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   LIGHTER SIDE OF SCHOOL LIFE

[Illustration: LORD'S]




       THE LIGHTER SIDE OF
           SCHOOL LIFE

           BY IAN HAY

     AUTHOR OF "A SAFETY MATCH"

    WITH ILLUSTRATIONS REPRODUCED
       FROM PASTEL DRAWINGS BY
           LEWIS BAUMER

             BOSTON
         LE ROY PHILLIPS




    _First Edition published October nineteen
    hundred fourteen; reprinted May
    nineteen fifteen_

    _Printed in Scotland by_
    BALLANTYNE, HANSON, & CO.
    At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh




                TO
           THE MEMBERS
                OF
       THE MOST RESPONSIBLE
       THE LEAST ADVERTISED
          THE WORST PAID
               AND
      THE MOST RICHLY REWARDED
            PROFESSION
           IN THE WORLD




        THE LIST OF CONTENTS


    I.    THE HEADMASTER                          _page_           1

    II.   THE HOUSEMASTER                                         35

    III.  SOME FORM-MASTERS                                       57

    IV.   BOYS                                                    91

    V.    THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE                               121

    VI.   SCHOOL STORIES                                         149

    VII.  "MY PEOPLE"                                            175

    VIII. THE FATHER OF THE MAN                                  205




        THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_reproduced from drawings by_ LEWIS BAUMER


    LORD'S                                        _Frontispiece_

    THE HEADMASTER OF FICTION                     _page_          16

    THE SCHOOLBOY OF FICTION                                      32

    THE DAREDEVIL                                                 48

    THE LUNCHEON INTERVAL: PORTRAIT OF
    A GENTLEMAN WHO HAS SCORED
    FIFTY RUNS                                                    64

    THE FRENCH MASTER: (I) FICTION,
    (II) FACT                                                     88

    THE INTELLECTUAL                                             104

    THE NIPPER                                                   120

    THE FAG: "SIC VOS NON VOBIS"                                 152

    THE SCHOOLGIRL'S DREAM                                       176

    RANK AND FILE                                                192

    THE MAN OF THE WORLD                                         208




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




THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SCHOOL LIFE




CHAPTER ONE

THE HEADMASTER


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.

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 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 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
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. 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 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 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?"

"_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 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, 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.

"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 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, 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.

[Illustration: THE HEADMASTER OF FICTION]

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 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 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 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

[Illustration: THE SCHOOLBOY OF FICTION]

Usually he is slightly unpopular. But he 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.




CHAPTER TWO

THE HOUSEMASTER


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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,
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 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.

[Illustration: THE DAREDEVIL]

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 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 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.?"

"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!"

"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."

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
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
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."




CHAPTER THREE

SOME FORM-MASTERS


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.

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 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 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," 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 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?"

[Illustration: THE LUNCHEON INTERVAL PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN WHO HAS
SCORED FIFTY RUNS]

"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.

"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 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.

"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 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 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!

           _Come, lasses and lads, get leave of your dads_--
                  Come on, man, come on!
            --_And away to the maypole, hey!_

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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:--

"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 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
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 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 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 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.

"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.

"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----"

"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 battle-field 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.

[Illustration: THE FRENCH MASTER: (I) FICTION, (II) FACT]

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, both of English and German, is
easier to understand.




CHAPTER FOUR

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 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 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.

"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, 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 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 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.

       *       *       *       *       *

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.

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 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.

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 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.

[Illustration: THE INTELLECTUAL]

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 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.

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 "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 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.

       *       *       *       *       *

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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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.

"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. "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."

"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!"

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.

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."

[Illustration: THE NIPPER]




CHAPTER FIVE

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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; 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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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
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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.




CHAPTER SIX

SCHOOL STORIES


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 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.

