his opening researches for the educational best, and whenever he was at
Chastlands he came over nearly every day to The Ingle-Nook on his
bicycle. It was a well-remembered road. Scarcely was there a turn in it
that did not recall some thought of the former time when he had ridden
over daily for a sight of Dolly; he would leave his bicycle in a clump
of gorse by the high road that was surely an outgrown fragment of the
old bush in which he had been wont to leave it six years before; he
would walk down the same rusty path, and his heart would quicken as it
used to quicken at the thought of seeing Dolly. But presently Peter
began to oust Dolly from his thoughts. Sometimes Peter would be standing
waiting for him by the high road. Sometimes Peter, mounted on a little
outgrown bicycle, would meet him on the purple common half way.
A man and a boy of ten are perhaps better company than a man and a boy
of fifteen. There’s so much less egotism between them. At any rate Peter
and Oswald talked of education and travel and politics and philosophy
with unembarrassed freedom. Oswald, like most childless people, had had
no suspicion of what the grey matter of a bright little boy’s brain can
hold. He was amazed at Peter’s views and curiosities. It was Oswald’s
instinct never to talk “down” to man, woman or child. He had never
thought about it, but if you had questioned him he would have told you
that that was the sort of thing one didn’t do. And this instinct gave
him a wide range of available companionship. Peter had never conceived
such good company as Oswald. You could listen to Oswald for hours. They
discoursed upon every topic out of dreamland. And sometimes they came
very close even to that dreamland where Bungo Peter adventured
immortally. Oswald would feel a transfiguring presence, a touch of
fantasy and half suspect their glorious companion.
Much of their talk was a kind of story-telling.
“How should we go to the Congo Forest?” Peter would ask. “Would one go
by Nairobi?”
“No, that’s the other way. We’d have to go——”
And forthwith Nobby and Peter were getting their stuff together and
counting how many porters they would need....
“One day perhaps we’d come upon a place ’fested with crocodiles,” Peter
would say.
“We would. You would be pushing rather ahead of the party with your
guns, looking for anything there might be—pushing through tall reeds far
above your head,” Oswald would oblige.
“You’d be with me,” insisted Peter....
It was really story-telling....
It was Peter’s habit in those days when he was alone to meditate on
paper. He would cover sheet after sheet with rapidly drawn scenes of
adventure. One day Oswald found himself figuring in one of these dream
pictures. He and Peter were leading an army in battle. “Capture of Ten
War Elephants” was the legend thereon. But he realized how clearly the
small boy saw him. Nothing was spared of the darkened, browless side of
his face with its asymmetrical glass eye, the figure of him was very
long and lean and bent, with its arm still in its old sling; and it was
drawn manifestly with the utmost confidence and admiration and love....
Peter’s hostility to schools was removed very slowly. The lessons at
High Cross had scarred him badly, and about Miss Mills clung
associations of the utmost dreariness. Still it was Oswald’s instinct to
consult the young man on his destiny.
“There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Oswald.
“Can’t I read it out of books?” asked Peter.
“You can’t read everything out of books,” said Oswald. “There’s things
you ought to see and handle. And things you can only learn by doing.”
Oswald wanted Peter to plan his own school.
Peter considered. “I’d like lessons about the insides of animals, and
about the people in foreign countries—and how engines work—and all that
sort of thing.”
“Then we must find a school for you where they teach all that sort of
thing,” said Oswald, as though it was merely a question of ordering
goods from the Civil Service Stores....
He had much to learn yet about education.
§ 12
But Oswald was still only face to face with the half of his
responsibility.
One morning he found Peter at the schoolroom table very busy cutting big
letters out of white paper. Beside him was a long strip of Turkey twill
from the dressing-up box that The Ingle-Nook had plagiarized from the
Sheldricks. “I’m getting ready for Joan,” said Peter. “I’m going to put
’Welcome’ on this for over the garden gate. And there’s to be a
triumphal arch.”
Hitherto Peter had scarcely betrayed any interest in Joan at all, now he
seemed able to think of no one else, and Oswald found himself reduced
abruptly from the position of centre of Peter’s universe to a mere
helper in the decorations. But he was beginning to understand the small
boy by this time, and he took the withdrawal of the limelight
philosophically.
