A few years ago a little book called _Half-holidays_ attracted some
attention in semi-scholastic, semi-clerical circles. It was anonymous,
and bore the modest motto _Crambe bis cocta_; but those behind the
scenes recognised it as the work of Charles Palmer, who was for many
years a master at Lupton. His acknowledged books include a useful little
work on the Accents and an excellent summary of Roman History from the
Fall of the Republic to Romulus Augustulus. The _Half-holidays_ contains
the following amusing passage; there is not much difficulty in
identifying the N. mentioned in it with Ambrose Meyrick.
"The cleverest dominie sometimes discovers"--the passage begins--"that
he has been living in a fool's paradise, that he has been tricked by a
quiet and persistent subtlety that really strikes one as almost devilish
when one finds it exhibited in the person of an English schoolboy. A
good deal of nonsense, I think, has been written about boys by people
who in reality know very little about them; they have been credited with
complexities of character, with feelings and aspirations and delicacies
of sentiment which are quite foreign to their nature. I can quite
believe in the dead cat trick of Stalky and his friends, but I confess
that the incident of the British Flag leaves me cold and sceptical. Such
refinement of perception is not the way of the boy--certainly not of the
boy as I have known him. He is radically a simple soul, whose feelings
are on the surface; and his deepest laid schemes and manoeuvres hardly
call for the talents of a Sherlock Holmes if they are to be detected and
brought to naught. Of course, a good deal of rubbish has been talked
about the wonderful success of our English plan of leaving the boys to
themselves without the everlasting supervision which is practised in
French schools. As a matter of fact, the English schoolboy is under
constant supervision; where in a French school one wretched usher has to
look after a whole horde of boys, in an English school each boy is
perpetually under the observation of hundreds of his fellows. In
reality, each boy is an unpaid _pion_, a watchdog whose vigilance never
relaxes. He is not aware of this; one need scarcely say that such a
notion is far from his wildest thoughts. He thinks, and very rightly,
doubtless, that he is engaged in maintaining the honour of the school,
in keeping up the observance of the school tradition, in dealing sharply
with slackers and loafers who would bring discredit on the place he
loves so well. He is, no doubt, absolutely right in all this; none the
less, he is doing the master's work unwittingly and admirably. When one
thinks of this, and of the Compulsory System of Games, which ensures
that every boy shall be in a certain place at a certain time, one sees,
I think, that the phrase about our lack of supervision _is_ a phrase
and nothing more. There is no system of supervision known to human wit
that approaches in thoroughness and minuteness the supervision under
which every single boy is kept all through his life at an English Public
School.
"Hence one is really rather surprised when, in spite of all these unpaid
assistants, who are the whole school, one is thoroughly and completely
taken in. I can only remember one such case, and I am still astonished
at the really infernal ability with which the boy in question lived a
double life under the very eyes of the masters and six hundred other
boys. N., as I shall call him, was not in my House, and I can scarcely
say how I came to watch his career with so much interest; but there was
certainly something about him which did interest me a good deal. It may
have been his appearance: he was an odd-looking boy--dark, almost
swarthy, dreamy and absent in manner, and, for the first years of his
school life, a quite typical loafer. Such boys, of course, are not
common in a big school, but there are a few such everywhere. One never
knows whether this kind will write a successful book, or paint a great
picture, or go to the devil--from my observation I am sorry to say that
the last career is the most usual. I need scarcely say that such boys
meet with but little encouragement; it is not the type which the Public
School exists to foster, and the boy who abandons himself to morbid
introspection is soon made to feel pretty emphatically that he is matter
in the wrong place. Of course, one may be crushing genius. If this ever
happened it would be very unfortunate; still, in all communities the
minority must suffer for the good of the majority, and, frankly, I have
always been willing to run the risk. As I have hinted, the particular
sort of boy I have in my mind turns out in nine cases out of ten to be
not a genius, but that much more common type--a blackguard.
