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.