When Aunt Phyllis and Joan arrived they found the flagged path from the
“Welcome” gate festooned with chains of coloured paper (bought with
Peter’s own pocket-money and made by him and Oswald, with some slight
assistance and much moral support from Aunt Phœbe in the evening) to the
door. The triumphal arch had been achieved rather in the Gothic style by
putting the movable Badminton net posts into a sort of trousering of
assorted oriental cloths from the dressing-up chest, and crossing two
heads of giant Heracleum between them. Peter stood at the door in the
white satin suit his innocent vanity loved—among other rôles it had
served for Bassanio, Prince Hal, and Antony (over the body of
Cæsar)—with a face of extraordinary solemnity. Behind him stood Uncle
Nobby.
Joan wasn’t quite the Joan that Peter expected. She was still wan from
her illness and she had grown several inches. She was as tall as he. And
she was white-faced, so that her hair seemed blacker than ever, and her
eyes were big and lustrous. She came walking slowly down the path with
her eyes wide open. There was a difference, he felt, in her movement as
she came forward, though he could not have said what it was; there was
more grace in Joan now and less vigour. But it was the same Joan’s voice
that cried, “Oh, Petah! It’s lovely!” She stood before him for a moment
and then threw her arms about him. She hugged him and kissed him, and
Uncle Nobby knew that it was the smear of High Cross School that made
him wriggle out of her embrace and not return her kisses.
But immediately he took her by the hand.
“It’s better in the playroom, Joan,” he said.
“All right, Joan, go on with him,” said Oswald, and came forward to meet
Aunt Phyllis. Aunt Phœbe was on the staircase a little aloof from these
things, as became a woman of intellect, and behind Aunt Phyllis came
Mary, and behind Mary came the Limpsfield cabman with Aunt Phyllis’s
trunk upon his shoulder, and demolished the triumphal arch. But Peter
did not learn of that disaster until later, and then he did not mind; it
had served its purpose.
The playroom (it was the old nursery rechristened) was indeed better. It
was all glorious with paper chains of green and white festooned from
corner to corner. On the floor to the right under the window was every
toy soldier that Peter possessed drawn up in review array—a gorgeous new
Scots Grey band in the front that Oswald had given him. But that was
nothing. The big armchair had been drawn out into the middle of the
room, and on it was _Peter’s own lion-skin_. And a piece of red
stair-carpet had been put for Joan to go up to the throne upon. And
beside the throne was a little table, and on the table was a tinsel robe
from Clarkson’s and a wonderful gilt crown and a sceptre. Oswald had
brought them along that morning.
“The crown is for _you_, Joan!” said Peter. “The sceptre was bought for
_you_.”
Little white-faced Joan stood stockishly with the crown in one hand and
the sceptre in the other. “Put the crown on, Joan,” said Peter. “It’s
yours. It’s a rest’ration ceremony.”
But she didn’t put it on.
“It’s lovely—and it’s lovely,” whispered Joan in a sort of rapture, and
stared about her incredulously with her big dark eyes. It was home
again—_home_, and Mrs. Pybus had passed like an evil dream in the night.
She had never really believed it possible before that Mrs. Pybus could
pass away. Even while Aunt Phyllis and Mary had been nursing her, Mrs.
Pybus had hovered in the background like something more enduring,
waiting for them to pass away as inexplicably as they had come. Joan had
heard the whining voice upon the stairs every day and always while she
was ill, and once Mrs. Pybus had come and stood by her bedside and
remarked like one who maintains an argument, “She’ll be ’appy enough
’ere when she’s better again.”
_No more Mrs. Pybus!_ No more whining scoldings. No more unexpected
slaps and having to go to bed supperless. No more measles and uneasy
misery in a bed with grey sheets. No more dark dreadful sayings that
lurked in the mind like jungle beasts. She was home, home with Peter,
out of that darkness....
And yet—outside was the darkness still....
“Joan,” said Peter, trying to rouse her. “There’s a cake like a birthday
for tea....”
When Oswald came in she was still holding the gilt crown in her hand.
She let Peter take it from her and put it on her head, still staring
incredulously about her. She took the sceptre limply. Peter was almost
gentle with this strange, staring Joan.