"Well, as I say, I was curious about N. I was sorry for him, too; both
his parents were dead, and he was rather in the position of the poor
fellows who have no home life to look forward to when the holidays are
getting near. And his obstinacy astonished me; in most cases the
pressure of public opinion will bring the slackest loafer to a sense of
the error of his ways before his first term is ended; but N. seemed to
hold out against us all with a sort of dreamy resistance that was most
exasperating. I do not think he can have had a very pleasant time. His
general demeanour suggested that of a sage who has been cast on an
island inhabited by a peculiarly repulsive and degraded tribe of
savages, and I need scarcely say that the other boys did their best to
make him realise the extreme absurdity of such behaviour. He was clever
enough at his work, but it was difficult to make him play games, and
impossible to make him play up. He seemed to be looking through us at
something else; and neither the boys nor the masters liked being treated
as unimportant illusions. And then, quite suddenly, N. altered
completely. I believe his housemaster, worn out of all patience, gave
him a severe thrashing; at any rate, the change was instant and
marvellous.
"I remember that a few days before N.'s transformation we had been
discussing the question of the cane at the weekly masters' meeting. I
had confessed myself a very half-hearted believer in the efficacy of the
treatment. I forget the arguments that I used, but I know that I was
strongly inclined to favour the 'Anti-baculist Party,' as the Head
jocosely named it. But a few months later when N.'s housemaster pointed
out N. playing up at football like a young demon, and then with a
twinkle in his eye reminded me of the position I had taken up at the
masters' meeting, there was nothing for it but to own that I had been in
the wrong. The cane had certainly, in this case, proved itself a magic
wand; the sometime loafer had been transformed by it into one of the
healthiest and most energetic fellows in the whole school. It was a
pleasure to watch him at the games, and I remember that his fast
bowling was at once terrific in speed and peculiarly deadly in its
accuracy.
"He kept up this deception, for deception it was, for three or four
years. He was just going up to Oxford, and the whole school was looking
forward to a career which we knew would be quite exceptional in its
brilliance. His scholarship papers astonished the Balliol authorities. I
remember one of the Fellows writing to our Head about them in terms of
the greatest enthusiasm, and we all knew that N.'s bowling would get him
into the University Eleven in his first term. Cricketers have not yet
forgotten a certain performance of his at the Oval, when, as a poetic
journalist observed, wickets fell before him as ripe corn falls before
the sickle. N. disappeared in the middle of term. The whole school was
in a ferment; masters and boys looked at one another with wild faces;
search parties were sent out to scour the country; the police were
communicated with; on every side one heard the strangest surmises as to
what had happened. The affair got into the papers; most people thought
it was a case of breakdown and loss of memory from overwork and mental
strain. Nothing could be heard of N., till, at the end of a fortnight,
his Housemaster came into our room looking, as I thought, puzzled and
frightened.
"'I don't understand,' he said. 'I've had this by the second post. It's
in N.'s handwriting. I can't make head or tail of it. It's some sort of
French, I suppose.'
"He held out a paper closely written in N.'s exquisite, curious script,
which always reminded me vaguely of some Oriental character. The masters
shook their heads as the manuscript went from hand to hand, and one of
them suggested sending for the French master. But, as it happened, I was
something of a student of Old French myself, and I found I could make
out the drift of the document that N. had sent his master.
"It was written in the manner and in the language of Rabelais. It was
quite diabolically clever, and beyond all question the filthiest thing I
have ever read. The writer had really exceeded his master in obscenity,
impossible as that might seem: the purport of it all was a kind of
nightmare vision of the school, the masters and the boys. Everybody and
everything were distorted in the most horrible manner, seen, we might
say, through an abominable glass, and yet every feature was easily
recognisable; it reminded me of Swift's disgusting description of the
Yahoos, over which one may shudder and grow sick, but which one cannot
affect to misunderstand. There was a fantastic episode which I remember
especially. One of us, an ambitious man, who for some reason or other
had become unpopular with a few of his colleagues, was described as
endeavouring to climb the school clock-tower, on the top of which a
certain object was said to be placed. The object was defended, so the
writer affirmed, by 'the Dark Birds of Night,' who resisted the master's
approach in all possible and impossible manners. Even to indicate the
way in which this extraordinary theme was treated would be utterly out
of the question; but I shall never forget the description of the
master's face, turned up towards the object of his quest, as he
painfully climbed the wall. I have never read even in the most filthy
pages of Rabelais, or in the savagest passages of Swift, anything which
approached the revolting cruelty of those few lines. They were
compounded of hell-fire and the Cloaca Maxima.
