II

"Poetry is the only possible way of saying anything that is worth saying

at all." This was an axiom that, in later years, Ambrose Meyrick's

friends were forced to hear at frequent intervals. He would go on to say

that he used the term poetry in its most liberal sense, including in it

all mystic or symbolic prose, all painting and statuary that was worthy

to be called art, all great architecture, and all true music. He meant,

it is to be presumed, that the mysteries can only be conveyed by

symbols; unfortunately, however, he did not always make it quite clear

that this was the proposition that he intended to utter, and thus

offence was sometimes given--as, for example, to the scientific

gentleman who had been brought to Meyrick's rooms and went away early,

wondering audibly and sarcastically whether "your clever friend" wanted

to metrify biology and set Euclid to Bach's Organ Fugues.

However, the Great Axiom (as he called it) was the justification that

he put forward in defence of the notes on which the previous section is

based.

"Of course," he would say, "the symbolism is inadequate; but that is the

defect of speech of any kind when you have once ventured beyond the

multiplication table and the jargon of the Stock Exchange. Inadequacy of

expression is merely a minor part of the great tragedy of humanity. Only

an ass thinks that he has succeeded in uttering the perfect content of

his thought without either excess or defect."

"Then, again," he might go on, "the symbolism would very likely be

misleading to a great many people; but what is one to do? I believe many

good people find Turner mad and Dickens tiresome. And if the great

sometimes fail, what hope is there for the little? We cannot all

be--well--popular novelists of the day."

Of course, the notes in question were made many years after the event

they commemorate; they were the man's translation of all the wonderful

and inexpressible emotions of the boy; and, as Meyrick puts it, many

"words" (or symbols) are used in them which were unknown to the lad of

fifteen.

"Nevertheless," he said, "they are the best words that I can find."

As has been said, the Old Grange was a large, roomy house; a space

could easily have been found for half a dozen more boys if the High

Usher had cared to be bothered with them. As it was, it was a favour to

be at Horbury's, and there was usually some personal reason for

admission. Pelly, for example, was the son of an old friend; Bates was a

distant cousin; and Rawson's father was the master of a small Grammar

School in the north with which certain ancestral Horburys were somehow

connected. The Old Grange was a fine large Caroline house; it had a

grave front of red brick, mellowed with age, tier upon tier of tall,

narrow windows, flush with the walls, and a high-pitched, red-tiled

roof. Above the front door was a rich and curious wooden pent-house,

deeply carven; and within there was plenty of excellent panelling, and

some good mantelpieces, added, it would seem, somewhere about the Adam

period. Horbury had seen its solid and comfortable merits and had bought

the freehold years before at a great bargain. The school was increasing

rapidly even in those days, and he knew that before long more houses

would be required. If he left Lupton he would be able to let the Old

Grange easily--he might almost put it up for auction--and the rent would

represent a return of fifty per cent on his investment. Many of the

rooms were large; of a size out of all proportion to the boys' needs,

and at a very trifling expense partitions might be made and the nine or

ten available rooms be subdivided into studies for twenty or even

twenty-five boys. Nature had gifted the High Usher with a careful,

provident mind in all things, both great and small; and it is but fair

to add that on his leaving Lupton for Wareham he found his anticipations

more than justified. To this day Charles Horbury, his nephew, a high

Government official, draws a comfortable income from his uncle's most

prudent investment, and the house easily holds its twenty-five boys.

Rainy, who took the place from Horbury, was an ingenious fellow and hit

upon a capital plan for avoiding the expense of making new windows for

some of the subdivided studies. After thoughtful consideration he caused

the wooden partitions which were put up to stop short of the ceiling by

four inches, and by this device the study with a window lighted the

study that had none; and, as Rainy explained to some of the parents, a

diffused light was really better for the eyes than a direct one.

In the old days, when Ambrose Meyrick was being made a man of, the four

boys "rattled," as it were, in the big house. They were scattered about

in odd corners, remote from each other, and it seemed from everybody

else. Meyrick's room was the most isolated of any, but it was also the

most comfortable in winter, since it was over the kitchen, to the

extreme left of the house. This part, which was hidden from the road by

the boughs of a great cedar, was an after-thought, a Georgian addition

in grey brick, and rose only to two stories, and in the one furnished

room out of the three or four over the kitchen and offices slept

Ambrose. He wished his days could be as quiet and retired as his nights.

He loved the shadows that were about his bed even on the brightest

mornings in summer; for the cedar boughs were dense, and ivy had been

allowed to creep about the panes of the window; so the light entered dim

and green, filtered through the dark boughs and the ivy tendrils.