§ 13
For some days Oswald regarded Joan as a grave and thoughtful child. She
seemed to be what country people call “old-fashioned.” She might have
been a changeling. He did not hear her laugh once. And she followed
Peter about as if she was his shadow.
Then one day as he cycled over from Chastlands he heard a strange tumult
proceeding from a little field on Master’s farm, a marvellous mixture of
familiar and unfamiliar sounds, an uproar, wonderful as though a
tinker’s van had met a school treat and the twain had got drunk
together. The source of this row was hidden from him by a little
coppice, and he dismounted and went through the wood to investigate.
Joan and Peter had discovered a disused cowshed with a sloping roof of
corrugated iron, and they had also happened upon an abandoned kettle and
two or three tin cans. They were now engaged in hurling these latter
objects on to the resonant roof, down which they rolled thunderously
only to be immediately returned. Joan was no longer a slip of pensive
dignity, Peter was no longer a marvel of intellectual curiosities. They
were both shrieking their maximum. Oswald had never before suspected
Joan of an exceptionally full voice, nor Peter of so vast a wealth of
gurgling laughter. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’” yelled Joan. “Keep the
Pot-A-boilin’.”
“Hoo!” cried Peter. “Hoo! Go it, Joan. Wow!”
And then, to crown the glory, _the kettle burst_. It came into two
pieces. That was too perfect! The two children staggered back. Each
seized a half of the kettle and kicked it deliberately. Then they rolled
away and fell on their stomachs amidst the grass, kicking their legs in
the air.
But the spirit of rowdyism grows with what it feeds upon.
“Oh, let’s do something _reely_ awful!” cried Joan. “Let’s do something
_reely_ awful, Petah!”
Peter’s legs became still and stiff with interrogation.
“Oh, Petah!” said Joan. “If I could only smash a window. Frow a brick
frough a real window, a Big Glass Window. Just one Glass Window.”
“_Where’s_ a window?” said Peter, evidently in a highly receptive
condition.
From which pitch of depravity Oswald roused him by a prod in the
back....
§ 14
But after that Joan changed rapidly. Colour crept back into her skin,
and a faintly rollicking quality into her bearing. She became shorter
again and visibly sturdier, and her hair frizzed more and stuck out
more. Her laugh and her comments upon the world became an increasingly
frequent embroidery upon the quiet of The Ingle-Nook. She seemed to have
a delusion that Peter was just within earshot, but only just.
Oswald wondered how far her recent experiences had vanished from her
mind. He thought they might have done so altogether until one day Joan
took him into her confidence quite startlingly. He was smoking in the
little arbour, and she came and stood beside him so noiselessly that he
did not know she was there until she spoke. She was holding her hands
behind her, and she was regarding the South Downs with a pensive frown.
She was paying him the most beautiful compliment. She had come to
consult him.
“Mrs. Pybus said,” she remarked, “that every one who doesn’t believe
there’s a God goes straight to Hell....
“I don’t believe there’s a God,” said Joan, “and Peter _knows_ there
isn’t.”
For a moment Oswald was a little taken aback by this simple theology.
Then he said, “D’you think Peter’s looked everywhere, Joan?”
Then he saw the real point at issue. “One thing you may be sure about,
Joan,” he said, “and that is that there isn’t a Hell. Which is rather a
pity in its way, because it would be nice to think of this Mrs. Pybus of
yours going there. But there’s no Hell at all. There’s nothing more
dreadful than the dreadful things _in_ life. There’s no need to worry
about Hell.”
That he thought was fairly conclusive. But Joan remained pensive, with
her eyes still on the distant hills. Then she asked one of those
unanswerable children’s questions that are all implication, imputation,
assumption, misunderstanding, and elision.
“But if there isn’t a Hell,” said Joan, “what does God do?”
§ 15
It was after Joan had drifted away again from these theological
investigations that Oswald, after sitting some time in silence, said
aloud and with intense conviction, “I love these children.”
He was no longer a stranger in England; he had a living anchorage. He
looked out over the autumnal glories of the Weald, dreaming intentions.
These children must be educated. They must be educated splendidly.
Oswald wanted to see Peter serving the empire. The boy would have
pluck—he had already the loveliest brain—and a sense of fun. And Joan?
Oswald was, perhaps, not quite so keen in those days upon educating
Joan. That was to come later....
