II

It was strange, but Meyrick never came in the after days and thanked his

uncle for that sharp dose of physical and mental pain. Even when he was

a man he dreamed of Mr. Horbury and woke up in a cold sweat, and then

would fall asleep again with a great sigh of relief and gladness as he

realised that he was no longer in the power of that "infernal old

swine," "that filthy, canting, cruel brute," as he roughly called his

old master.

The fact was, as some old Luptonians remarked, the two had never

understood one another. With the majority of the boys the High Usher

passed for a popular master enough. He had been a distinguished athlete

in his time, and up to his last days at the school was a football

enthusiast. Indeed, he organised a variety of the Lupton game which met

with immense popularity till the Head was reluctantly compelled to stop

it; some said because he always liked to drop bitter into Horbury's cup

when possible; others--and with more probability on their

side--maintained that it was in consequence of a report received from

the school doctor to the effect that this new species of football was

rapidly setting up an old species of heart disease in the weaker

players.

However that might be, there could be no doubt as to Horbury's intense

and deep-rooted devotion to the school. His father had been a Luptonian

before him. He himself had gone from the school to the University, and

within a year or two of taking his degree he had returned to Lupton to

serve it as a master. It was the general opinion in Public School

circles that the High Usher had counted for as much as Chesson, the

Headmaster, if not for more, in the immense advance in prestige and

popularity that the school had made; and everybody thought that when

Chesson received the episcopal order Horbury's succession was a

certainty. Unfortunately, however, there were wheels within wheels, and

a total stranger was appointed, a man who knew nothing of the famous

Lupton traditions, who (it was whispered) had been heard to say that

"this athletic business" was getting a bit overdone. Mr. Horbury's

friends were furious, and Horbury himself, it was supposed, was bitterly

disappointed. He retreated to one of the few decent canonries which have

survived the wave of agricultural depression; but those who knew him

best doubted whether his ecclesiastical duties were an adequate

consolation for the loss of that coveted Headmastership of Lupton.

To quote the memoir which appeared in the _Guardian_ soon after his

death, over some well-known initials:

"His friends were shocked when they saw him at the Residence. He seemed

no longer the same man, he had aged more in six months, as some of them

expressed themselves, than in the dozen years before. The old joyous

Horbury, full of mirth, an apt master of word-play and logic-fence, was

somehow 'dimmed,' to use the happy phrase of a former colleague, the

Dean of Dorchester. Old Boys who remembered the sparkle of his wit, the

zest which he threw into everything, making the most ordinary form-work

better fun than the games at other schools, as one of them observed,

missed something indefinable from the man whom they had loved so long

and so well. One of them, who had perhaps penetrated as closely as any

into the _arcana_ of Horbury's friendship (a privilege which he will

ever esteem as one of the greatest blessings of his life), tried to

rouse him with an extravagant rumour which was then going the round of

the popular Press, to the effect that considerable modifications were

about to be introduced into the compulsory system of games at X., one of

the greatest of our great Public Schools. Horbury flushed; the old light

came into his eyes; his friend was reminded of the ancient war-horse who

hears once more the inspiring notes of the trumpet. 'I can't believe

it,' he said, and there was a tremor in his voice. 'They wouldn't dare.

Not even Y. (the Headmaster of X.) would do such a scoundrelly thing as

that. I _won't_ believe it.' But the flush soon faded and his apathy

returned. 'After all,' he said, 'I shouldn't wonder if it were so. Our

day is past, I suppose, and for all I know they may be construing the

Breviary and playing dominoes at X. in a few years' time.'

"I am afraid that those last years at Wareham were far from happy. He

felt, I think, out of tune with his surroundings, and, _pace_ the

readers of the _Guardian_, I doubt whether he was ever quite at home in

his stall. He confessed to one of his old associates that he doubted the

wisdom of the whole Cathedral system. 'What,' he said, in his old

characteristic manner, 'would St. Peter say if he could enter this

building and see that gorgeous window in which he is represented with

mitre, cope and keys?' And I do not think that he was ever quite

reconciled to the daily recitation of the Liturgy, accompanied as it is

in such establishments by elaborate music and all the pomp of the

surpliced choir. 'Rome and water, Rome and water!' he has been heard to

mutter under his breath as the procession swept up the nave, and before

he died I think that he had the satisfaction of feeling that many in

high places were coming round to his views.

