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A year passed, and when Philip came to the school
the old masters were all in their places; but a good many changes
had taken place notwithstanding their stubborn resistance, none the
less formidable because it was concealed under an apparent desire to
fall in with the new head's ideas. Though the form-masters still
taught French to the lower school, another master had come, with a
degree of doctor of philology from the University of Heidelberg and
a record of three years spent in a French lycee, to teach French to
the upper forms and German to anyone who cared to take it up instead
of Greek. Another master was engaged to teach mathematics more
systematically than had been found necessary hitherto. Neither of
these was ordained. This was a real revolution, and when the pair
arrived the older masters received them with distrust. A laboratory
had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the
character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what
further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his. The
school was small as public schools go, there were not more than two
hundred boarders; and it was difficult for it to grow larger, for it
was huddled up against the Cathedral; the precincts, with the
exception of a house in which some of the masters lodged, were
occupied by the cathedral clergy; and there was no more room for
building. But Mr. Perkins devised an elaborate scheme by which he
might obtain sufficient space to make the school double its present
size. He wanted to attract boys from London. He thought it would be
good for them to be thrown in contact with the Kentish lads, and it
would sharpen the country wits of these.
"It's against all our traditions," said Sighs, when Mr. Perkins made
the suggestion to him. "We've rather gone out of our way to avoid
the contamination of boys from London."
"Oh, what nonsense!" said Mr. Perkins.
No one had ever told the form-master before that he talked nonsense,
and he was meditating an acid reply, in which perhaps he might
insert a veiled reference to hosiery, when Mr. Perkins in his
impetuous way attacked him outrageously.
"That house in the precincts--if you'd only marry I'd get the
Chapter to put another couple of stories on, and we'd make
dormitories and studies, and your wife could help you."
The elderly clergyman gasped. Why should he marry? He was
fifty-seven, a man couldn't marry at fifty-seven. He couldn't start
looking after a house at his time of life. He didn't want to marry.
If the choice lay between that and the country living he would much
sooner resign. All he wanted now was peace and quietness.
"I'm not thinking of marrying," he said.
Mr. Perkins looked at him with his dark, bright eyes, and if there
was a twinkle in them poor Sighs never saw it.
"What a pity! Couldn't you marry to oblige me? It would help me a
great deal with the Dean and Chapter when I suggest rebuilding your
house."
But Mr. Perkins' most unpopular innovation was his system of taking
occasionally another man's form. He asked it as a favour, but after
all it was a favour which could not be refused, and as Tar,
otherwise Mr. Turner, said, it was undignified for all parties. He
gave no warning, but after morning prayers would say to one of the
masters:
"I wonder if you'd mind taking the Sixth today at eleven. We'll
change over, shall we?"
They did not know whether this was usual at other schools, but
certainly it had never been done at Tercanbury. The results were
curious. Mr. Turner, who was the first victim, broke the news to his
form that the headmaster would take them for Latin that day, and on
the pretence that they might like to ask him a question or two so
that they should not make perfect fools of themselves, spent the
last quarter of an hour of the history lesson in construing for them
the passage of Livy which had been set for the day; but when he
rejoined his class and looked at the paper on which Mr. Perkins had
written the marks, a surprise awaited him; for the two boys at the
top of the form seemed to have done very ill, while others who had
never distinguished themselves before were given full marks. When he
asked Eldridge, his cleverest boy, what was the meaning of this the
answer came sullenly:
"Mr. Perkins never gave us any construing to do. He asked me what I
knew about General Gordon."
Mr. Turner looked at him in astonishment. The boys evidently felt
they had been hardly used, and he could not help agreeing with their
silent dissatisfaction. He could not see either what General Gordon
had to do with Livy. He hazarded an inquiry afterwards.
"Eldridge was dreadfully put out because you asked him what he knew
about General Gordon," he said to the headmaster, with an attempt at
a chuckle.
Mr. Perkins laughed.
"I saw they'd got to the agrarian laws of Caius Gracchus, and I
wondered if they knew anything about the agrarian troubles in
Ireland. But all they knew about Ireland was that Dublin was on the
Liffey. So I wondered if they'd ever heard of General Gordon."
