morning we leave for Salisbury Plain, where we are to camp out for ten
days. To that I am looking forward immensely. Sharing a tent with seven
boys in this house should bring me closer to them than ever and I ought
to be able to learn something valuable about that most elusive and
tricky thing, a boy's mind.
They are never quite natural in the presence of a master; perhaps
they'll forget that I am one at Tidworth.
Our O.C. here is a strange fellow. I like him very much, but his views
on life are diametrically opposed to my own. He is as hard as nails
and is a twentieth-century Stoic. He despises all beautiful things;
his bookshelves are lined with Kipling and guides to military strategy
and tactics. He lives in and for the Corps. He is never happy unless
he is in uniform. Like myself he is a mathematician, but he makes all
his work as military as possible. Day and night he evolves schemes
for field-days, outpost, advanced guard and other exercises; he is
an expert scout, signaller, and drill-master. He demands the utmost
punctilio in matters of ceremonial on parade: he coaches individually
each boy who shoots on the range; he spends most of his holidays in
barracks or on Army manœuvres as a lieutenant in the Special Reserve.
He is one of the few men I know who is convinced that we are shortly
to embark on a colossal European war, and naturally all the rest of
Common Room laugh at him. He really is rather absurd, yet I cannot
help but love him, he is so splendidly sure of himself. His is one of
the rooms to which I feel any inclination to go when I feel lonely. He
sits up to all hours of the night drawing maps and working out military
problems from old examination papers, but he is always eager and ready
for an argument. His principal bone of contention with me is that I
don't "ginger up" the boys enough. He is a firm believer in the rod;
he canes nearly all the boys in his House weekly, just to keep them up
to the mark and himself in training. He detests my theories that boys
should be taught in comfortable rooms with good pictures on the walls
and æsthetic colours to delight their senses. He is one of those men
who is suspicious of all Art as tending towards the immoral. They say
he is admirable in camp, and that all the other Public School officers
stand in awe of him because he knows his job so much better than they
do. He certainly is unlike any other schoolmaster whom I have ever
known. There is a sort of Straffordian "thoroughness" about him which
makes him an idol in the sight of the boys who, to give them their due,
certainly do bestow all their hero-worship on the Nietzschean superman
when they find him.
IV
_August 10, 1910_
I am back in Chagford again after ten of the best days I can remember.
Camp was one continuous round of sheer joy. The weather was good: they
gave us plenty of work to do; I learnt an immense amount of soldiering
and I have become quite as keen as any of them.
O'Connor, our O.C., has recommended me for a commission and I go into
barracks at the Depot in Exeter next week. I had no idea that life
under canvas could be so good. To be woken after a dreamless sleep
at five on a perfect summer morning, to open the tent-flaps and look
out on the gorgeous woods of the Pennings and then to dash up and
have an icy shower-bath before first parade, to come in to breakfast
with an appetite as keen as that of a baby, to spend the greater part
of the day in the open air, washing up, cleaning the tent and my
uniform, or running about as a scout searching for information, to
shout rowdy songs in company with a couple of thousand other spirits
as healthy and care-free as oneself, to gossip in the lines as the
light gradually dwindles away at night, and last of all to be sung to
sleep by the bugle's "last post" and "lights out," in short to live
as man should live, in a sort of half-savage, wholly healthy way like
this is one delirious dream. I loved every minute of it. Would that
it could have continued for a hundred instead of ten days. The boys in
my tent treated me exactly as one of themselves. I was ordered about
by my section commander just like any other private; in fact, I was
privileged enough to be taken by everybody just as a private, as if
there were no Radchester and this was all. It was just one glorious
"rag": the fight for food and drink as orderly of the day, the hustle
to get everything cleared up in time for parade, the deadly funk lest
one's buttons should not pass muster at the inspection, the fear lest
one should do the wrong thing in close order drill on parade, and
so bring ridicule down on the school or oneself from the tyrannical
sergeants who bullied us into shape, everything was thoroughly good and
I loved it.
