The head-master was a clergyman, a good-humoured, easy-going man, as
temperate, one had no doubt, in his religious life as in all else, and if
he ever lost sleep on our account, it was from a very proper anxiety as to
our gentility. I was in disgrace once because I went to school in some
brilliant blue homespun serge my mother had bought in Devonshire, and I
was told I must never wear it again. He had tried several times, though he
must have known it was hopeless, to persuade our parents to put us into
Eton clothes, and on certain days we were compelled to wear gloves. After
my first year, we were forbidden to play marbles because it was a form of
gambling and was played by nasty little boys, and a few months later told
not to cross our legs in class. It was a school for the sons of
professional men who had failed or were at the outset of their career, and
the boys held an indignation meeting when they discovered that a new boy
was an apothecary's son (I think at first I was his only friend,) and we
all pretended that our parents were richer than they were. I told a little
boy who had often seen my mother knitting or mending my clothes that she
only mended or knitted because she liked it, though I knew it was
necessity.
It was like, I suppose, most schools of its type, an obscene, bullying
place, where a big boy would hit a small boy in the wind to see him double
up, and where certain boys, too young for any emotion of sex, would sing
the dirty songs of the street, but I daresay it suited me better than a
better school. I have heard the head-master say, "how has so-and-so done
in his Greek?" and the class-master reply, "very badly, but he is doing
well in his cricket," and the head-master has gone away saying "Oh, leave
him alone." I was unfitted for school work, and though I would often work
well for weeks together, I had to give the whole evening to one lesson if
I was to know it. My thoughts were a great excitement, but when I tried to
do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in
a high wind. I was always near the bottom of my class, and always making
excuses that but added to my timidity; but no master was rough with me. I
was known to collect moths and butterflies and to get into no worse
mischief than hiding now and again an old tailless white rat in my
coat-pocket or my desk. There was but one interruption of our quiet
habits, the brief engagement of an Irish master, a fine Greek scholar and
vehement teacher, but of fantastic speech. He would open the class by
saying, "there he goes, there he goes," or some like words as the
head-master passed by at the end of the hall. "Of course this school is no
good. How could it be with a clergyman for head-master?" And then perhaps
his eye would light on me, and he would make me stand up and tell me it
was a scandal I was so idle when all the world knew that any Irish boy was
cleverer than a whole class-room of English boys, a description I had to
pay for afterwards. Sometimes he would call up a little boy who had a
girl's face and kiss him upon both cheeks and talk of taking him to Greece
in the holidays, and presently we heard he had written to the boy's
parents about it, but long before the holidays he was dismissed.