Of Human Bondage (12 page)

  "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.

  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.