It is very quiet and tame at Chagford after that strenuous time, but
I have never before realized how precious a thing a hot bath was, or
clean sheets and a comfortable bed, and entire liberty with regard
to the way in which one spends one's day. Chagford is becoming my
home, my refuge from the world. Betty and Thomasin even came as far
as Moretonhampstead in the motor-bus to meet me. I could have hugged
them both for this. They were disappointed not to see Illingworth and
it was hard to account for his absence. I said that he had gone to
Switzerland to complete his education. I miss him even more here than I
did at school. We sang all the old songs to-night and I read some more
stories out of "The Arabian Nights." It is hard to imagine that three
months have passed since I was last here. The village, they tell me, is
crowded: all the summer visitors are now here. I don't like to hear
that--I am jealous of my find. I don't like hordes of Londoners prying
into my favourite nooks. I shall find banana-skins and orange-pips on
the Wallabrook to-morrow, and probably the way to Cranmere will be
indicated by a long succession of paper bags and bits of discarded bun.
I wish I could describe the fascination of the moor. As soon as I got
to Exeter I saw the blue hills in the distance with their quaint,
craggy tors, and my heart leaped within me. I wanted to get out of
the train and run to greet them. By the time that we had climbed out
of Newton to Bovey I was racing from side to side of the carriage to
glut my eyes with the rich sights which met my eye wherever I looked,
the white-washed cottages, the prosperous farms, the rookeries, the
rock-strewn streams, the thick woods, the riot of many-coloured
flowers, the red loam and real green fields--how different these from
the poor parched pastures of Radchester; the square squat church
towers, the tapering spires, the big mansions of the squirearchy, the
slow plodding farm labourers in the winding lanes, the myriad animals
squatting, running, flying, chasing and being chased; everything spoke
to me of home and then at last at Moretonhampstead to be met by such
dear creatures as Betty and Thomasin: my cup of happiness was indeed
full.
_August 21, 1910_
I am to go back to Chagford as soon as I have finished my military
training here in order to coach young Willoughby (whose brother was at
New College with me last year) for Woolwich. He said that he didn't
mind where he went and so he fell in at once with my suggestion of
Chagford. I am not altogether liking life in barracks after my wild
and free week at Chagford. There I got up when I liked, ordered what
I liked for meals, was waited on hand and foot by Betty and Thomasin,
lazed by the side of the Teign and bathed at frequent intervals in a
deep pool which nobody knew of, far from all inquisitive eyes, and
trapesed about the moor to my heart's content every day. I took a
heap of books but except in the kitchen at nights, when I read aloud,
I never had any temptation to open them. After the strenuous life of
camp I was only too glad of the opportunity to meander and gossip. Life
seems to move very slowly in these Devon villages. No one seems to have
been married or to have died since I was last here: the same girls
serve in the same shops, the same men occupy the same seats in the bar
parlour at "The Half-Moon" and "The Goat and Boy"; the only change is
the influx of visitors attired in immaculate flannels, who get excited
because their copy of the _Times_ "was not sent up at the usual time
to-day."
Thank Heaven, I've only got to endure ten days more of this: I am not
overfond of the officers. They resent my presence, I think, because
I am not a _pukka_ soldier: I never could be--I have not O'Connor's
temperament. There is such an amazing amount of ritual and ceremony
about the mess. There's not much to do except to drink and read
the papers, and "get up" the parts of the "rifle," which bore me.
The Sergeant-Major has taken me under his wing and given me tips
preparatory to my exam., but I'm not so grateful as I ought to be.
Every morning I go out on first parade, usually in a parlous funk
about my clothes. Do I wear a sword or not? Whom exactly am I expected
to salute? What are my duties? Everything is hazy: there is nothing
definite laid down and frequently I loiter about all the morning only
to find that I am not wanted. Most of the senior officers seem to spend
their time filling up papers in the orderly room. In the afternoons
they go off and play tennis or fish, and I am left to my own devices
until dinner, which meal I am expected to attend. I have explored the
city, which is an attractive one. The inhabitants are sleepy, but
extraordinarily healthy-looking and rubicund of hue: the girls almost
uncannily pretty.