[Illustration: THE FAG: "SIC VOS NON VOBIS"]

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 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 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_ _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 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:

     "I won't tell him to read his Bible, and love and serve God; if he
     don't do that for his mother's sake and teaching, he won't for
     mine. Shall I go into the sort of temptations he'll meet with? No,
     I can't do that. Never do for an old fellow to go into such things
     with a boy. He won't understand me. Do him more harm than good, ten
     to one. Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he's sent to
     school to make himself a good scholar? Well, but he isn't sent to
     school for that--at any rate, not for that mainly. I don't care a
     straw for Greek particles, or the digamma; no more does his mother.
     What is he sent to school for? Well, partly because he wanted so to
     go. If he'll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling
     Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that's all I want."

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.

     "There had been an unobserved spectator of the whole scene, in the
     person of Mr. Williams himself, and it was his strong hand that now
     gripped Barker's shoulder. He was greatly respected by the boys,
     who all knew his tall handsome figure by sight, and he frequently
     stood a quiet and pleased observer of their games. The boys in the
     playground came crowding round, and Barker in vain struggled to
     escape. Mr. Williams held him firmly, and said in a calm voice, 'I
     have just seen you treat one of your schoolfellows with the
     grossest violence. It makes me blush for you, Roslyn boys,' he
     continued, turning to the group that surrounded him, 'that you can
     even for a moment stand by unmoved, and see such things done. Now;
     mark; it makes no difference that the boy who has been hurt is my
     own son; I would have punished this scoundrel whoever it had been,
     and I shall punish him now.' With these words, he lifted the
     riding-whip which he happened to be carrying, and gave Barker by
     far the severest castigation he had ever undergone. He belaboured
     him till his sullen obstinacy gave way to a roar for mercy, and
     promises never so to offend again.

     "At this crisis he flung the boy from him with a 'phew' of disgust,
     and said, 'I give nothing for your word; but if ever you do bully
     in this way again, and I see or hear of it, your present punishment
     shall be a trifle to what I shall then administer. At present,
     thank me for not informing your master.' So saying, he made Barker
     pick up the cap, and, turning away, walked home with Eric leaning
     on his arm."

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 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!

     "'By heavens, this is _too_ bad!' he exclaimed, stamping his foot
     with anger. 'What have I ever done to you young blackguards that
     you should treat me thus? Have I ever been a bully? Have I ever
     harmed one of you? And _you_, too, Vernon Williams!'

     "The little boy trembled and looked ashamed under his glance of
     sorrow and scorn.

     "'Well, I _know_ who has put you up to this; but you shall not
     escape so. I shall thrash you, every one.'

     "Very quietly he suited the action to the word, sparing none."

These silent, strong men!

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

     "Vernon hid his face on Eric's shoulder; and, as his brother
     stooped over him and folded him to his heart, they cried in
     silence, for there seemed no more to say, until, wearied with
     sorrow, the younger fell asleep; and then Eric carried him tenderly
     downstairs, and laid him, still half-sleeping, upon his bed."

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 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 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
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.

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 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?

     "Now the reserve of a boy is tenfold deeper than the reserve of a
     maid, she having been made for one end only by blind Nature, but
     man for several. With a large and healthy hand he tore down these
     veils, and trampled them under the well-intentioned feet of
     eloquence. In a raucous voice he cried aloud little matters, like
     the hope of Honour and the dream of Glory, that boys do not discuss
     with their most intimate equals.... He profaned the most secret
     places of their souls with outcries and gesticulations. He bade
     them consider the deeds of their ancestors, in such fashion that
     they were flushed to their tingling ears. Some of them--the rending
     voice cut a frozen stillness--might have had relatives who perished
     in defence of their country. (They thought, not a few of them, of
     an old sword in a passage, or above a breakfast-table, seen and
     fingered by stealth since they could walk.) He adjured them to
     emulate those illustrious examples; and they looked all ways in
     their extreme discomfort.

     "Their years forbade them even to shape their thoughts clearly to
     themselves. They felt savagely that they were being outraged by a
     fat man who considered marbles a game.... What, in the name of
     everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved this horror before
     their eyes?"

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

     "Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk."

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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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.




CHAPTER SEVEN

"MY PEOPLE"


[Illustration: THE SCHOOLGIRL'S DREAM]


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 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 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."

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
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 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. 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?" 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 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._


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 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 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:

"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 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.

"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 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.

