"But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shiv'ring in the winter's cold.
* * * * *
The pitying women raised a clamour round."
CRABBE, _The Borough_.
A great many people say that all suffering is good for one, and I am
sure pain does improve one very often, and in many ways. It teaches one
sympathy, it softens and it strengthens. But I cannot help thinking that
there are some evil experiences which only harden and stain. The best I
can say for what we endured at Crayshaw's is that it _was_ experience,
and so I suppose could not fail to teach one something, which, as Jem
says, was "more than Snuffy did."
The affection with which I have heard men speak of their school-days and
school-masters makes me know that Mr. Crayshaw was not a common type of
pedagogue. He was not a common type of man, happily; but I have met
other specimens in other parts of the world in which his leading quality
was as fully developed, though their lives had nothing in common with
his except the opportunities of irresponsible power.
The old wounds are scars now, it is long past and over, and I am grown
up, and have roughed it in the world; but I say quite deliberately that
I believe that Mr. Crayshaw was not merely a harsh man, uncultured and
inconsiderate, having need and greed of money, taking pupils cheap,
teaching them little or nothing, and keeping a kind of rough order with
too much flogging,--but that the mischief of him was that he was
possessed by a passion (not the less fierce because it was unnatural)
which grew with indulgence and opportunity, as other passions grow, and
that this was a passion for cruelty.
One does not rough it long in this wicked world without seeing more
cruelty both towards human beings and towards animals than one cares to
think about; but a large proportion of common cruelty comes of
ignorance, bad tradition and uncultured sympathies. Some painful
outbreaks of inhumanity, where one would least expect it, are no doubt
strictly to be accounted for by disease. But over and above these common
and these exceptional instances, one cannot escape the conviction that
irresponsible power is opportunity in all hands and a direct temptation
in some to cruelty, and that it affords horrible development to those
morbid cases in which cruelty becomes a passion.
That there should ever come a thirst for blood in men as well as tigers,
is bad enough but conceivable when linked with deadly struggle, or at
the wild dictates of revenge. But a lust for cruelty growing fiercer by
secret and unchecked indulgence, a hideous pleasure in seeing and
inflicting pain, seems so inhuman a passion that we shrink from
acknowledging that this is ever so.
And if it belonged to the past alone, to barbarous despotisms or to
savage life, one might wisely forget it; for the dark pages of human
history are unwholesome as well as unpleasant reading, unless the mind
be very sane in a body very sound. But those in whose hands lie the
destinies of the young and of the beasts who serve and love us, of the
weak, the friendless, the sick and the insane, have not, alas! this
excuse for ignoring the black records of man's abuse of power!
The records of its abuse in the savage who loads women's slender
shoulders with his burdens, leaves his sick to the wayside jackal, and
knocks his aged father on the head when he is past work; the brutality
of slave-drivers, the iniquities of vice-maddened Eastern
despots;--such things those who never have to deal with them may afford
to forget.
But men who act for those who have no natural protectors, or have lost
the power of protecting themselves, who legislate for those who have no
voice in the making of laws, and for the brute creation, which we win to
our love and domesticate for our convenience; who apprentice pauper boys
and girls, who meddle with the matters of weak women, sick persons, and
young children, are bound to face a far sadder issue. That even in these
days, when human love again and again proves itself not only stronger
than death, but stronger than all the selfish hopes of life; when the
everyday manners of everyday men are concessions of courtesy to those
who have not the strength to claim it; when children and pet animals are
spoiled to grotesqueness; when the good deeds of priest and physician,
nurse and teacher, surpass all earthly record of them--man, as man, is
no more to be trusted with unchecked power than hitherto.
The secret histories of households, where power should be safest in the
hands of love; of hospitals, of schools, of orphanages, of poorhouses,
of lunatic-asylums, of religious communities founded for GOD'S worship
and man's pity, of institutions which assume the sacred title as well as
the responsibilities of Home--from the single guardian of some rural
idiot to the great society which bears the blessed Name of Jesus--have
not each and all their dark stories, their hushed-up scandals, to prove
how dire is the need of public opinion without, and of righteous care
within, that what is well begun should be well continued?
If any one doubts this, let him pause on each instance, one by one, and
think of what he has seen, and heard, and read, and known of; and he
will surely come to the conviction that human nature cannot, even in the
very service of charity, be safely trusted with the secret exercise of
irresponsible power, and that no light can be too fierce to beat upon
and purify every spot where the weak are committed to the tender mercies
of the consciences of the strong.
