He was very far from realising the imperfections of his equipment for
the grand entry; but still he was not without uneasiness. In particular
the conversation incident to the canal-boat wager was disturbing him.
It amazed him, as he reflected, that he should have remained, to such an
advanced age, in a state of ignorance concerning the origin of the clay
from which the crocks of his native district were manufactured. That
the Sunday should have been able to inform him did not cause him any
shame, for he guessed from the peculiar eager tone of voice in which the
facts had been delivered, that the Sunday was merely retailing some
knowledge recently acquired by chance. He knew all the Sunday's tones
of voice; and he also was well aware that the Sunday's brain was not on
the whole better stored than his own. Further, the Sunday was satisfied
with his bit of accidental knowledge. Edwin was not. Edwin wanted to
know why, if the clay for making earthenware was not got in the Five
Towns, the Five Towns had become the great seat of the manufacture. Why
were not pots made in the South, where the clay came from? He could not
think of any answer to this enigma, nor of any means of arriving by
himself at an answer. The feeling was that he ought to have been able
to arrive at the answer as at the answer to an equation.
He did not definitely blame his education; he did not think clearly
about the thing at all. But, as a woman with a vague discomfort dimly
fears cancer, so he dimly feared that there might be something
fundamentally unsound in this sound education of his. And he had
remorse for all the shirking that he had been guilty of during all his
years at school. He shook his head solemnly at the immense and nearly
universal shirking that continually went on. He could only acquit three
or four boys, among the hundreds he had known, of the shameful sin. And
all that he could say in favour of himself was that there were many
worse than Edwin Clayhanger. Not merely the boys, but the masters, were
sinners. Only two masters could he unreservedly respect as having acted
conscientiously up to their pretensions, and one of these was an
unpleasant brute. All the cleverness, the ingenuities, the fakes, the
insincerities, the incapacitaties, the vanities, and the dishonesties of
the rest stood revealed to him, and he judged them by the mere essential
force of character alone. A schoolmaster might as well attempt to
deceive God as a boy who is watching him every day with the inhuman eye
of youth.
"All this must end now!" he said to himself, meaning all that could be
included in the word "shirk."
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