After all, the empire, indeed the whole world of mankind, is made up of
Joans and Peters. What the empire is, what mankind becomes, is nothing
but the sum of what we have made of the Joans and Peters.
CHAPTER THE TENTH
A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS
§ 1
So it was that a systematic intention took hold of the lives of Joan and
Peter. They had been snatched apart adventurously and disastrously out
of the hands of an aimless and impulsive modernism and dragged off into
dusty and decaying corners of the Anglican system. Now they were to be
rescued by this Empire worshipper, this disfigured and suffering
educational fanatic, and taught——?
What was there in Oswald’s mind? His intentions were still sentimental
and cloudy, but they were beginning to assume a firm and definite form.
Just as the Uganda children were being made into civilized men and women
according to the lights and means of the Protectorate government, so
these two children had to be made fit rulers and servants of the
greatest empire in the world. They had to know all that a ruling race
should know, they had to think and act as befitted a leading people. All
this seemed to him the simple and obvious necessity of the case. But he
was a sick man, fatigued much more readily than most men, given to moods
of bitter irritability; he had little knowledge of how he might set
about this task, he did not know what help was available and what was
impossible. He made enquiries and some were very absurd enquiries; he
sought advice and talked to all sorts of people; and meanwhile Joan and
Peter spent a very sunny and pleasant November running wild about
Limpsfield—until one day Oswald noted as much and packed them off for
the rest of the term to Miss Murgatroyd again. The School of St. George
and the Venerable Bede was concentrating upon a Christmas production of
_Alice in Wonderland_. There could not be very much bad teaching anyhow,
and there would be plenty of fun.
How is one to learn where one’s children may be educated?
This story has its comic aspects: Oswald went first to the Education
Department!
He thought that if one had two rather clever and hopeful children upon
whom one was prepared to lavish time and money, an Imperial Education
Department would be able to tell an anxious guardian what schools
existed for them and the respective claims and merits and
inter-relationships of such schools. But he found that the government
which published a six-inch map of the British Isles on which even the
meanest outhouse is marked, had no information for the enquiring parent
or guardian at all in this matter of schools. An educational map had
still to become a part of the equipment of the civilized state. As it
was inconceivable that party capital could be made out of the production
of such a map, it was likely to remain a desideratum in Great Britain
for many years to come.
In an interview that remained dignified on one side at least until the
last, Oswald was referred to the advertisement columns of _The Times_
and the religious and educational papers, and to—“a class of educational
_agents_,” said the official with extreme detachment. “Usually, of
course, people _hear_ of schools.”
So it was that England still referred back to the happy days of the
eighteenth century when our world was small enough for everybody to know
and trust and consult everybody, and tell in a safe and confidential
manner everything that mattered.
“Oh, my God!” groaned Oswald suddenly, giving way to his internal
enemies. “My God! Here are two children, brilliant children—with plenty
of money to be spent on them! Doesn’t the Empire care a twopenny damn
what becomes of them?”
“There is an Association of Private Schoolmasters, I believe,” said the
official, staring at him; “but I don’t know if it’s any good.”
§ 2
Joan was rehearsing a special dance in costume and Peter was
word-perfect as the White Knight long before Oswald had found even a
hopeful school for either of them. He clung for some time to the
delusion that there must exist somewhere a school that would exactly
meet Peter’s natural and reasonable demand for an establishment where
one would learn about “guns and animals, mountains, machines and foreign
people,” that would give lessons about “the insides of animals” and “how
engines work” and “all that sort of thing.” The man wanted a school kept
by Leonardo da Vinci. When he found a curriculum singularly bare of
these vital matters, he began to ask questions.
His questions presently developed into a very tiresome and trying
Catechism for Schoolmasters. He did not allow for the fact that most
private schoolmasters in England were rather overworked and rather
under-exercised men with considerable financial worries. Indeed, he made
allowances for no one. He wanted to get on with the education of Joan
and Peter—and more particularly of Peter.
His Catechism varied considerably in detail, but always it ran upon the
lines of the following questions.
“What sort of boy are you trying to make?”
“How will he differ from an uneducated boy?”
“I don’t mean in manners, I mean how will he differ in imagination?”
“Yes—I said—imagination.”