Mr. Crayshaw's conscience was not a tender one, and very little light
came into his out-of-the-way establishment, and no check whatever upon
his cruelty. It had various effects on the different boys. It killed one
in my day, and the doctor (who had been "in a difficulty" some years
back, over a matter through which Mr. Crayshaw helped him with bail and
testimony) certified to heart disease, and we all had our
pocket-handkerchiefs washed, and went to the funeral. And Snuffy had
cards printed with a black edge, and several angels and a broken lily,
and the hymn--
"Death has been here and borne away
A brother from our side;
Just in the morning of his day,
As young as we he died."
--and sent them to all the parents. But the pupils had to pay for the
stamps. And my dear mother cried dreadfully, first because she was so
sorry for the boy, and secondly because she ever had felt uncharitably
towards Mr. Crayshaw.
Crayshaw's cruelty crushed others, it made liars and sneaks of boys
naturally honest, and it produced in Lorraine an unchildlike despair
that was almost grand, so far was the spirit above the flesh in him. But
I think its commonest and strangest result was to make the boys bully
each other.
One of the least cruel of the tyrannies the big boys put upon the little
ones, sometimes bore very hardly on those who were not strong. They used
to ride races on our backs and have desperate mounted battles and
tournaments. In many a playground and home since then I have seen boys
tilt and race, and steeplechase, with smaller boys upon their backs, and
plenty of wholesome rough-and-tumble in the game; and it has given me a
twinge of heartache to think how, even when we were at play, Crayshaw's
baneful spirit cursed us with its example, so that the big and strong
could not be happy except at the expense of the little and weak.
For it was the big ones who rode the little ones, with neatly-cut
ash-sticks and clumsy spurs. I can see them now, with the thin legs of
the small boys tottering under them, like a young donkey overridden by a
coal-heaver.
I was a favourite horse, for I was active and nimble, and (which was
more to the point) well made. It was the shambling, ill-proportioned
lads who suffered most. The biggest boy in school rode me, as a rule,
but he was not at all a bad bully, so I was lucky. He never spurred me,
and he boasted of my willingness and good paces. I am sure he did not
know, I don't suppose he ever stopped to think, how bad it was for me,
or what an aching lump of prostration I felt when it was over. The day I
fainted after winning a steeplechase, he turned a bucket of cold water
over me, and as this roused me into a tingling vitality of pain, he was
quite proud of his treatment, and told me nothing brought a really good
horse round after a hard day like a bucket of clean water. And (so much
are we the creatures of our conditions!) I remember feeling something
approaching to satisfaction at the reflection that I had "gone till I
dropped," and had been brought round after the manner of the
best-conducted stables.
It was not that that made Jem and me run away. (For we did run away.)
Overstrain and collapse, ill-usage short of torture, hard living and
short commons, one got a certain accustomedness to, according to the
merciful law which within certain limits makes a second nature for us
out of use and wont. The one pain that knew no pause, and allowed of no
revival, the evil that overbore us, mind and body, was the evil of
constant dread. Upon us little boys fear lay always, and the terror of
it was that it was uncertain. What would come next, and from whom, we
never knew.
It was I who settled we should run away. I did it the night that Jem
gave in, and would do nothing but cry noiselessly into his sleeve and
wish he was dead. So I settled it and told Lorraine. I wanted him to
come too, but he would not. He pretended that he did not care, and he
said he had nowhere to go to. But he got into Snuffy's very own room at
daybreak whilst we stood outside and heard him snoring; and very loud he
must have snored too, for I could hear my heart thumping so I should not
have thought I could have heard anything else. And Lorraine took the
back-door key off the drawers, and let us out, and took it back again.
He feared nothing. There was a walnut-tree by the gate, and Jem said,
"Suppose we do our faces like gipsies, so that nobody may know us." (For
Jem was terribly frightened of being taken back.) So we found some old
bits of peel and rubbed our cheeks, but we dared not linger long over
it, and I said, "We'd better get further on, and we can hide if we hear
steps or wheels." So we took each other's hands, and for nearly a mile
we ran as hard as we could go, looking back now and then over our
shoulders, like the picture of Christian and Hopeful running away from
the Castle of Giant Despair.
We were particularly afraid of the milkman, for milkmen drive about
early, and he had taken a runaway boy back to Crayshaw's years before,
and Snuffy gave him five shillings. They said he once helped another boy
to get away, but it was a big one, who gave him his gold watch. He would
do anything if you paid him. Jem and I had each a little bundle in a
handkerchief, but nothing in them that the milkman would have cared for.
