn him all that a scholar ought to be learned.
If he wants books, get them, and put them down
to me. I can pay for them. And at the end of
the year, if he gets plucked in his examinations,
you send him home to me, and I'll bile him!"

The plain man breaks off, and glares with
ferocious affection upon his offspring. All this
while the shrewd Head has been observing the
boy's demeanour; and if he decides that the exuberance
of his papa has not been inherited to
an ineradicable extent, he accepts the cowering
youth and does his best for him. As a rule he is
justified in his judgment.

Lastly comes a novel and quite inexplicable
variant of the species. It owes its existence entirely
to journalistic enterprise.

Little Tommy Snooks, we will say, arrives
home one afternoon in a taxi in the middle of
term, and announces briefly but apprehensively
to his parents that he has been "sacked."
He is accompanied or preceded by a letter from
his Headmaster, expressing genuine sorrow
for the occurrence, and adding that though it
has been found necessary for the sake of discipline
to remove Master Thomas from the
School, his offence has not been such as to involve[192]
any moral stigma. Little Tommy's parents,
justly incensed that their offspring should
have been expelled from school without incurring
any moral stigma, write demanding instant
reparation. The Headmaster, in his reply,
states that Thomas has been expelled because
he has broken a certain rule, the penalty for
breaking which happens to be—and is known
to be—expulsion. Voilà tout. In other words,
he has been expelled, not for smoking or drinking
or breaking bounds (or whatever he may
happen to have done), but for deliberately and
wantonly flying in the face of the Law which
prohibits these misdemeanours. Either Tommy
must go, or the Law be rendered futile and
ridiculous.

This paltry and frivolous attempt to evade
the real point at issue—which appears to be
that many people, including Tommy's parents
and the Headmaster himself, smoke, drink,
and go out after dark and are none the worse—is
treated with the severity which it deserves.
A letter is despatched, consigning the Headmaster
to scholastic perdition. The Headmaster
briefly acknowledges receipt, and suggests
that the correspondence should now cease.

So far the campaign has followed well-defined
[193]and perfectly natural lines, for a parent is
seldom disposed to take his boy's expulsion
"lying down." But at this point the new-style
parent breaks right away from tradition—kicks
over the traces, in fact. Despatching that
slightly dazed but on the whole deeply gratified
infant martyr, Master Tommy, to salve outraged
nature at an adjacent Picture Palace, the
parent sits down at his (or her) desk and unmasks
the whole dastardly conspiracy to a halfpenny
newspaper of wide circulation. "I do
this," he explains, "not from any feeling of animosity
towards the Headmaster of the School,
but in order to clear my son's good name and
fair fame in the eyes of the world." This is interesting
and valuable news to the world, which
has not previously heard of Tommy Snooks.
The astute editor of the halfpenny paper, with
a paternal smile upon his features and his
tongue in his cheek, publishes the letter in a
conspicuous position—if things in the football
and political world happen to be particularly
dull, he sometimes finds room for Tommy's
photograph too—and invites general correspondence
on the subject.

Few parents can resist such an opportunity;
and for several weeks the editor is supplied,[194]
free gratis, with a column of diversified but
eminently saleable matter. The beauty of a
controversy of this kind is that you can debate
upon almost any subject without being pulled
up for irrelevance. Parents take full advantage
of this licence. Some contribute interesting
legends of their children's infancy. Others
plunge into a debate upon punishment in general,
and the old battle of cane, birch, slipper,
imposition, detention, and moral suasion is
fought over again. This leads to a discussion
as to whether public schools shall or shall not
be abolished—by whom, is not stated. Presently
the national reserve of retired colonels is
mobilised, and fiery old gentlemen write from
Cheltenham to say that in their young days
boys were boys and not molly-coddles. Old
friends like Materfamilias, Pro Bono Publico,
Quis Custodiet Custodes rush into the fray with
joyous whoops. There is quite a riot of pseudonyms:
the only person who gives his proper
name (and address) is the headmaster of a
small preparatory school, who contributes a
copy of his prospectus, skilfully disguised as
a treatise on "How to Preserve Home Influences
at School."

