boots from his feet and bring slippers. The residue have barely returned
to their noisy fireside when Hulkins' voice is uplifted again. This time
he requires blotting-paper, and the last comer in the panting crowd is
sent into the next study to purloin some. The rest have hardly regained
their fastness when there is a third disturbance, and there is Hulkins
howling like a lost soul for matches. And so, with infinite uproar and
waste of labour, the great man's wants are supplied. It does the fags no
harm, but it is very, very bad for Hulkins.
Frisby is another type. He is not afraid of assuming responsibility. He
is a typical new broom. He dots the i's and crosses the t's of all the
tiresome little regulations in the House. He sets impositions to small
boys with great profusion, and sees to it that they are shown up
punctually. If it is his turn to take roll-call, he descends to the
unsportsmanlike device of waiting upon the very threshold of the Hall
until the clock strikes, and then coming in and shutting the door with a
triumphant bang in the faces of those who had reckoned on the usual
thirty seconds' grace. He ferrets out the misdemeanours of criminals of
fourteen, and gibbets them. He is terribly efficient--but his vigilance
and zeal stop suddenly short at the prospect of a collision with any
malefactor more than five feet high.
Then there is Meakin. He receives his prefectship with a sigh of relief.
For four years he has led a hunted and precarious existence in the lower
walks of the House. His high-spirited playmates have made him a target
for missiles, derided his style of running, broken his spectacles,
raided his study, wrecked his collection of beetles, and derived
unfailing joy from his fluent but impotent imprecations. Now, at last,
he sees peace ahead. He will be left to himself, at any rate. They will
not dare to rag a prefect unless the prefect endeavours to exert his
authority unduly, and Meakin has no intention whatever of doing that. To
Frisby, Office is a sharp two-edged sword; to Meakin, it is merely a
shield and buckler.
Then there is Flabb. He finds a prefect's lot a very tolerable one. He
fully appreciates the fleshpots in the prefect's room; and he feels that
it is pleasant to have fags to whiten his cricket-boots and make toast
for his tea. He maintains friendly relations with the rest of the House,
and treats small boys kindly. He performs his mechanical
duties--roll-call, supervision of Prep, and the like--with as little
friction as possible. But he does not go out of his way to quell riots
or put down bullying; and when any unpleasantness arises between the
Prefects and the House, Flabb effaces himself as completely as possible.
Finally, there is Manby, the head of the House. He is high up in the
Sixth, and a good all-round athlete. He weighs twelve stone ten, and
fears nothing--except a slow ball which comes with the bowler's arm. To
him government comes easily. The House hangs upon his lightest word, and
his lieutenants go about their business with assurance and despatch. He
is a born organiser and a natural disciplinarian. His prestige overawes
the unofficial aristocracy of the House--always the most difficult
section. And he stands no nonsense. A Manby of my acquaintance once came
upon twenty-two young gentlemen in a corner of the cricket-field, who,
having privily abandoned the orthodox game arranged for their benefit
that afternoon, were indulging in a pleasant but demoralising pastime
known as "tip-and-run." Manby, addressing them as "slack little swine, a
disgrace to the House," chastised them one by one, and next half-holiday
made them play tip-and-run under a broiling sun and his personal
supervision from two o'clock till six.
A House with a Manby at the head of it is safe. It can even survive a
weak Housemaster. Greater Britain is run almost entirely by Manbys.
* * * * *
Taking it all round, the prefectorial machine works well. It is by no
means perfect, but it is infinitely more efficient than any other
machine. The chief bar to its smooth running is the inherent loyalty of
boys to one another and their dislike of anything which savours of
tale-bearing. Schoolboys have no love for those who go out of their way
to support the arm of the Law, and a prefect naturally shrinks from
being branded as a master's jackal. Hence, that ideal--a perfect
understanding between a Housemaster and his prefects--is seldom
achieved. What usually happens is that when the Housemaster is
autocratically inclined he runs the House himself, while the prefects
are mere lay figures; and when the Housemaster is weak or indolent the
prefects take the law into their own hands and run the House, often
extremely efficiently, with as little reference to their titular head as
possible. He is a great Housemaster who can co-operate closely with his
prefects without causing friction between the prefects and the House, or
the prefects and himself.