Then the horrid fact was disclosed that the new head had a mania for
general information. He had doubts about the utility of examinations
on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted
common sense.
Sighs grew more worried every month; he could not get the thought
out of his head that Mr. Perkins would ask him to fix a day for his
marriage; and he hated the attitude the head adopted towards
classical literature. There was no doubt that he was a fine scholar,
and he was engaged on a work which was quite in the right tradition:
he was writing a treatise on the trees in Latin literature; but he
talked of it flippantly, as though it were a pastime of no great
importance, like billiards, which engaged his leisure but was not to
be considered with seriousness. And Squirts, the master of the
Middle Third, grew more ill-tempered every day.
It was in his form that Philip was put on entering the school. The
Rev. B. B. Gordon was a man by nature ill-suited to be a
schoolmaster: he was impatient and choleric. With no one to call him
to account, with only small boys to face him, he had long lost all
power of self-control. He began his work in a rage and ended it in a
passion. He was a man of middle height and of a corpulent figure; he
had sandy hair, worn very short and now growing gray, and a small
bristly moustache. His large face, with indistinct features and
small blue eyes, was naturally red, but during his frequent attacks
of anger it grew dark and purple. His nails were bitten to the
quick, for while some trembling boy was construing he would sit at
his desk shaking with the fury that consumed him, and gnaw his
fingers. Stories, perhaps exaggerated, were told of his violence,
and two years before there had been some excitement in the school
when it was heard that one father was threatening a prosecution: he
had boxed the ears of a boy named Walters with a book so violently
that his hearing was affected and the boy had to be taken away from
the school. The boy's father lived in Tercanbury, and there had been
much indignation in the city, the local paper had referred to the
matter; but Mr. Walters was only a brewer, so the sympathy was
divided. The rest of the boys, for reasons best known to themselves,
though they loathed the master, took his side in the affair, and, to
show their indignation that the school's business had been dealt
with outside, made things as uncomfortable as they could for
Walters' younger brother, who still remained. But Mr. Gordon had
only escaped the country living by the skin of his teeth, and he had
never hit a boy since. The right the masters possessed to cane boys
on the hand was taken away from them, and Squirts could no longer
emphasize his anger by beating his desk with the cane. He never did
more now than take a boy by the shoulders and shake him. He still
made a naughty or refractory lad stand with one arm stretched out
for anything from ten minutes to half an hour, and he was as violent
as before with his tongue.
No master could have been more unfitted to teach things to so shy a
boy as Philip. He had come to the school with fewer terrors than he
had when first he went to Mr. Watson's. He knew a good many boys who
had been with him at the preparatory school. He felt more grownup,
and instinctively realised that among the larger numbers his
deformity would be less noticeable. But from the first day Mr.
Gordon struck terror in his heart; and the master, quick to discern
the boys who were frightened of him, seemed on that account to take
a peculiar dislike to him. Philip had enjoyed his work, but now he
began to look upon the hours passed in school with horror. Rather
than risk an answer which might be wrong and excite a storm of abuse
from the master, he would sit stupidly silent, and when it came
towards his turn to stand up and construe he grew sick and white
with apprehension. His happy moments were those when Mr. Perkins
took the form. He was able to gratify the passion for general
knowledge which beset the headmaster; he had read all sorts of
strange books beyond his years, and often Mr. Perkins, when a
question was going round the room, would stop at Philip with a smile
that filled the boy with rapture, and say:
"Now, Carey, you tell them."
The good marks he got on these occasions increased Mr. Gordon's
indignation. One day it came to Philip's turn to translate, and the
master sat there glaring at him and furiously biting his thumb. He
was in a ferocious mood. Philip began to speak in a low voice.
"Don't mumble," shouted the master.
Something seemed to stick in Philip's throat.
"Go on. Go on. Go on."
Each time the words were screamed more loudly. The effect was to
drive all he knew out of Philip's head, and he looked at the printed
page vacantly. Mr. Gordon began to breathe heavily.
"If you don't know why don't you say so? Do you know it or not? Did
you hear all this construed last time or not? Why don't you speak?