But the boom is short-lived. Presently a crisis[195]
arises in some other department of our national
life. Something cataclysmal happens to
the House of Commons, or the Hippodrome,
or Tottenham Hotspur. Public attention is diverted;
the correspondence is closed with cruel
abruptness; and little Tommy Snooks is summoned
from the Picture Palace, and sent to another
school or provided with a private tutor.
Still, his good name and fair fame are now vindicated
in the eyes of the world.

But it is not altogether surprising that the
great Temple should once have observed:

"Boys are always reasonable; masters sometimes;
parents never!"

III

Correspondence between school and home
is conducted upon certain well-defined lines. A
boy writes home every Sunday: his family may
write to him when they please and as often as
they please. But—they must never send postcards.

Postcards in public schools are common property.
Many a new boy's promising young life
has been overclouded at the very outset by the[196]
arrival of some such maternal indiscretion as
this:

"Dearest Artie" usually comes into possession
of this missive after it has been passed from
hand to hand, with many joyous comments, the
whole length of the Lower School breakfast-table.
He may not hear the last of the vests and
Baby for months.

As for writing home, a certain elasticity of
method is essential. In addressing one's father,
it is advisable to confine oneself chiefly to the
topic of one's studies. Money should not be asked
for, but references to the Classics may be
introduced with advantage, and perhaps a fair
copy of one's last Latin prose enclosed. The
father will not be able to understand or even
read it; but this will not prevent him from imagining
that he could have done so thirty years
ago; and his heart will glow with the reminiscent
enthusiasm of the retired scholar.

Mothers may be addressed with more freedom.[197]
Small financial worries may be communicated,
and it is a good plan to dwell resignedly
but steadily upon the insufficiency of the food
supplied by the School authorities. Health topics
may be discussed, especially in so far as they
touch upon the question of extra diet.

Sisters appreciate School gossip and small
talk of any kind.

Young brothers may be impressed with daredevil
tales of masters put to rout and prefects
"ragged" to death.

The appended dossier furnishes a fairly comprehensive
specimen of the art. It is entitled:

THE BIRTHDAY

Correspondence addressed to Master E. Bumpleigh,

Mr. Killick's House, Grandwich School

No. I

(Reply.

No. II

(Reply.

[201]

No. III

(Reply.

No. IV

(Reply.

No. V

[204]

(Reply.

Extract from the Catalogue of the Killickite
House Library, Grandwich School:

[205]

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE FATHER OF THE MAN

[207]
CHAPTER EIGHT

THE FATHER OF THE MAN

Among the higher English
castes it is not good form to appear deeply interested
in any thing, or to hold any serious views
about anything, or to possess any special knowledge
about anything. In fact, the more you
know the less you say, and the more passionately
you are interested in a matter, the less you
"enthuse" about it. That is the Public School
Attitude in a nutshell. It is a pose which entirely
misleads foreigners and causes them to regard
the English as an incredibly stupid and
indifferent nation.

An American gentleman, we will say, with
all an American's insatiable desire to "see the
wheels go round" and get to the root of the
matter, finds himself sitting beside a pleasant
English stranger at a public dinner. They will
converse, possibly about sport, or politics, or
wireless telegraphy. The pleasant Englishman
may be one of the best game shots in the country,
or a Privy Councillor, or a scientist of European
reputation, but the chances are that the
American will never discover from the conversation
that he is anything more than a rather
superficial or diffident amateur. Again, supposing[208]
the identity of the stranger is known: the
American will endeavour to draw him out. But
the expert will decline to enter deeply into his
own subject, for that would be talking "shop";
and under no circumstances will he consent to
discuss his own achievements therein, for that
would be "side."