[Illustration: RANK AND FILE]

So far the campaign has followed well-defined 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, 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 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
arrival of some such maternal indiscretion as this:

     _Dearest Artie,--I am sending you some nice new vests for the
     colder months. Mind you put them on, but ask the Matron to air them
     first. The girls send their love, and Baby sends you a kiss.--Your
     affec._
                                           _Mother_.

"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. 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

    MESSRS. BUMPLEIGH & SITWELL, LTD.,
         220B CORNHILL,
    _Telegrams_: "BUMPSIT, LONDON."
                    _November 6, 19--._

     MY DEAR EGBERT,--Your mother informs me that to-morrow, the 7th
     inst., is your fifteenth birthday. I therefore take this
     opportunity of combining my customary greetings with a few
     observations on your half-term report, which has just reached me.
     It is a most deplorable document. With the exception of your health
     (which is described as "excellent"), and your violin-playing (which
     I note is "most energetic"), I can find no cause for congratulation
     or even satisfaction in your record for the past half-term. Indeed,
     were it not for the existence of the deep-seated conspiracy (of
     which you have so frequently and so earnestly warned me) among the
     masters at your school, to deprive you of your just marks and so
     prevent you from taking your rightful place at the head of the
     form, I should almost suspect you of idling.

     I enclose ten shillings as a birthday gift. If you could contrive
     during the next half-term to overcome the unfortunate prejudice
     with which the Grandwich staff appears to be inspired against you,
     I might see my way to doing something rather more handsome at
     Christmas.--
     Your affectionate father,
                          JOHN HENRY BUMPLEIGH.


(_Reply._

                              _November 7._

     MY DEAR FATHER,--Thanks awfully for the ten bob. Yes, it is most
     deplorable as you say about my report. I feel it very much. It is a
     rum thing that I should have come out bottom, for I have been
     working fearfully hard lately. I expect a mistake has been made in
     adding up the marks. You see, they are all sent in to the
     form-master at half-term, and he, being a classical man, naturally
     can't do mathematics a bit, so he adds up the marks all anyhow, and
     practically anybody comes out top. It is very disheartening. I
     think it would be better if I went on the Modern Side next term.
     The masters there are just as ignerant and unfair as on the
     classical, but not being classical men they do know something about
     adding up marks. So if I went I might get justice done me. I must
     now stop, as I have several hours more prep. to do, and I want to
     go and ask Mr. Killick for leave to work on after bed-time.--Your
     affec. son,
                             E. BUMPLEIGH.)


          No. II

    THE LIMES, WALLOW-IN-THE-WEALD,
             SURREY, _Monday_.

     MY DEAREST BOY,--Very many happy returns of your birthday. The
     others (_Genealogical Tree omitted here_) ... send their best love.

     I fear your father is not quite pleased with your half-term report.
     It seems a pity you cannot get higher up in your form, but I am
     sure you _try_, my boy. I don't think Father makes quite enough
     allowance for your _health_. With your weak digestion, long hours
     of sedentary work must be very trying at times. Ask the matron ...
     (_one page omitted_). I enclose ten shillings, and will send you
     the almond cake and potted lobster you ask for.--Your affectionate
     mother,
                                MARTHA BUMPLEIGH.


(_Reply._

                                _November 7._

     DEAR MUM,--Thanks ever so much for the ten bob, also the lobster
     and cake, which are A1. Yes, the pater wrote to me about my
     report--rather a harsh letter, I thought. Still, we must make
     allowances for him. When he was young education was a very simple
     matter. Now it is the limit. My digestion is all right, thanks, but
     my head aches terribly towards the end of a long day of seven or
     eight hours' work. Don't mention this to the pater, as it might
     worry him. I shall work on to the end, but if the strain gets too
     much it might be a sound plan for me to go on the Modern Side next
     term. You might mention this cassualy to the pater. I must stop
     now, as the prayer-bell is ringing.--Your affec. son,
                                  E. BUMPLEIGH.)


        No. III

    THE LIMES, WALLOW-IN-THE-WEALD,
    SURREY, _Aujourd'hui_.