We managed very well, for we got behind a wall when he went by, and I
felt so much cheered up I thought we should get home that day, far as it
was. But when we got back into the road, I found that Jem was limping,
for Snuffy had stamped on his foot when Jem had had it stuck out beyond
the desk, when he was writing; and the running had made it worse, and at
last he sat down by the roadside, and said I was to go on home and send
back for him. It was not very likely I would leave him to the chance of
being pursued by Mr. Crayshaw; but there he sat, and I thought I never
should have persuaded him to get on my back, for good-natured as he is,
Jem is as obstinate as a pig. But I said, "What's the use of my having
been first horse with the heaviest weight in school, if I can't carry
you?" So he got up and I carried him a long way, and then a cart
overtook us, and we got a lift home. And they knew us quite well, which
shows how little use walnut-juice is, and it is disgusting to get off.
I think, as it happened, it was very unfortunate that we had discoloured
our faces; for though my mother was horrified at our being so thin and
pinched-looking, my father said that of course we looked frights with
brown daubs all over our cheeks and necks. But then he never did notice
people looking ill. He was very angry indeed, at first, about our
running away, and would not listen to what we said. He was angry too
with my dear mother, because she believed us, and called Snuffy a bad
man and a brute. And he ordered the dog-cart to be brought round, and
said that Martha was to give us some breakfast, and that we might be
thankful to get that instead of a flogging, for that when _he_ ran away
from school to escape a thrashing, his father gave him one thrashing
while the dog-cart was being brought round, and drove him straight back
to school, where the school-master gave him another.
"And a very good thing for me," said my father, buttoning his coat,
whilst my mother and Martha went about crying, and Jem and I stood
silent. If we were to go back, the more we told, the worse would be
Snuffy's revenge. An unpleasant hardness was beginning to creep over me.
"The next time I run away," was my thought, "I shall not run home." But
with this came a rush of regret for Jem's sake. I knew that Crayshaw's,
did more harm to him than to me, and almost involuntarily I put my arms
round him, thinking that if they would only let him stay, I could go
back and bear anything, like Lewis Lorraine. Jem had been crying, and
when he hid his face on my shoulder, and leaned against me, I thought it
was for comfort, but he got heavier and heavier, till I called out, and
he rolled from my arms and was caught in my father's. He had been
standing about on the bad foot, and pain and weariness and hunger and
fright overpowered him, and he had fainted.
The dog-cart was counter-ordered, and Jem was put to bed, and Martha
served me a breakfast that would have served six full-grown men. I ate
far more than satisfied me, but far less than satisfied Martha, who
seemed to hope that cold fowl and boiled eggs, fried bacon and pickled
beef, plain cakes and currant cakes, jam and marmalade, buttered toast,
strong tea and unlimited sugar and yellow cream, would atone for the
past in proportion to the amount I ate, if it did not fatten me under
her eyes. I really think I spent the rest of the day in stupor. I am
sure it was not till the following morning that I learned the decision
to which my father had come about us.
Jem was too obviously ill to be anywhere at present but at home; and my
father decided that he would not send him back to Crayshaw's at all, but
to a much more expensive school in the south of England, to which the
parson of our parish was sending one of his sons. I was to return to
Crayshaw's at once; he could not afford the expensive school for us
both, and Jem was the eldest. Besides which, he was not going to
countenance rebellion in any school to which he sent his sons, or to
insult a man so highly recommended to him as Mr. Crayshaw had been.
There certainly seemed to have been some severity, and the boys seemed
to be a very rough lot; but Jem would fight, and if he gave he must
take. His great-grandfather was just the same, and _he_ fought the
Putney Pet when he was five-and-twenty, and his parents thought he was
sitting quietly at his desk in Fetter Lane.
I loved Jem too well to be jealous of him, but I was not the less
conscious of the tender tone in which my father always spoke even of
his faults, and of the way it stiffened and cooled when he added that I
was not so ready with my fists, but that I was as fond of my own way as
Jem was of a fight; but that setting up for being unlike other people
didn't do for school life, and that the Woods had done me no kindness by
making a fool of me. He added, however, that he should request Mr.
Crayshaw, as a personal favour, that I should receive no punishment for
running away, as I had suffered sufficiently already.
We had told very little of the true history of Crayshaw's before Jem
fainted, and I felt no disposition to further confidences. I took as
cheerful a farewell of my mother as I could, for her sake; and put on a
good deal of swagger and "don't care" to console Jem. He said, "You're
as plucky as Lorraine," and then his eyes shut again. He was too ill to
think much, and I kissed his head and left him. After which I got
stoutly into the dog-cart, and we drove back up the dreary hills down
which Jem and I had run away.
That Snuffy was bland to cringing before my father did not give me hope
that I should escape his direst revenge; and the expression of
Lorraine's face showed me, by its sympathy, what _he_ expected. But we
were both wrong, and for reasons which we then knew nothing about.