Here, then, after the hour of ten each night, he dwelt secure. Now and

again Mr. Horbury would pay nocturnal surprise visits to see that all

lights were out; but, happily, the stairs at the end of the passage,

being old and badly fitted, gave out a succession of cracks like pistol

shots if the softest foot was set on them. It was simple, therefore, on

hearing the first of these reports, to extinguish the candle in the

small secret lantern (held warily so that no gleam of light should

appear from under the door) and to conceal the lantern under the

bed-clothes. One wetted one's finger and pinched at the flame, so there

was no smell of the expiring snuff, and the lantern slide was carefully

drawn to guard against the possibility of suspicious grease-marks on the

linen. It was perfect; and old Horbury's visits, which were rare enough,

had no terrors for Ambrose.

So that night, while the venom of the cane still rankled in his body,

though it had ceased to disturb his mind, instead of going to bed at

once, according to the regulations, he sat for a while on his box

seeking a clue in a maze of odd fancies and conceits. He took off his

clothes and wrapped his aching body in the rug from the bed, and

presently, blowing out the official paraffin lamp, he lit his candle,

ready at the first warning creak on the stairs to douse the glim and

leap between the sheets.

Odd enough were his first cogitations. He was thinking how very sorry he

was to have hit Pelly that savage blow and to have endangered Rawson's

eyesight by the hard boards of the dictionary! This was eccentric, for

he had endured from those two young Apaches every extremity of

unpleasantness for upwards of a couple of years. Pelly was not by any

means an evil lad: he was stupid and beefy within and without, and the

great Public School system was transmuting him, in the proper course and

by the proper steps, into one of those Brave Average Boobies whom

Meyrick used to rail against afterwards. Pelly, in all probability (his

fortunes have not been traced), went into the Army and led the milder

and more serious subalterns the devil's own life. In India he "lay

doggo" with great success against some hill tribe armed with

seventeenth-century muskets and rather barbarous knives; he seems to

have been present at that "Conference of the Powers" described so

brightly by Mr. Kipling. Promoted to a captaincy, he fought with

conspicuous bravery in South Africa, winning the Victoria Cross for his

rescue of a wounded private at the instant risk of his own life, and he

finally led his troop into a snare set by an old farmer; a rabbit of

average intelligence would have smelt and evaded it.

For Rawson one is sorry, but one cannot, in conscience, say much that is

good, though he has been praised for his tact. He became domestic

chaplain to the Bishop of Dorchester, whose daughter Emily he married.

But in those old days there was very little to choose between them, from

Meyrick's point of view. Each had displayed a quite devilish ingenuity

in the art of annoyance, in the whole cycle of jeers and sneers and

"scores," as known to the schoolboy, and they were just proceeding to

more active measures. Meyrick had borne it all meekly; he had returned

kindly and sometimes quaint answers to the unceasing stream of remarks

that were meant to wound his feelings, to make him look a fool before

any boys that happened to be about. He had only countered with a mild:

"What do you do that for, Pelly?" when the brave one smacked his head.

"Because I hate sneaks and funks," Pelly had replied and Meyrick said no

more. Rawson took a smaller size in victims when it was a question of

physical torments; but he had invented a most offensive tale about

Meyrick and had told it all over the school, where it was universally

believed. In a word, the two had done their utmost to reduce him to a

state of utter misery; and now he was sorry that he had punched the nose

of one and bombarded the other with a dictionary!

The fact was that his forebearance had not been all cowardice; it is,

indeed, doubtful whether he was in the real sense a coward at all. He

went in fear, it is true, all his days, but what he feared was not the

insult, but the intention, the malignancy of which the insult, or the

blow, was the outward sign. The fear of a mad bull is quite distinct

from the horror with which most people look upon a viper; it was the

latter feeling which made Meyrick's life a burden to him. And again

there was a more curious shade of feeling; and that was the intense

hatred that he felt to the mere thought of "scoring" off an antagonist,

of beating down the enemy. He was a much sharper lad than either Rawson

or Pelly; he could have retorted again and again with crushing effect,

but he held his tongue, for all such victories were detestable to him.

And this odd sentiment governed all his actions and feelings; he

disliked "going up" in form, he disliked winning a game, not through any

acquired virtue, but by inherent nature. Poe would have understood

Meyrick's feelings; but then the author of _The Imp of the Perverse_

penetrated so deeply into the inmost secrets of humanity that

Anglo-Saxon criticism has agreed in denouncing him as a wholly "inhuman"

writer.

With Meyrick this mode of feeling had grown stronger by provocation; the

more he was injured, the more he shrank from the thought of returning

the injury. In a great measure the sentiment remained with him in later

life. He would sally forth from his den in quest of fresh air on top of

an omnibus and stroll peacefully back again rather than struggle for

victory with the furious crowd. It was not so much that he disliked the

physical contest: he was afraid of getting a seat! Quite naturally, he

said that people who "pushed," in the metaphorical sense, always

reminded him of the hungry little pigs fighting for the largest share of

the wash; but he seemed to think that, whereas this course of action was

natural in the little pigs, it was profoundly unnatural in the little

men. But in his early boyhood he had carried this secret doctrine of his

to its utmost limits; he had assumed, as it were, the role of the

coward and the funk; he had, without any conscious religious motive

certainly, but in obedience to an inward command, endeavoured to play

the part of a Primitive Christian, of a religious, in a great Public

School! _Ama nesciri et pro nihilo aestimari._ The maxim was certainly in

his heart, though he had never heard it; but perhaps if he had searched

the whole world over he could not have found a more impossible field for

its exercise than this seminary, where the broad, liberal principles of

Christianity were taught in a way that satisfied the Press, the public

and the parents.