     DEAR EGGIE,--Many happy returns. I have spent all my dress
     allowance, so I can't do much in the way of a present, I'm afraid;
     but I send a P.O. for 2_s._ 6_d._ You got a pretty bad half-term
     report, my dear. Breakfast that morning _was_ a cheery meal. I got
     hold of it afterwards and read it, and certainly you seem to have
     been getting into hot water all round. By the way, I see you have
     got some new masters at Grandwich, judging by the initials on your
     report. I know "V. K." and "O. P. H.": they are Killick and
     Higginson, aren't they? But who are "A. C. N." and
     "M. P. G."?--Your affec. sister,
                                BARBARA.


(_Reply._

                               _November, 7._

     DEAR BABS,--Thanks ever so much for the 2_s._ 6_d._ It is most
     welcome, as the pater only sent ten bob, being shirty about my
     report; and the mater another. Still, I haven't heard from Aunt
     Deborah yet: she usually comes down hansom on my birthday. The new
     masters you mean are A. C. Newton and M. P. Gainford. I don't
     think either of them would take very kindly to you. Newton is an
     International, so he won't have much use for girls. Gainford is
     rather a snipe, and has been married for years and years. But I'll
     tell you if any more new ones come. I am making a last effort to
     get on to the Mods. next term--about fed up with Higgie.--Your
     affec. brother,
                              E. BUMPLEIGH.)


     No. IV

    THE SCHOOL HOUSE,
    OAKSHOTT SCHOOL, BUCKS, _Monday_.

     DEAR EGGSTER,--Well, old sport, how goes it? Just remembered it is
     your birthday, so send you 9_d._ in stamps--all I have but 2_d._
     How is your mangy school? Wait till our XV plays you on the 18th!
     What ho!--Your affec. brother,
                              J. BUMPLEIGH.

     Just had a letter from the pater about my half-term report. He
     seems in a fairly rotten state.


(_Reply._

                             _November 7._

     DEAR MOPPY,--Thanks awfully for the 9_d._ I am about broke, owing
     to my half-term report coinsiding with my birthday. Putrid luck, I
     call it. Still, Aunt Deborah hasn't weighed in yet. All right,
     send along your bandy-legged XV, and we will return them to you
     knock-kneed. I must stop now, as we are going to rag a man's study
     for wearing a dickey.--Your affec. brother,
                            E. BUMPLEIGH.)


      No. V

    THE LABURNUMS, SURBITON,
          _Monday, Nov. 6._

     MY DEAR NEPHEW,--Another year has gone by, and once more I am
     reminded that my little godson is growing up to man's estate. Your
     fifteenth birthday! And I remember when you were only--(_Here
     Master Egbert skips three sheets and comes to the last page of the
     letter_) ... I am sending you a birthday present--something of
     greater value than usual. It is a handsome and costly edition of
     _Forty Years of Missionary Endeavour in Eastern Polynesia_,
     recently published. The author has actually signed his name upon
     the fly-leaf for you. Think of that! The illustrations are by an
     Associate of the Royal Academy. I hope you are well, and pursuing
     your studies diligently.--Your affectionate aunt,
                            DEBORAH SITWELL.


(_Reply._

                             _November 7._

     DEAR AUNT DEBORAH,--Thank you very much for so kindly remembering
     my birthday. The book has just arrived, and I shall always look
     upon it as one of my most valued possessions. I will read it
     constantly--whenever I have time, in fact; but really after being
     in school hard at work for ten or twelve hours a day, one is more
     inclined for bed than books, even one on such an absorbing subject
     as this. I am much interested in Missionary Endeavours, and help
     them in every way I can. We are having a sermon on the subject next
     Sunday. There is to be a collection, and I intend to make a special
     effort.--Your affec. nephew,
                             E. BUMPLEIGH.)

       *       *       *       *       *

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

     _"Forty Years of Missionary Endeavour in Eastern Polynesia._
     Presented by E. Bumpleigh, Nov. 8."




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 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.

[Illustration: THE MAN OF THE WORLD]

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
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 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!... 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 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 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,
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 corrected

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.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Lighter Side of School Life, by Ian Hay