Betty and Thomasin came in from Chagford for the day yesterday at my
invitation and I took them out to lunch and tea, and we had a rare good
time together. They are very anxious for my release and complain that
Fernworthy View is very dull without me. Whether that be true or no,
all blessings be upon their sweet heads for saying so.
I have had letters from heaps of Radcastrians who were in camp with me,
declaring that they find home very slow and boring after the ecstatic
days in camp.
_September 15, 1910_
I passed my exam. all right at Exeter and very glad I was to shake the
dust of the barracks square from my feet and once more to get back to
my beloved Chagford.
Willoughby is a Wykehamist, who is trying to get into "The Shop" in
November. His mathematics are sound but his English is lamentable. He
seems to have read nothing except, quaintly enough, Norwegian sagas:
he is always quoting "Burnt Njal." I find him excellent company: and
he has ravished the hearts of most of the girls who are staying here.
It is much gayer than it was when I was last here; we have had three
gorgeous dances. I wish I did not feel such a fool at these shows.
Radchester has unfitted me for all these society gatherings. I feel
abominably out of it; it is so long since I used to dance regularly.
I get in a paralytic fear lest I should tread on my partners' toes. I
imagine that I am wooden, gawky and stiff, in spite of my partner's
eulogies on my ease and lightness.
We play tennis, golf and cricket a good deal and even got up some
amateur theatricals, in which I took the part of Myngs in a Pepys
play. These people are as different as possible from the north-country
manufacturers. None of them have much money, but they all possess
honoured names and an intense pride of birth: Cruwys, Polwhele,
Chichester, Acland, Trefusis, or Champernowne. I wish we boasted such
names at Radchester. They are all exceedingly kind to me. I feel
thoroughly happy and at ease when I am gossiping with the villagers
or running about on the moor with Willoughby, who is very slack about
walking, and always wants to hire a car; he has heaps of money and is
certainly lavish with it. He flirts outrageously with all the girls he
comes across, but he is healthy and altogether lovable.
We work all the mornings and sometimes at night. I don't think there
is much doubt about his getting in. He is beginning to take quite an
interest in his English work and constantly bewails the fact that
he never discovered at school what a delightful subject it is. He is
interested in all sides of life and like Illingworth is afraid of
nothing. If he wants to get into conversation with any one he just
does it, whereas, however much I wanted to, I should always hold back
through fear, what of I don't quite know.
I have tried to set down on paper exactly how this country affects
me, but I cannot do it. I envy Eden Phillpotts and Trevena more than
I can say. I look for romance in the faces of the passers-by and try
to weave stories about the villagers but they all fail to materialize.
I cannot make any of them live in my pages; they are all dolls. I
haven't really been taught to observe properly. Willoughby comes back
from a garden-party and can conjure up an exact picture of all the old
frumps, the parsons, the retired civilians, their lovely daughters ...
every one. He knows the colour of their eyes and hair, peculiarities of
their hands and bodies, the material of which their clothes are made,
together with their colour and shape.
I talk to a girl for an hour, find her captivating, come home, essay
to describe her and fail entirely. I can't even remember whether she
is dark or fair, what sort of frock she wore, what was the colour of
her eyes, or whether her features are regular or not. I suppose I don't
look at people enough. I simply daren't. I can't scrutinize: I wish I
could overcome this bashfulness. All the time I keep on thinking what a
fool all these people must imagine me to be. But all the same there are
one or two types here who interest me a good deal. The captain of the
cricket team is a retired colonel of an Indian regiment, an old M.C.C.
man who lives for the game and curses us roundly when we fail to come
up to his expectations. When we win he praises us extravagantly, when
we lose his language becomes positively Oriental. He never misses an
opportunity of net-practice and requires us to be equally keen. His one
aim in life is to go through a season without losing a single match. In
August he always invites the most famous cricketers he knows to come
and stay with him, but they do not always come off on these tricky
wickets and he gets much more furious with them if they fail than he
does with us.