And he sat in his room and grieved over the fashion in which he had

broken this discipline. Still, something had to be done: he was

compelled to stay in this place, and he did not wish to be reduced to

the imbecility of wretched little Phipps who had become at last more

like a whimpering kitten with the mange than a human being. One had not

the right to allow oneself to be made an idiot, so the principle had to

be infringed--but externally only, never internally! Of that he was

firmly resolved; and he felt secure in his recollection that there had

been no anger in his heart. He resented the presence of Pelly and

Rawson, certainly, but in the manner with which some people resent the

presence of a cat, a mouse, or a black-beetle, as disagreeable objects

which can't help being disagreeable objects. But his bashing of Pelly

and his smashing of Rawson, his remarks (gathered from careful

observation by the banks of the Lupton and Birmingham Canal); all this

had been but the means to an end, the securing of peace and quiet for

the future. He would not be murdered by this infernal Public School

system either, after the fashion of Phipps--which was melancholy, or

after the fashion of the rest--which was more melancholy still, since it

is easier to recover from nervous breakdown than from suffusion of cant

through the entire system, mental and spiritual. Utterly from his

heart he abjured and renounced all the horrible shibboleths of the

school, its sham enthusiasm, its "ethos," its "tone," its "loyal

co-operation--masters and boys working together for the good of the

whole school"--all its ridiculous fetish conventions and absurd

observances, the joint contrivances of young fools and old knaves. But

his resistance should be secret and not open, for a while; there should

be no more "bashing" than was absolutely necessary.

And one thing he resolved upon--he would make all he could out of the

place; he would work like a tiger and get all the Latin and Greek and

French obtainable, in spite of the teaching and its imbecile pedantry.

The school work must be done, so that trouble might be avoided, but

here at night in his room he would really learn the languages they

pottered over in form, wasting half their time in writing sham

Ciceronian prose which would have made Cicero sick, and verse evil

enough to cause Virgil to vomit. Then there was French, taught chiefly

out of pompous eighteenth-century fooleries, with lists of irregular

verbs to learn and Babylonish nonsense about the past participle, and

many other rotten formulas and rules, giving to the whole tongue the air

of a tiresome puzzle which had been dug up out of a prehistoric grave.

This was not the French that he wanted; still, he could write out

irregular verbs by day and learn the language at night. He wondered

whether unhappy French boys had to learn English out of the _Rambler_,

Blair's _Sermons_ and Young's _Night Thoughts_. For he had some sort of

smattering of English literature which a Public School boy has no

business to possess. So he went on with this mental tirade of his: one

is not over-wise at fifteen. It is true enough, perhaps, that the French

of the average English schoolboy is something fit to move only pity and

terror; it may be true also that nobody except Deans and schoolmasters

seems to bring away even the formulas and sacred teachings (such as the

Optative mystery and the Doctrine of Dum) of the two great literatures.

There is, doubtless, a good deal to be said on the subject of the Public

Schoolman's knowledge of the history and literature of his own country;

an infinite deal of comic stuff might be got out of his views and

acquirements in the great science of theology--still let us say,

_Floreat_!

Meyrick turned from his review of the wisdom of his elders and

instructors to more intimate concerns. There were a few cuts of that

vigorous cane which still stung and hurt most abominably, for skill or

fortune had guided Mr. Horbury's hand so that he had been enabled here

and there to get home twice in the same place, and there was one

particular weal on the left arm where the flesh, purple and discoloured,

had swelled up and seemed on the point of bursting. It was no longer

with rage, but with a kind of rapture, that he felt the pain and

smarting; he looked upon the ugly marks of the High Usher's evil humours

as though they had been a robe of splendour. For he knew nothing of that

bad sherry, nothing of the Head's conversation; he knew that when Pelly

had come in quite as late it had only been a question of a hundred

lines, and so he persisted in regarding himself as a martyr in the cause

of those famous "Norman arches," which was the cause of that dear dead

enthusiast, his father, who loved Gothic architecture and all other

beautiful "unpractical" things with an undying passion. As soon as

Ambrose could walk he had begun his pilgrimages to hidden mystic

shrines; his father had led him over the wild lands to places known

perhaps only to himself, and there, by the ruined stones, by the smooth

hillock, had told the tale of the old vanished time, the time of the

"old saints."