Shop and Side—let us never lose sight of
them. An Englishman dislikes brains almost
as much as he worships force of character. If
you call him "clever" he will regard you with
resentment and suspicion. To his mind cleverness
is associated with moral suppleness and
sharp practice. In politics he may describe the
leader of the other side as "clever"; but not his
own leader. He is "able." But the things that
he fears most are "shop" and "side." He is so
frightened of being thought to take a pleasure
in his work—he likes it to be understood that
he only does it because he has to—and so terrified
of being considered egotistical, that he prefers
upon the whole to be regarded as lazy or
dunderheaded. In most cases the brains are
there, and the cleverness is there, and above all
the passion for and pride in his work are there;
but he prefers to keep these things to himself and
present a careless or flippant front to the world.

[209]

From what does this national self-consciousness
spring? It has its roots, as already indicated,
in the English public school system.

Consider. The public school boy, like all
primitive types, invents his own gods and worships
them without assistance. Now the primitive
mind recognises two kinds of god—lovable
gods and gods which must be squared. Class
A are worshipped from sheer admiration and
reverence, because they are good and "able"
gods, capable of godlike achievements. To
Class B, however, homage is rendered as a pure
measure of precaution, lest, being enormously
powerful and remarkably uncertain in temper,
they should turn and rend their votaries. Indeed,
in their anxiety to avoid the unfavourable
notice of these deities, the worshippers do not
hesitate to sacrifice one another. So it is with
the schoolboy. Class A consists of the gods he
admires, Class B of the gods he is afraid of.

First, Class A.

What a boy admires most of all is ability—ability
to do things, naturally and spontaneously.
He worships bodily strength, bodily grace,
swiftness of foot, straightness of eye, dashing
courage, and ability to handle a bat or gun, or
control the movements of a ball, with dexterity[210]
and—ease. Great emphasis must be placed on
the ease. Owing to a curious kink in the schoolboy
mind, these qualities depreciate at least
fifty per cent. if they are not natural qualities—that
is, if they have been acquired by laborious
practice or infinite pains. The water-funk who
ultimately schools himself into a brilliant high-diver,
or the overgrown crock who trains himself,
by taking thought, into an effective athlete,
is a person of no standing. At school sports you
often hear such a conversation as this:

"Good time for the mile, wasn't it?"

"Yes; but look at the way he has been sweating
up for it. He's been in training for weeks.
Did you see Jinks in the high jump, though?
He cleared five foot four, and never turned out
to practice once. That's pretty hot stuff if you
like!"

Or:

"Pretty useful, old Dobbin taking six wickets!"

"Oh, that rotter! Last year he could hardly
get the ball within a yard of the crease. I hear
he has been spending hours and hours in the
holidays bowling by himself at a single stump.
He's no earthly good, really."

It is the way of the world. The tortoise is a[211]
dreadfully unpopular winner. To an Englishman,
a real hero is a man who wins a championship
in the morning, despite the fact that he was
dead drunk the night before.

This contempt for the plodder extends also
to the scholastic sphere. A boy has no great
love or admiration for learning in itself, but he
appreciates brilliance in scholarship—as opposed
to hard work. If you come out top of your
form, or gain an entrance scholarship at the
University, your friends will applaud you vigorously,
but only if they are perfectly certain
that you have done no work whatever. If you
are suspected of midnight oil or systematic labour,
the virtue is gone out of your performance.
You are merely a "swot." The general
attitude appears to be that unless you can take—or
appear to take—an obstacle in your stride,
that obstacle is not worth surmounting. This
leads to a good deal of hypocrisy and make-believe.
For instance:

"Pretty good, Sparkleigh getting a Schol,
wasn't it?" remark the rank and file to one another.
"He never did a stroke of work for it,
and when he went up for his exam. he went on
the bust the night before. Jolly good score off
the Head: he said he wouldn't get one!...[212]
Grubbe? Oh yes, he got one all right. I should
just think so! The old sap! We'd have rooted
him if he hadn't!"