Cruelty was, as I have said, Mr. Crayshaw's ruling passion, but it was
not his only vice. There was a whispered tradition that he had once been
in jail for a misuse of his acquirements in the art of penmanship; and
if you heard his name cropping up in the confidential conversation of
such neighbours as small farmers, the postman, the parish overseer, and
the like, it was sure to be linked with unpleasingly suggestive
expressions, such as--"a dirty bit of business," "a nasty job that," "an
awkward affair," "very near got into trouble," "a bit of bother about
it, but Driver and Quills pulled him through; theirs isn't a nice
business, and they're men of t' same feather as Crayshaw, so I reckon
they're friends." Many such hints have I heard, for the 'White Lion' was
next door to the sweet-shop, and in summer, refreshment of a sober kind,
with conversation to match, was apt to be enjoyed on the benches
outside. The good wives of the neighbourhood used no such euphuisms as
their more prudent husbands, when they spoke of Crayshaw's. Indeed one
of the whispered anecdotes of Snuffy's past was of a hushed-up story
that was just saved from becoming a scandal, but in reference to which
Mr. Crayshaw was even more narrowly saved from a crowd of women who had
taken the too-tardy law into their own hands. I remember myself the
retreat of an unpaid washer-woman from the back premises of Crayshaw's
on one occasion, and the unmistakable terms in which she expressed her
opinions.
"Don't tell me! I know Crayshaw's well enough; such folks is a curse to
a country-side, but judgment overtakes 'em at last."
"Judgment," as the good woman worded it, kept threatening Mr. Crayshaw
long before it overtook him, as it is apt to disturb scoundrels who keep
a hypocritical good name above their hidden misdeeds. As it happened, at
the very time Jem and I ran away from him, Mr. Crayshaw himself was
living in terror of one or two revelations, and to be deserted by two of
his most respectably connected boys was an ill-timed misfortune. The
countenance my father had been so mistaken as to afford to his
establishment was very important to him, for we were the only pupils
from within fifty miles, and our parents' good word constituted an
"unexceptionable reference."
Thus it was that Snuffy pleaded humbly (but in vain) for the return of
Jem, and that he not only promised that I should not suffer, but to my
amazement kept his word.
Judgment lingered over the head of Crayshaw's for two years longer, and
I really think my being there had something to do with maintaining its
tottering reputation. I was almost the only lad in the school whose
parents were alive and at hand and in a good position, and my father's
name stifled scandal. Most of the others were orphans, being cheaply
educated by distant relatives or guardians, or else the sons of poor
widows who were easily bamboozled by Snuffy's fluent letters, and the
religious leaflets which it was his custom to enclose. (In several of
these cases, he was "managing" the poor women's "affairs" for them.) One
or two boys belonged to people living abroad. Indeed, the worst bully in
the school was a half-caste, whose smile, when he showed his gleaming
teeth, boded worse than any other boy's frown. He was a wonderful
acrobat, and could do extraordinary tricks of all sorts. My being nimble
and ready made me very useful to him as a confederate in the exhibitions
which his intense vanity delighted to give on half-holidays, and kept me
in his good graces till I was old enough to take care of myself. Oh, how
every boy who dreaded him applauded at these entertainments! And what
dangerous feats I performed, every other fear being lost in the fear of
him! I owe him no grudge for what he forced me to do (though I have had
to bear real fire without flinching when he failed in a conjuring trick,
which should only have simulated the real thing); what I learned from
him has come in so useful since, that I forgive him all.
I was there for two years longer. Snuffy bullied me less, and hated me
the more. I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. It was a hateful life,
but I am sure the influence of a good home holds one up in very evil
paths. Every time we went back to our respective schools my father gave
us ten shillings, and told us to mind our books, and my mother kissed us
and made us promise we would say our prayers every day. I could not bear
to break my promise, though I used to say them in bed (the old form we
learnt from her), and often in such a very unfit frame of mind, that
they were what it is very easy to call "a mockery."
GOD knows (Who alone knows the conditions under which each soul blunders
and spells on through life's hard lessons) if they were a mockery. _I_
know they were unworthy to be offered to Him, but that the habit helped
to keep me straight I am equally sure. Then I had a good home to go to
during the holidays. That was everything, and it is in all humbleness
that I say that I do not think the ill experiences of those years
degraded me much. I managed to keep some truth and tenderness about me;
and I am thankful to remember that I no more cringed to Crayshaw than
Lorraine did, and that though I stayed there till I was a big boy, I
never maltreated a little one.