Speak, you blockhead, speak!"
The master seized the arms of his chair and grasped them as though
to prevent himself from falling upon Philip. They knew that in past
days he often used to seize boys by the throat till they almost
choked. The veins in his forehead stood out and his face grew dark
and threatening. He was a man insane.
Philip had known the passage perfectly the day before, but now he
could remember nothing.
"I don't know it," he gasped.
"Why don't you know it? Let's take the words one by one. We'll soon
see if you don't know it."
Philip stood silent, very white, trembling a little, with his head
bent down on the book. The master's breathing grew almost stertorous.
"The headmaster says you're clever. I don't know how he sees it.
General information." He laughed savagely. "I don't know what they
put you in his form for, Blockhead."
He was pleased with the word, and he repeated it at the top of his
voice.
"Blockhead! Blockhead! Club-footed blockhead!"
That relieved him a little. He saw Philip redden suddenly. He told
him to fetch the Black Book. Philip put down his Caesar and went
silently out. The Black Book was a sombre volume in which the names
of boys were written with their misdeeds, and when a name was down
three times it meant a caning. Philip went to the headmaster's house
and knocked at his study-door. Mr. Perkins was seated at his table.
"May I have the Black Book, please, sir."
"There it is," answered Mr. Perkins, indicating its place by a nod
of his head. "What have you been doing that you shouldn't?"
"I don't know, sir."
Mr. Perkins gave him a quick look, but without answering went on
with his work. Philip took the book and went out. When the hour was
up, a few minutes later, he brought it back.
"Let me have a look at it," said the headmaster. "I see Mr. Gordon
has black-booked you for 'gross impertinence.' What was it?"
"I don't know, sir. Mr. Gordon said I was a club-footed blockhead."
Mr. Perkins looked at him again. He wondered whether there was
sarcasm behind the boy's reply, but he was still much too shaken.
His face was white and his eyes had a look of terrified distress.
Mr. Perkins got up and put the book down. As he did so he took up
some photographs.
"A friend of mine sent me some pictures of Athens this morning," he
said casually. "Look here, there's the Akropolis."
He began explaining to Philip what he saw. The ruin grew vivid with
his words. He showed him the theatre of Dionysus and explained in
what order the people sat, and how beyond they could see the blue
Aegean. And then suddenly he said:
"I remember Mr. Gordon used to call me a gipsy counter-jumper when I
was in his form."
And before Philip, his mind fixed on the photographs, had time to
gather the meaning of the remark, Mr. Perkins was showing him a
picture of Salamis, and with his finger, a finger of which the nail
had a little black edge to it, was pointing out how the Greek ships
were placed and how the Persian.
XVII
Philip passed the next two years with comfortable monotony. He was
not bullied more than other boys of his size; and his deformity,
withdrawing him from games, acquired for him an insignificance for
which he was grateful. He was not popular, and he was very lonely.
He spent a couple of terms with Winks in the Upper Third. Winks,
with his weary manner and his drooping eyelids, looked infinitely
bored. He did his duty, but he did it with an abstracted mind. He
was kind, gentle, and foolish. He had a great belief in the honour
of boys; he felt that the first thing to make them truthful was not
to let it enter your head for a moment that it was possible for them
to lie. "Ask much," he quoted, "and much shall be given to you."
Life was easy in the Upper Third. You knew exactly what lines would
come to your turn to construe, and with the crib that passed from
hand to hand you could find out all you wanted in two minutes; you
could hold a Latin Grammar open on your knees while questions were
passing round; and Winks never noticed anything odd in the fact that
the same incredible mistake was to be found in a dozen different
exercises. He had no great faith in examinations, for he noticed
that boys never did so well in them as in form: it was
disappointing, but not significant. In due course they were moved
up, having learned little but a cheerful effrontery in the
distortion of truth, which was possibly of greater service to them
in after life than an ability to read Latin at sight.