But let us be quite frank about Sparkleigh.
He has won his Scholarship, and has done it—in
the eyes of the School—with one hand tied
behind him. But Scholarships are not won in
this way, and no one is better aware of the fact
than Sparkleigh. His task, to tell the truth, has
been far more difficult than that of the unheroic
Grubbe. Grubbe was content to accept the stigma
of "swot" because it carried with it permission
to work as hard and as openly—one had
almost said as flagrantly—as he pleased. But
Sparkleigh, who had to maintain the attitude
of a man of the world and a scholastic Gallio
and yet work just as hard as Grubbe, was sorely
put to it at times. He must work, and work
desperately hard, yet never be seen working.
None of the friends who slapped him on the
back when the news of his success arrived knew
of the desperate resorts to which the boy had
had recourse in order to obtain the time and
privacy necessary for his purpose. On Sunday
afternoons he would disappear upon a country
walk, ostentatiously exhibiting a cigarette case
and giving his friends to understand that his[213]
walk was the statutory three-mile qualification
of a bona-fide traveller. In reality he sat behind
a hedge in an east wind and contended with
Thucydides.

And there was his demeanour in school. On
Thursdays, for instance, the Sixth came in from
four till six and composed Latin Verses. On
these occasions the Head seldom appeared, the
task of presiding over the drowsy assembly falling
to a scholarly but timid young man who was
mortally afraid of the magnates who sat at the
top bench. Sparkleigh would take down the appointed
passage as it was dictated and read it
through carelessly. In reality he was committing
it to memory. Then:

"Wake me at a quarter to six," he would say
to his neighbour, yawning. And laying his head
upon his arms, he would rest motionless until
aroused at the appointed moment.

But he was not asleep. For an hour and three-quarters
that busy fertile brain would be pulling
and twisting the English verse into Latin shape,
converting it into polished Elegiacs or rolling
hexameters. Then, sleepily raising his head,
and casting a last contemptuous glance over the
English copy, Sparkleigh would take up his
pen, and in the remaining quarter of an hour[214]
scribble out a full and complete fair copy—to
the respectful admiration of his neighbour
Grubbe, who, covered with ink and surrounded
by waste paper, was laboriously grappling with
the last couplet.

There are many Sparkleighs in school life—and
in the larger world as well. They are not
really deceitful or pretentious, but they are
members of a society in which revealed ambition
is not good form. That is all.

There is one curious relaxation of the schoolboy's
vendetta against ostentatious industry.
You may work if you are a member of the Army
Class. The idea appears to be that to cultivate
learning for its own sake is the act of a pedant
and a prig, but if you have some loyal, patriotic,
and gentlemanly object in view such as the obtaining
of the King's Commission, a little vulgar
application of your nose to the grindstone
may be excused and indeed justified. But you
must be careful to explain that you are never
never going to do any work again after this.

As already noted, these characteristics puzzle
the foreigner. The Scotsman, for instance,
though even more reserved than the Englishman,[215]
is not nearly so self-conscious; and to him
"ma career"—to quote John Shand—is the
most important business in life. Success is far
too momentous a thing to be jeopardised by
false modesty; so why waste time and spoil
one's chances by pretending that it is a mere
accident in life—the gift of chance or circumstance?
The American, too, cannot understand
the pose. His motto is "Thorough." American
oarsmen get their crew together a year before
the race, and train continuously—even in winter
they row in a stationary tub under cover—until
by diligent practice they evolve a perfect
combination. Englishmen would never dream
of taking such pains. They have a vague feeling
that such action is "unsportsmanlike." In their
eyes it is rather improper to appear so anxious
to win. Once more we find ourselves up against
the shame of revealed ambition. The public
school spirit again!

So much for the gods a boy admires. Now
for the gods he is afraid of.