"I read out and translated a few of the least abominable sentences. I
can hardly say whether the feeling of disgust or that of bewilderment
predominated amongst us. One of my colleagues stopped me and said they
had heard enough; we stared at one another in silence. The astounding
ability, ferocity and obscenity of the whole thing left us quite
dumbfounded, and I remember saying that if a volcano were suddenly to
belch forth volumes of flame and filth in the middle of the playing
fields I should scarcely be more astonished. And all this was the work
of N., whose brilliant abilities in games and in the schools were to
have been worth many thousands a year to X., as one of us put it! This
was the boy that for the last four years we had considered as a great
example of the formative influences of the school! This was the N. who
we thought would have died for the honour of the school, who spoke as if
he could never do enough to repay what X. had done for him! As I say, we
looked at one another with faces of blank amazement and horror. At last
somebody said that N. must have gone mad, and we tried to believe that
it was so, for madness, awful calamity as it is, would be more endurable
than sanity under such circumstances as these. I need scarcely say that
this charitable hypothesis turned out to be quite unfounded: N. was
perfectly sane; he was simply revenging himself for the suppression of
his true feelings for the four last years of his school life. The
'conversion' on which we prided ourselves had been an utter sham; the
whole of his life had been an elaborately organised hypocrisy maintained
with unfailing and unflinching skill term after term and year after
year. One cannot help wondering when one considers the inner life of
this unhappy fellow. Every morning, I suppose, he woke up with curses in
his soul; he smiled at us all and joined in the games with black rage
devouring him. So far as one can say, he was quite sincere in his
concealed opinions at all events. The hatred, loathing and contempt of
the whole system of the place displayed in that extraordinary and
terrible document struck me as quite genuine; and while I was reading it
I could not help thinking of his eager, enthusiastic face as he joined
with a will in the school songs; he seemed to inspire all the boys about
him with something of his own energy and devotion. The apparition was a
shocking one; I felt that for a moment I had caught a glimpse of a
region that was very like hell itself.
"I remember that the French master contributed a characteristic touch of
his own. Of course, the Headmaster had to be told of the matter, and it
was arranged that M. and myself should collaborate in the unpleasant
task of making a translation. M. read the horrible stuff through with an
expression on his face that, to my astonishment, bordered on admiration,
and when he laid down the paper he said:
"'_Eh bien: Maitre Francois est encore en vie, evidemment. C'est le vrai
renouveau de la Renaissance; de la Renaissance en tres mauvaise humeur,
si vous voulez, mais de la Renaissance tout-de-meme. Si, si; c'est de la
cru veritable, je vous assure. Mais, notre bon N. est un Rabelais qui a
habite une terre affreusement seche._'
"I really think that to the Frenchman the terrible moral aspect of the
case was either entirely negligible or absolutely non-existent; he
simply looked on N.'s detestable and filthy performance as a little
masterpiece in a particular literary _genre_. Heaven knows! One does not
want to be a Pharisee; but as I saw M. grinning appreciatively over this
dung-heap I could not help feeling that the collapse of France before
Germany offered no insoluble problem to the historian.
"There is little more to be said as to this extraordinary and most
unpleasant affair. It was all hushed up as much as possible. No further
attempts to discover N.'s whereabouts were made. It was some months
before we heard by indirect means that the wretched fellow had abandoned
the Balliol Scholarship and the most brilliant prospects in life to
attach himself to a company of greasy barnstormers--or 'Dramatic
Artists,' as I suppose they would be called nowadays. I believe that his
subsequent career has been of a piece with these beginnings; but of that
I desire to say nothing."
The passage has been quoted merely in evidence of the great success with
which Ambrose Meyrick adapted himself to his environment at Lupton.
Palmer, the writer, who was a very well-meaning though intensely stupid
person, has told the bare facts as he saw them accurately enough; it
need not be said that his inferences and deductions from the facts are
invariably ridiculous. He was a well-educated man; but in his heart of
hearts he thought that Rabelais, _Maria Monk, Gay Life in Paris and La
Terre_ all came to much the same thing.