Then they fell into the hands of Tar. His name was Turner; he was
the most vivacious of the old masters, a short man with an immense
belly, a black beard turning now to gray, and a swarthy skin. In his
clerical dress there was indeed something in him to suggest the
tar-barrel; and though on principle he gave five hundred lines to
any boy on whose lips he overheard his nickname, at dinner-parties
in the precincts he often made little jokes about it. He was the
most worldly of the masters; he dined out more frequently than any
of the others, and the society he kept was not so exclusively
clerical. The boys looked upon him as rather a dog. He left off his
clerical attire during the holidays and had been seen in Switzerland
in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine and a good dinner, and
having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a lady who was very
probably a near relation, was thenceforward supposed by generations
of schoolboys to indulge in orgies the circumstantial details of
which pointed to an unbounded belief in human depravity.
Mr. Turner reckoned that it took him a term to lick boys into shape
after they had been in the Upper Third; and now and then he let fall
a sly hint, which showed that he knew perfectly what went on in his
colleague's form. He took it good-humouredly. He looked upon boys as
young ruffians who were more apt to be truthful if it was quite
certain a lie would be found out, whose sense of honour was peculiar
to themselves and did not apply to dealings with masters, and who
were least likely to be troublesome when they learned that it did
not pay. He was proud of his form and as eager at fifty-five that it
should do better in examinations than any of the others as he had
been when he first came to the school. He had the choler of the
obese, easily roused and as easily calmed, and his boys soon
discovered that there was much kindliness beneath the invective with
which he constantly assailed them. He had no patience with fools,
but was willing to take much trouble with boys whom he suspected of
concealing intelligence behind their wilfulness. He was fond of
inviting them to tea; and, though vowing they never got a look in
with him at the cakes and muffins, for it was the fashion to believe
that his corpulence pointed to a voracious appetite, and his
voracious appetite to tapeworms, they accepted his invitations with
real pleasure.
Philip was now more comfortable, for space was so limited that there
were only studies for boys in the upper school, and till then he had
lived in the great hall in which they all ate and in which the lower
forms did preparation in a promiscuity which was vaguely distasteful
to him. Now and then it made him restless to be with people and he
wanted urgently to be alone. He set out for solitary walks into the
country. There was a little stream, with pollards on both sides of
it, that ran through green fields, and it made him happy, he knew
not why, to wander along its banks. When he was tired he lay
face-downward on the grass and watched the eager scurrying of
minnows and of tadpoles. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to
saunter round the precincts. On the green in the middle they
practised at nets in the summer, but during the rest of the year it
was quiet: boys used to wander round sometimes arm in arm, or a
studious fellow with abstracted gaze walked slowly, repeating to
himself something he had to learn by heart. There was a colony of
rooks in the great elms, and they filled the air with melancholy
cries. Along one side lay the Cathedral with its great central
tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of beauty, felt when he
looked at it a troubling delight which he could not understand. When
he had a study (it was a little square room looking on a slum, and
four boys shared it), he bought a photograph of that view of the
Cathedral, and pinned it up over his desk. And he found himself
taking a new interest in what he saw from the window of the Fourth
Form room. It looked on to old lawns, carefully tended, and fine
trees with foliage dense and rich. It gave him an odd feeling in his
heart, and he did not know if it was pain or pleasure. It was the
first dawn of the aesthetic emotion. It accompanied other changes.
His voice broke. It was no longer quite under his control, and queer
sounds issued from his throat.
Then he began to go to the classes which were held in the
headmaster's study, immediately after tea, to prepare boys for
confirmation. Philip's piety had not stood the test of time, and he
had long since given up his nightly reading of the Bible; but now,
under the influence of Mr. Perkins, with this new condition of the
body which made him so restless, his old feelings revived, and he
reproached himself bitterly for his backsliding. The fires of Hell
burned fiercely before his mind's eye. If he had died during that
time when he was little better than an infidel he would have been
lost; he believed implicitly in pain everlasting, he believed in it
much more than in eternal happiness; and he shuddered at the dangers
he had run.
Since the day on which Mr. Perkins had spoken kindly to him, when he
was smarting under the particular form of abuse which he could least
bear, Philip had conceived for his headmaster a dog-like adoration.