“Don’t you _know_ that education is building up an imagination? I
thought everybody knew that.”
“Then what _is_ education doing?”
Here usually the Catechized would become troublesome and the Catechist
short and rude. The Catechism would be not so much continued as resumed
after incivilities and a silence.
“What sort of curriculum is my ward to go through?”
“Why is he to _do_ Latin?”
“Why is he to _do_ Greek?”
“Is he going to read or write or speak these languages?”
“Then what is the strange and peculiar benefit of them?”
“What will my ward know about Africa when you have done with him?”
“What will he know about India? Are there any Indian boys here?”
“What will he know about Garibaldi and Italy? About engineering? About
Darwin?”
“Will he be able to write good English?”
“Do your boys do much German? Russian? Spanish or Hindustani?”
“Will he know anything about the way the Royal Exchange affects the
Empire? But why shouldn’t he understand the elementary facts of finance
and currency? Why shouldn’t every citizen understand what a pound
sterling really means? All our everyday life depends on that. What do
you teach about Socialism? Nothing! Did you say Nothing? But he may be a
member of Parliament some day. Anyhow he’ll be a voter.”
“But if you can’t teach him everything why not leave out these damned
classics of yours?”...
The record of an irritable man seeking the impossible is not to be dwelt
upon too closely. During his search for the boys’ school that has yet to
exist, Oswald gave way to some unhappy impulses; he made himself
distressing and exasperating to quite a number of people. From the first
his attitude to scholastic agents was hostile and uncharitable. His
appearance made them nervous and defensive from the outset, more
particularly the fierce cocking of his hat and the red intensity of his
eye. He came in like an accusation rather than an application.
“And tell me, are these all the schools there are?” he would ask,
sitting with various printed and copygraphed papers in his hand.
“All we can recommend,” the genteel young man in charge would say.
“All you are _paid_ to recommend?” Oswald would ask.
“They are the best schools available,” the genteel young man would
fence.
“Bah!” Oswald would say.
A bad opening....
From the ruffled scholastic agents Oswald would go on in a mood that was
bound to ruffle the hopeful school proprietor. Indeed some of these
interviews became heated so soon and so extravagantly that there was a
complete failure to state even the most elementary facts of the case.
Lurid misunderstandings blazed. Uganda got perplexingly into the
dispute. From one admirable establishment in Eastbourne Oswald retreated
with its principal calling after him from his dignified portico, “I
wouldn’t take the little nigger at any price.”
When his doctor saw him after this last encounter he told him; “You are
not getting on as well as you ought to do. You are running about too
much. You ought to be resting completely.”
So Oswald took a week’s rest from school visiting before he tried again.
§ 3
If it had not been for the sense of Joan and Peter growing visibly day
by day, Oswald might perhaps have displayed more of the patience of the
explorer. But his was rather the urgency of a thirsty traveller who
looks for water than the deliberation of a trigonometrical survey. In a
little while he mastered the obvious fact that preparatory schools were
conditioned by the schools for which they prepared. He found a school at
Margate, White Court, which differed rather in quality, and particularly
in the quality of its proprietor, than in the nature of its arrangements
from the other schools he had been visiting, and to this he committed
Peter. Assisted by Aunt Phyllis he found an education for Joan in
Highmorton School, ten miles away; he settled himself in a furnished
house at Margate to be near them both; and having thus gained a
breathing time, he devoted himself to a completer study of the
perplexing chaos of upper-class education in England. What was it “up
to”? He had his own clear conviction of what it ought to be up to, but
the more he saw of existing conditions, the more hopelessly it seemed to
be up to either entirely different things or else, in a spirit of
intellectual sabotage, up to nothing at all. From the preparatory
schools he went on to the great public schools, and from the public
schools he went to the universities. He brought to the quest all the
unsympathetic detachment of an alien observer and all the angry passion
of an anxious patriot. With some suggestions from Matthew Arnold.
“Indolence.” “Insincerity.” These two words became more and more
frequent in his thoughts as he went from one great institution to
another. Occasionally the headmasters he talked to had more than a
suspicion of his unspoken comments. “Their imaginations are dead within
them,” said Oswald. “If only they could see the Empire! If only they
could forget their little pride and dignity and affectations in the
vision of mankind!”