"But to the very last he never forgot Lupton. A year or two before he

died he wrote the great school song, 'Follow, follow, follow!' He was

pleased, I know, when it appeared in the _Luptonian_, and a famous Old

Boy informs me that he will never forget Horbury's delight when he was

told that the song was already a great favourite in 'Chantry.' To many

of your readers the words will be familiar; but I cannot resist quoting

the first verse:

"I am getting old and grey and the hills seem far away,

And I cannot hear the horn that once proclaimed the morn

When we sallied forth upon the chase together;

For the years are gone--alack!--when we hastened on the track,

And the huntsman's whip went crack! as a signal to our pack

Riding in the sunshine and fair weather.

And yet across the ground

I seem to hear a sound,

A sound that comes up floating from the hollow;

And its note is very clear

As it echoes in my ear,

And the words are: 'Lupton, follow, follow, follow!'

_Chorus._

"Lupton, follow away!

The darkness lies behind us, and before us is the day.

Follow, follow the sun,

The whole world's to be won,

So, Lupton, follow, follow, follow, follow away!

"An old pupil sang this verse to him on his death-bed, and I think,

perhaps, that some at least of the readers of the _Guardian_ will allow

that George Horbury died 'fortified,' in the truest sense, 'with the

rites of the Church'--the Church of a Great Aspiration."

Such was the impression that Mr. Horbury had evidently made upon some of

his oldest friends; but Meyrick was, to the last, an infidel. He read

the verses in the _Guardian_ (he would never subscribe to the

_Luptonian_) and jeered savagely at the whole sentiment of the memoir,

and at the poetry, too.

"Isn't it incredible?" he would say. "Let's allow that the main purpose

of the great Public Schools is to breed brave average boobies by means

of rocker, sticker and mucker and the rest of it. Still, they do

acknowledge that they have a sort of _parergon_--the teaching of two

great literatures, two literatures that have moulded the whole of

Western thought for more than two thousand years. And they pay an animal

like this to teach these literatures--a swine that has not enough

literature of any kind in him to save the soul of a louse! Look at those

verses! Why, a decent fourth form boy would be ashamed to put his name

to them!"

He was foolish to talk in this fashion. People merely said that it was

evident he was one of the failures of the great Public School system;

and the song was much admired in the right circles. A very well-turned

_idem Latine_ appeared in the _Guardian_ shortly after the publication

of the memoir, and the initials at the foot of the version were

recognised as those of a literary dean.

And on that autumn evening, far away in the 'seventies, Meyrick, the

boy, left Mr. Horbury's study in a white fury of grief and pain and

rage. He would have murdered his master without the faintest

compunction, nay, with huge delight. Psychologically, his frame of mind

was quite interesting, though he was only a schoolboy who had just had a

sound thrashing for breaking rules.

For the fact, of course, was that Horbury, the irritating influence of

the Head's conversation and sherry apart, was by no means a bad fellow.

He was for the moment savagely cruel, but then, most men are apt to be

savagely cruel when they suffer from an inflamed liver and offensive

superiors, more especially when there is an inferior, warranted

defenceless, in their power. But, in the main, Horbury was a very decent

specimen of his class--English schoolmaster--and Meyrick would never

allow that. In all his reasoning about schools and schoolmasters there

was a fatal flaw--he blamed both for not being what they never pretended

to be. To use a figure that would have appealed to him, it was if one

quarrelled with a plain, old-fashioned meeting-house because it was not

in the least like Lincoln Cathedral. A chimney may not be a decorative

object, but then it does not profess to be a spire or a pinnacle far in

the spiritual city.