The greatest of these is Convention. The
first, and perhaps the only, thing that a boy
learns at a public school is to keep in his appointed
place. If he strays out by so much as a single[216]
pace, he is "putting on side," and is promptly
sacrificed. Presumption is the deadliest sin in
school life, and is usually punished with a ferocity
out of all proportion to the offence. In
moderation, Convention is a very salutary deity.
None of us are of much use in this world until
we have found our level and acquired the virtues
of modesty and self-suppression. It is extremely
good for a cheeky new boy, late cock of
a small preparatory school and idol of a doting
family, to have to learn by painful experience
that it is not for him to raise his voice in the
course of general conversation or address himself
to any but his own immediate order until he
has been a member of the school for a year at
least. These are what may be termed self-evident
conventions, and it does no one any particular
harm to learn to obey them. But the great
god Convention, like most absolute monarchs,
has grown distinctly cranky and eccentric in
some of his whims. A sensible new boy knows
better than to speak familiarly to a superior, or
take a seat too near the fire, or answer back
when unceremoniously treated. But there are
certain laws of Convention which cannot be
anticipated by the most intelligent and well-meaning
beginner. For instance, it may be—and[217]
invariably is—"side" to wear your cap
straight (or crooked), or your jacket buttoned
(or unbuttoned), or your hair brushed (or not),
or to walk upon this side of the street (or that).
But which? It is impossible to solve these problems
by any process save that of dismal experience.
And, as in a maturer branch of criminology,
ignorance of the Law is held to be no excuse
for infraction of the Law. I once knew a small
boy who, trotting back to his House from football
and being pressed for time, tied his new
white sweater round his neck by the sleeves instead
of donning it in the ordinary fashion. That
evening, to his great surprise and extreme discomfort,
he was taken out and slippered by a
self-appointed vigilance committee. To wear
one's sweater tied round one's neck, it seemed,
was the privilege of the First Fifteen alone.
Who shall tell how oft he offendeth?

And even when the first years are past and
a position of comparative prominence attained,
the danger of Presumption is not outdistanced.
A boy obtains his House colours, we will say.
His friends congratulate him warmly, and then
sit down to wait for symptoms of "side." The
newly-born celebrity must walk warily. Too
often he trips. Our first success in life is very,[218]
very sweet, and it is hard to swallow our exultation
and preserve a modest or unconscious demeanour
when our heart is singing. But the
lesson must be learned, and ultimately is learned;
but too often only after a cruel and utterly
disproportionate banishment to the wilderness.
Can we wonder that the Englishman who has
achieved greatness in the world—the statesman,
the soldier, the athlete—always exhibits
an artificial indifference of manner when his
deeds are mentioned in his presence? In nine
cases out of ten this is not due to proverbial
heroic modesty: it is caused by painful and lasting
memories of the results which followed his
first essays in self-esteem.

The other god which schoolboys dread is
Public Opinion. They have little fear of their
masters, and none whatever of their parents;
but they are mortally afraid of one another.
Moral courage is the rarest thing in schoolboy
life. Physical courage, on the other hand, is a
sine qua non: so much so that if a boy does not
possess it he must pretend that he does. But if
he exhibits moral courage the great majority
of his fellows will fail to recognise it, and will
certainly not appreciate it. They do not know
its meaning. Their fathers have extolled it to[219]
them, and they have heard it warmly commended
in sermons in chapel; but they seldom know
it when they meet it. If an obscure and unathletic
prefect reports a muscular and prominent
member of the House to the Housemaster for
some gross and demoralising offence, they will
not regard the prefect as a hero. Probably they
will consider him a prig, and certainly a sneak.
The fact that he has sacrificed all that makes
schoolboy life worth living in the exercise of
his simple duty will not occur to the rank and
file at all. Admiration for that sort of thing they
regard as an idiosyncrasy of pastors and masters.