* * * * *
But sometimes an intolerable strain is thrown upon the machine--or
rather, upon the most sensitive portions of it.
Look at this boy, standing uneasily at the door of his study, with his
fingers upon the handle. Outside, in the passage, a riot is in progress.
It is only an ordinary exuberant "rag": he himself has participated in
many such. But the Law enjoins that this particular passage shall be
kept perfectly quiet between the hours of eight and nine in the evening;
and it is this boy's particular duty, as the only prefect resident in
the passage, to put the Law into effect.
He stands in the darkness of his study, nerving himself. The crowd
outside numbers ten or twelve; but he is not in the least afraid of
that. This enterprise calls for a different kind of courage, and a good
deal of it. Jackson is not a particularly prominent member of the House,
except by reason of his office: others far more distinguished than
himself are actually participating in the disturbance outside. It will
be of no avail to emerge wrathfully and say: "Less row, there!" He said
that three nights ago. Two nights ago he said it again, and threatened
reprisals. Last night he named various offenders by name, and stated
that if the offence was repeated he would report them to the
Housemaster. _To-night he has got to do it._ The revellers outside know
this: the present turmoil is practically a challenge. To crown all, he
can hear, above the din, in the very forefront of battle, the voice of
Blake, once his own familiar friend.
With Blake Jackson had reasoned privily only that afternoon, warning him
that the House would go to pot if its untitled aristocracy took to
inciting others, less noble, to deeds of lawlessness. Blake had replied
by recommending his late crony to return to his study and boil his head.
And here he was, leading to-night's riot.
What will young Jackson do? Watch him well, for from his action now you
will be able to forecast the whole of his future life.
He may remain mutely in his study, stop his ears, and allow the storm to
blow itself out. He may appear before the roysterers and utter vain
repetitions, thereby salving his conscience without saving his face. Or
he may go out like a man and fulfil his promise of last night. It sounds
simple enough on paper. But consider what it means to a boy of
seventeen, possessing no sense of perspective to tone down the magnitude
of the disaster he is courting. Jackson hesitates. Then, suddenly:
"I'll be _damned_ if I take it lying down!" he mutters.
He draws a deep breath, turns the handle, and steps out. Next moment he
is standing in the centre of a silent and surly ring, jotting down
names.
"You five," he announces to a party of comparatively youthful offenders,
"can come to the prefect's room after prayers and be tanned. You
three"--he indicates the incredulous Blake and two burly
satellites--"will have to be reported. I'm sorry, but I gave you fair
warning last night."
He turns on his heel and departs in good order to his study,
branded--for life, he feels convinced--as an officious busybody, a
presumptuous upstart, and worst of all, a betrayer of old friends. He
has of his own free will cast himself into the nethermost Hell of the
schoolboy--unpopularity--all to keep his word.
And yet for acts of mere physical courage they give men the Victoria
Cross.
NUMBER II. THE OPPOSITION
To conduct the affairs of a nation requires both a Government and an
Opposition. So it is with school politics. The only difference is that
the scholastic Opposition is much franker about its true aims.
The average schoolboy, contemplating the elaborate arrangements made by
those in authority for protecting him from himself--rules, roll-calls,
bounds, lock-ups, magisterial discipline and prefectorial
supervision--decides that the ordering and management of the school can
be maintained without any active assistance from him; and he plunges
joyously into Opposition with all the abandon of a good sportsman who
knows that the odds are heavily against him. He breaks the Law, or is
broken by the Law, with equal cheerfulness.