But Meyrick was always scolding meeting-houses because they were not

cathedrals. He has been heard to rave for hours against useful,

unpretentious chimney-pots because they bore no resemblance to celestial

spires. Somehow or other, possibly by inheritance, possibly by the

influence of his father's companionship, he had unconsciously acquired a

theory of life which bore no relation whatever to the facts of it. The

theory was manifest in his later years; but it must have been

stubbornly, if vaguely, present in him all through his boyhood. Take,

for instance, his comment on poor Canon Horbury's verses. He judged

those, as we have seen, by the rules of the fine art of literature, and

found them rubbish. Yet any old Luptonian would have told him that to

hear the whole six hundred boys join in the chorus, "Lupton, follow

away!" was one of the great experiences of life; from which it appears

that the song, whatever its demerits from a literary point of view,

fully satisfied the purpose for which is was written. In other words, it

was an excellent chimney, but Meyrick still persisted in his easy and

futile task of proving that it was not a bit like a spire. Then, again,

one finds a fallacy of still huger extent in that major premiss of his:

that the great Public Schools purpose to themselves as a secondary and

minor object the imparting of the spirit and beauty of the Greek and

Latin literatures. Now, it is very possible that at some distant period

in the past this was an object, or even, perhaps, _the_ object of the

institutions in question. The Humanists, it may be conjectured, thought

of school and University as places where Latin and Greek were to be

learned, and to be learned with the object of enjoying the great thought

and the great style of an antique world. One sees the spirit of this in

Rabelais, for example. The Classics are a wonderful adventure; to learn

to understand them is to be a spiritual Columbus, a discoverer of new

seas and unknown continents, a drinker of new-old wine in a new-old

land. To the student of those days a mysterious drowned Atlantis again

rose splendid from the waves of the great deep. It was these things that

Meyrick (unconsciously, doubtless) expected to find in his school life;

it was for the absence of these things that he continued to scold the

system in his later years; wherein, like Jim in _Huckleberry Finn_, he

missed the point by a thousand miles.

The Latin and Greek of modern instruction are, of course, most curious

and interesting survivals; no longer taught with any view of enabling

students to enjoy and understand either the thought or beauty of the

originals; taught rather in such a manner as to nauseate the learner for

the rest of his days with the very notion of these lessons. Still, the

study of the Classics survives, a curious and elaborate ritual, from

which all sense and spirit have departed. One has only to recollect the

form master's lessons in the _Odyssey_ or the _Bacchae_, and then to view

modern Free-masons celebrating the Mystic Death and Resurrection of

Hiram Abiff; the analogy is complete, for neither the master nor the

Masons have the remotest notion of what they are doing. Both persevere

in strange and mysterious actions from inveterate conservatism.

Meyrick was a lover of antiquity and a special lover of survivals, but

he could never see that the round of Greek syntax, and Latin prose, of

Elegiacs and verbs in [Greek: mi], with the mystery of the Oratio

obliqua and the Optative, was one of the most strange and picturesque

survivals of modern life. It is to be noted, by the way, that the very

meaning of the word "scholar" has been radically changed. Thus a

well-known authority points out that "Melancholy" Burton had no

"scholarship" in the real sense of the word; he merely used his vast

knowledge of ancient and modern literature to make one of the most

entertaining and curious books that the world possesses. True

"scholarship," in the modern sense, is to be sought for not in the

Jacobean translators of the Bible, but in the Victorian revisers. The

former made the greatest of English books out of their Hebrew and Greek

originals; but the latter understood the force of the aorist. It is

curious to reflect that "scholar" once meant a man of literary taste and

knowledge.

Meyrick never mastered these distinctions, or, if he did so in later

years, he never confessed to his enlightment, but went on railing at the

meeting-house, which, he still maintained, _did_ pretend to be a

cathedral. He has been heard to wonder why a certain Dean, who had

pointed out the vast improvements that had been effected by the

Revisers, did not employ a few young art students from Kensington to

correct the infamous drawing of the fourteenth-century glass in his

cathedral. He was incorrigible; he was always incorrigible, and thus, in

his boyhood, on the dark November evening, he meditated the murder of

his good master and uncle--for at least a quarter of an hour.

His father, he remembered, had always spoken of Gothic architecture as

the most wonderful and beautiful thing in the world: a thing to be

studied and loved and reverenced. His father had never so much as

mentioned rocker, much less had he preached it as the one way by which

an English boy must be saved. Hence, Ambrose maintained inwardly that

his visit to Selden Abbey was deserving of reward rather than

punishment, and he resented bitterly, the savage injustice (as he

thought it) of his caning.