It is not until he becomes a prefect himself
that the average boy discovers the meaning of
the word character, and whether he possesses
any of his own. If he does, he begins straight-way
to make up for lost time. He sets yet another
god upon his Olympus and keeps him at
the very summit thereof from that day forth for
the rest of his life. As already noted, the Englishman
is suspicious of brains, despises intellectuality,
and thoroughly mistrusts any superficial
appearance of cleverness; but he worships
character, character, character all the time.
And that is the main—the only—difference between[220]
the English man and the English boy.
The man appreciates moral courage, because
it is a sign of character. It is the only respect
in which the English Peter Pan grows up.

Finally, we note a new factor in the composition
of the Public School Type—the military
factor. Ten years ago school Cadet Corps were
few in number, lacking in efficiency, and thoroughly
lax in discipline. Routine consisted of
some very inert company drills and some very
intermittent class-firing, varied by an occasional
and very disorderly field-day. Real keenness
was confined to those boys who had a
chance of going to Bisley as members of the
shooting eight. The officers were middle-aged
and short-winded. It was not quite "the thing"
to belong to the Corps—presumably because
anybody could belong to it—and in any case it
was not decorous to be enthusiastic about it.

But the Officers' Training Corps has changed
all that. At last the hand of peace-loving and
somnolent Headmasters has been forced by the
action of a higher power. Now the smallest
public school has its Corps, subsidised by the
State and supervised by the War Office. Three
years ago, in Windsor Great Park, King George
reviewed a perfectly equipped and splendidly[221]
organised body of seventeen thousand schoolboys
and undergraduates; and these were a
mere fraction of the whole. The O.T.C. is undeniably
efficient. Its officers hold His Majesty's
commission, and have to qualify for their
posts by a course of attachment to a regular
body. Frequently the C.O. is an old soldier.
Discipline and obedience of a kind hitherto unknown
in schools have come into existence.
That is to say, A has learned to obey an order
from B with promptitude and despatch, not because
A is in the Fifteen while B is not, but because
A is a sergeant and B is a private; or to
put the matter more simply still, because it is
an Order. Conversely, A gives his orders clearly
and confidently because he knows that he
has the whole weight of military law behind
him, and need not pause to worry about athletic
status or caste distinctions.

It may be objected that we are merely substituting
a military caste for an athletic caste;
but no one who knows anything about boys
will support such a view. The new caste will
help to modify the despotism of the old: that is
all. And undoubtedly the system breeds initiative,
which is not the strong point of the average
schoolboy. In the Army everyone looks[222]
automatically for instruction to the soldier of
highest rank present, whether he be a brigadier
in charge of a field-day or the oldest soldier of
three privates engaged in guarding a gap in a
hedge. It is these low-grade delegations of authority
which force initiative and responsibility
upon boys who otherwise would shrink from
putting themselves forward, not through lack
of ability or character, but through fear of Presumption.
And here we encounter another thoroughly
British characteristic. A Briton has a
great capacity for minding his own business.
He dislikes undertaking a responsibility which
is not his by right. But persuade him that a
task is indubitably and officially his, and he will
devote his life to it, however unthankful or exacting
it may be. In the same way many a
schoolboy never takes his rightful place in his
House or School simply because he does not
happen to possess any of the restricted and accidental
qualifications which school law demands
of its leaders. Now, aided by the initiative
and independence which elementary military
training bestows, he is encouraged to come
forward and take a share in the life of the school
from which his own respect for schoolboy standards
of merit has previously debarred him. All[223]
he wants is a little confidence in himself and a
little training in responsibility. The Officers'
Training Corps is doing the same work among
public schoolboys to-day that the Boy Scout
movement is doing so magnificently for his
brethren in other walks of life.

II

But we need not dip into the future: we are
concerned only with the past and its effect upon
the present.

What manner of man is he that the English
public school system has contributed to the service
of the State and the Empire? (With the
English public schools we ought fairly to include
Scottish public schools conducted on
English lines.) How far are the characteristics
of the boy discernible in the Man? The answer
is:—Through and through.