The doctor is another good type: he is very handsome and beloved of
every one. He bears his honours lightly so long as every one gives in
to him, but he sulks like any two-year-old child if he is crossed in
any way. He likes to keep himself surrounded by pretty girls and as
there is no dearth of them he has a good time.
One of the best points about Chagford is the way in which every one
collects at different houses without any special invitation. I find
that the Chagford people have done me no end of good. They've laughed
me out of a good deal of my awkwardness. Though I am much slower at
making friends than Willoughby, I have ceased to regard all mankind as
hostile to me.
The parson here has become a great pal of mine. He is young,
extraordinarily well-read, athletic, and madly keen about his work. It
is a treat, by way of a change, to leave the roysterers and sit smoking
in his study and talk about books and education and social problems.
His life is full to the brim with that happiness which comes from
service. It seems to me an ideal existence to try to keep the vision
splendid before the eyes of these moor-folk, to comfort them in their
distress.... I have often thought of taking Orders. I don't quite know
what keeps me back. I can conceive no finer life than that led by the
preacher. Of all men in history I think I should like to have been John
Wesley. At home nothing delights me so much as taking my father's Bible
Classes or preaching to his Sunday afternoon congregations from the
lectern. I've read the Thirty-nine Articles again lately: I don't like
the thought of swearing my allegiance to them, but there are heaps of
parsons who do excellent work without regarding a great many of them.
I like visiting the cottagers and for the most part they seem to like
me. I know that at home they all expect me "to go into the Church,"
as they call it, in the end. The difficulty is about the call. Is the
Church my vocation? One thing I would not do and that is to take Orders
solely with a view to preferment at school.... No, I could not become
a parson unless I felt a clear call and it is that call that I am so
uncertain of. I don't like separating myself from my fellow-men by
wearing a sombre garb. I believe that it is possible to fulfil one's
life-mission quite as well by remaining among the laity. Certainly
points of ecclesiastical etiquette give rise to no wild enthusiasms
or hatred in my breast. I was educated as a High Churchman and I like
incense and vestments, good music and ritual, but I am quite happy
with the Evangelicals. I could never get so tempestuously wrathful
about minor points of doctrine as that flamboyant, truculent paper that
represents the Catholic Anglican party does. I attend Wesleyan chapels
and Roman Catholic churches and from all of them I derive some measure
of comfort. I have been reading the lessons in church here for the last
few Sundays.
Willoughby always laughs at my church-going; like most of the visitors
he never enters a place of worship. I see no reason why any man should
unless he feels the need of it. I do. He doesn't, and there's an end of
it. The psalms and collects and hymns uplift me and the sermons I look
forward to more than anything in the week. There is always some strain
of philosophy in sermons which appeals to me. I certainly dislike
chapel at school, solely because it is compulsory. The sermons, too,
there are curiously uneven. Most of the parsons on the staff are good,
conscientious Christians, but some are devoted to dogma and others to
moral conduct, and they tend to separate these two features of religion
absolutely, which I am certain is a mistake.
It is like our Divinity lessons: one has to test whether a boy has
done his preparation by asking all sorts of silly questions, while all
the time one is longing to preach, to point out the inspiration, to
expound the Bible as a complete guide to life. It is very difficult to
reconcile the two. My best Divinity scholars are certainly my least
reliable boys as regards Christian practice.
I wish I knew where the solution lies. I am tempted always to let the
exact knowledge go and preach from a text whenever I go in to class.
The object of education is to fit a boy for life, so that he may learn
to conduct himself honourably and valiantly wherever he goes. Does our
present system succeed in doing this? If not, it is a very serious
shortcoming. What we want is much more Christian doctrine taught--it
ought to pervade every lesson. There is still far too great a tendency
to regard Sundays, chapels, and the Divinity lessons as something quite
outside the ordinary things of life: boys are not made to perceive that
their whole life is a religion and that where there is no religion
there is no life, and that to try to live according to one code of
ethics on Sundays and an entirely opposite one all the rest of the week
is simply to kill either the spiritual or the material.
