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.