In the first place, the Man is usually a Conservative.
So are all schoolboys. (Who shall
forget the turmoil which arose when a new and
iconoclastic Housemaster decreed that the
comfortable double collar which had hitherto
been the exclusive property of the aristocracy[224]
might—nay, must—be worn by all the House
irrespective of rank?)

Secondly, he is very averse to putting himself
forward until he has achieved a certain locus
standi. A newly-elected Member of Parliament,
if he happens to be an old public-school boy,
rarely if ever addresses the House during his
first session. He leaves that to Radical thrusters
and Scotsmen on the make. He does this
because he remembers the day upon which he
was rash enough to rise to his feet and offer a
few halting observations on the occasion of his
first attendance at a meeting of the Middle
School Debating Society. ("Who are you,"
inquired his friends afterwards, "to get up and
jaw? Have you got your House colours?")

Thirdly, he declines upon all occasions, be
he scholar, or soldier, or lawyer, to discuss matters
of interest relating to his profession; for this
is "shop." He remembers the historic "ragging"
of two harmless but eccentric members
of the Fifth at school, who, dwelling in different
Houses, were discovered to be in the habit of
posting one of Cicero's letters to one another
every evening for purposes of clandestine and
unnatural perusal at breakfast next morning.

If he rises to a position of eminence in life or[225]
performs great deeds for the State, he laughs
his achievements to scorn, and attributes them
to "a rotten fluke," remembering that that was
what one of the greatest heroes of his youth,
one Slogsby, used to do when he had made a
hundred in a school match.

If he is created a Judge or a Magistrate or a
District Commissioner he is especially severe
upon sneaks and bullies, for he knows what
sneaking and bullying can be. For the open
law-breaker he has a much kindlier feeling, for
he was once one himself. He is intensely loyal
to any institution with which he happens to be
connected, such as the British Empire or the
M.C.C., because loyalty to School and House
is one of the fundamental virtues of the public
school boy.

Lastly, compulsory games at school have
bred in him an almost passionate desire to keep
himself physically fit at all times in after life.

He has grave faults. Loving tradition, he
dislikes change, and often stands mulishly in
the way of necessary progress. Mistrusting precocity,
he often snubs genuine and valuable enthusiasm.
His anxiety to mind only his own
business sometimes leads him into deciding
that some urgent matter does not concern him[226]
when in point of fact it does. As a schoolboy he
was the avowed enemy of all "cads," and his
views on what constituted a cad were rather too
comprehensive. Riper years do not always correct
this fault, and he is considered—too often,
rightly—cliquey and stuck-up. Disliking a
bounder, he sometimes fails to penetrate the
disguise of a man of real ability. Similarly his
loyalty to his friends sometimes leads him to
believe that there can be no real ability or integrity
of character outside his own circle; with
the result that in filling up offices he is sometimes
guilty of nepotism. The fact that the offence
is world-old and world-wide does not
excuse it in a public school man.

Finally, all public school boys are intensely
reserved about their private ambitions and
private feelings. So is the public school man.
Consequently soulful and communicative persons
who do not understand him regard him as
stodgy and unsociable.

But he serves his purpose. Like most things
British, he is essentially a compromise. He is
a type, not an individual; and when the daily,
hourly business of a nation is to govern hundreds
of other nations, perhaps it is as well to do so
through the medium of men who, by merging[227]
their own individuality in a common stock, have
evolved a standard of Character and Manners
which, while never meteoric, seldom brilliant,
too often hopelessly dull, is always conscientious,
generally efficient, and never, never tyrannical
or corrupt. If this be mediocrity, who
would soar?

**Transcribers Notes**


Minor punctuation errors corrected


Page 51 Buluwayo spelling left


Page 143 indiarubber spelling left


Page 199 disheartening printer typo correct


Page 202 coinsiding spelling left


Illustrations in the HTML version have been moved to not break
paragraphs - the illustration index from the original, therefore, does
not exactly match the HTML location of the illustrations.