He racked his brains vainly for some way to please him. He treasured
the smallest word of commendation which by chance fell from his
lips. And when he came to the quiet little meetings in his house he
was prepared to surrender himself entirely. He kept his eyes fixed
on Mr. Perkins' shining eyes, and sat with mouth half open, his head
a little thrown forward so as to miss no word. The ordinariness of
the surroundings made the matters they dealt with extraordinarily
moving. And often the master, seized himself by the wonder of his
subject, would push back the book in front of him, and with his
hands clasped together over his heart, as though to still the
beating, would talk of the mysteries of their religion. Sometimes
Philip did not understand, but he did not want to understand, he
felt vaguely that it was enough to feel. It seemed to him then that
the headmaster, with his black, straggling hair and his pale face,
was like those prophets of Israel who feared not to take kings to
task; and when he thought of the Redeemer he saw Him only with the
same dark eyes and those wan cheeks.
Mr. Perkins took this part of his work with great seriousness. There
was never here any of that flashing humour which made the other
masters suspect him of flippancy. Finding time for everything in his
busy day, he was able at certain intervals to take separately for a
quarter of an hour or twenty minutes the boys whom he was preparing
for confirmation. He wanted to make them feel that this was the
first consciously serious step in their lives; he tried to grope
into the depths of their souls; he wanted to instil in them his own
vehement devotion. In Philip, notwithstanding his shyness, he felt
the possibility of a passion equal to his own. The boy's temperament
seemed to him essentially religious. One day he broke off suddenly
from the subject on which he had been talking.
"Have you thought at all what you're going to be when you grow up?"
he asked.
"My uncle wants me to be ordained," said Philip.
"And you?"
Philip looked away. He was ashamed to answer that he felt himself
unworthy.
"I don't know any life that's so full of happiness as ours. I wish I
could make you feel what a wonderful privilege it is. One can serve
God in every walk, but we stand nearer to Him. I don't want to
influence you, but if you made up your mind--oh, at once--you
couldn't help feeling that joy and relief which never desert one
again."
Philip did not answer, but the headmaster read in his eyes that he
realised already something of what he tried to indicate.
"If you go on as you are now you'll find yourself head of the school
one of these days, and you ought to be pretty safe for a scholarship
when you leave. Have you got anything of your own?"
"My uncle says I shall have a hundred a year when I'm twenty-one."
"You'll be rich. I had nothing."
The headmaster hesitated a moment, and then, idly drawing lines with
a pencil on the blotting paper in front of him, went on.
"I'm afraid your choice of professions will be rather limited. You
naturally couldn't go in for anything that required physical
activity."
Philip reddened to the roots of his hair, as he always did when any
reference was made to his club-foot. Mr. Perkins looked at him
gravely.
"I wonder if you're not oversensitive about your misfortune. Has it
ever struck you to thank God for it?"
Philip looked up quickly. His lips tightened. He remembered how for
months, trusting in what they told him, he had implored God to heal
him as He had healed the Leper and made the Blind to see.
"As long as you accept it rebelliously it can only cause you shame.
But if you looked upon it as a cross that was given you to bear only
because your shoulders were strong enough to bear it, a sign of
God's favour, then it would be a source of happiness to you instead
of misery."
He saw that the boy hated to discuss the matter and he let him go.
But Philip thought over all that the headmaster had said, and
presently, his mind taken up entirely with the ceremony that was
before him, a mystical rapture seized him. His spirit seemed to free
itself from the bonds of the flesh and he seemed to be living a new
life. He aspired to perfection with all the passion that was in him.
He wanted to surrender himself entirely to the service of God, and
he made up his mind definitely that he would be ordained. When the
great day arrived, his soul deeply moved by all the preparation, by
the books he had studied and above all by the overwhelming influence
of the head, he could hardly contain himself for fear and joy. One
thought had tormented him. He knew that he would have to walk alone
through the chancel, and he dreaded showing his limp thus obviously,
not only to the whole school, who were attending the service, but
also to the strangers, people from the city or parents who had come
to see their sons confirmed. But when the time came he felt suddenly
that he could accept the humiliation joyfully; and as he limped up
the chancel, very small and insignificant beneath the lofty vaulting
of the Cathedral, he offered consciously his deformity as a
sacrifice to the God who loved him.
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