During these holidays I have devised several new schemes for next term:
I don't know how many of them I shall bring to fruition. I've been
reading a good many books on school life lately, but they all seem to
me to lack something, I don't quite know what it is. Most novelists
at one time or another try their hand at a Public School novel--but I
expect that the next generation will smile at our present efforts, just
as we do at "Eric, or Little by Little."
H. A. Vachell in "The Hill" wrote a most readable novel and certainly
portrayed that amazingly sentimental side that is really very prominent
in the human boy. He hates and loves whole-heartedly. Other men and
boys become the whitest of heroes and the blackest of villains in his
eyes. But beyond this there was nothing of truth to life in what was an
exceedingly successful book.
Arnold Lunn in his counterblast to this, "The Harrovians," dwelt too
distinctly on the reverse side of the picture, on the more drab side of
life at school. He is certainly truer in his descriptions but somehow
he missed the soul: "The Harrovians" and "The Hill" are both like
Academy pictures.
I don't know if the real Public School novel will ever be written:
I don't quite know if it can. In the first place, to make it both
readable and true, you must take an exceptional boy like Denis Yorke in
St. John Lucas's "The First Round," or those immortal scamps in "Stalky
and Co."
The average boy's life is too humdrum to make material for a book: of
course a good journalist could make an excellent chapter out of an
account of a house or school match. Most novelists are quite bad at
this journeyman sort of writing. Modern writers are trying different
tactics. The popular way at present is to focus the reader's attention
on Common Room. Boys are dull compared with men; their conversations
inept; all the normal plots round which novels spin i.e. love-making,
are out of place in a boy's life, so clever Hugh Walpole in "Mr. Perrin
and Mr. Traill" has approached nearer than any one else in presenting
at once a readable, exciting and true picture of a certain sort of
school. Certainly there are men on the Radchester staff who might have
walked straight out of the pages of this remarkable novel. Anything
truer than that sordid, lurid picture of the petty jealousies that
exist between grown man and man at a school has never been written.
"But surely," said the parson here to me the other night, while we
were discussing this, "no two cultivated men of the world would be at
daggers drawn simply over a ridiculous umbrella."
"That's just the hideousness of it all," I replied. "Men do behave
in that incomprehensible way at schools. They are like naughty
children: you'd never believe that they are graduates, picked men,
both intellectually and physically. You'd never believe how spiteful
and inhuman men can be to one another until you've lived with them in
a school. I suppose we see too much of one another. I cannot believe
that all schools are like Radchester, but certainly Hugh Walpole must
have suffered at one not unlike it."
I have had a great many talks about education with the parson while I
have been here: he is very keen on raising the age-limit to sixteen in
elementary schools. At present he says that the education they get is
of no use to them. There are heaps of boys and girls of eighteen and
nineteen in Chagford who can neither read nor write, although they were
taught to do both when they were children: as soon as they go on to
the farms they find that these accomplishments are not marketable, and
so they forget them in an incredibly short space of time. Apparently,
too, the standard of morality in village life is deplorably low. When
the youths attend church it is, only too frequently, so that they may
ogle the girls: the church makes a good rendezvous. Neither drunkenness
nor immorality have decreased with the spread of education, nor are the
people any more thrifty or ambitious.
The farmers are as ignorant as they were before the Corn Laws were
repealed. Altogether he draws a lurid, hopeless picture of the country
yokel.
There must be at bottom a wonderfully fine instinct at the heart of
every Englishman for, however bad the system of education may be, and
that it is bad from the highest to lowest I am becoming surer every
day, he still makes a good thing of life.
The Public School product is a fine specimen of a man: he is strictly
honest in all his dealings, he will never turn his back on a "pal,"
he is capable of handling men with sympathy, he can adapt himself at
short shrift to almost any circumstance: if only he could be prevailed
upon not to despise learning and beauty no other type of man could
touch him.