[Illustration: THE INTELLECTUAL]
The most powerful member of the Opposition is the big boy who has not
been made a prefect, and is not likely to be made a prefect. He enjoys
many privileges--some of them quite unauthorised--and has no
responsibilities. He is one of the happiest people in the world. He has
reached the age and status at which corporal punishment is supposed to
be too degrading to be feasible: this immunity causes him to realise
that he is a personage of some importance; and when he is addressed
rudely by junior form-masters he frequently stands upon his dignity and
speaks to his Housemaster about it. His position in the House depends
firstly upon his athletic ability, and secondly upon the calibre of
the prefects. Given a timid set of prefects, and an unquestioned
reputation in the football world, Master Bullock has an extremely
pleasant time of it. He possesses no fags, but that does not worry him.
I once knew a potentate of this breed who improvised a small gong out of
the lid of a biscuit-tin, which he hung in his study. When he beat upon
this with a tea-spoon, all within earshot were expected to (and did)
come running for orders. Such as refrained were chastised with a
toasting-fork.
Then comes a great company of which the House recks nothing, and of whom
House history has little to tell--the Cave-Dwellers, the Swots, the
Smugs, the Saps. These keep within their own lurking-places, sedulously
avoiding the noisy conclaves which crowd sociably round the Hall fire.
For one thing, the conversation there bores them intensely, and for
another they would seldom be permitted to join in it. The _role_ of Sir
Oracle is strictly confined to the athletes of the House, though the Wag
and the Oldest Inhabitant are usually permitted to offer observations or
swell the chorus. But the Cave-Dwellers, never.
The curious part about it is that not by any means all the
Cave-Dwellers are "Swots." It is popularly supposed that any boy who
exhibits a preference for the privacy of his study devotes slavish
attention therein to the evening's Prep, thus stealing a march upon his
more sociable and less self-centred brethren. But this is far from being
the case. Many of the Cave-Dwellers dwell in caves because they find it
more pleasant to read novels, or write letters, or develop photographs,
or even do nothing, than listen to stale House gossip or indulge in
everlasting small cricket in a corridor.
They are often the salt of the House, but they have no conception of the
fact. They entertain a low opinion of themselves: they never expect to
rise to any great position in the world: so they philosophically follow
their own bent, and leave the glory and the praise to the athletes and
their _umbrae_. It comes as quite a shock to many of them, when they
leave school and emerge into a larger world, to find themselves not only
liked but looked up to; while the heroes of their schooldays, despite
their hairy arms and club ties, are now dismissed in a word as
"hobbledehoys."
Then comes the Super-Intellectual--the "Highbrow." He is a fish out of
the water with a vengeance, but he does exist at school--somehow. He
congregates in places of refuge with others of the faith; and they
discuss the _English Review_, and mysterious individuals who are only
referred to by their initials--as G. B. S. and G. K. C. Sometimes he
initiates these discussions because they really interest him, but more
often, it is to be feared, because they make him feel superior and
grown-up. Somewhere in the school grounds certain youthful schoolmates
of his, inspired by precisely similar motives but with different methods
of procedure, are sitting in the centre of a rhododendron bush smoking
cigarettes. In each case the idea is the same--namely, a hankering after
meats which are not for babes. But the smoker puts on no side about his
achievements, whereas the "highbrow" does. He loathes the vulgar herd
and holds it aloof. He does not inform the vulgar herd of this fact, but
he confides it to the other highbrows, and they applaud his
discrimination. Intellectual snobbery is a rare thing among boys, and
therefore difficult to account for. Perhaps the pose is a form of
reaction. It is comforting, for instance, after you have been compelled
to dance the can-can in your pyjamas for the delectation of the Lower
Dormitory, to foregather next morning with a few kindred spirits and
discourse pityingly and scathingly upon the gross philistinism of the
lower middle classes.
No, the lot of the aesthete at school is not altogether a happy one, but
possibly his tribulations are not without a certain beneficent effect.
When he goes up to Oxford or Cambridge he will speedily find that in the
tolerant atmosphere of those intellectual centres the prig is not merely
permitted to walk the earth but to flourish like the green bay-tree.
Under the intoxicating effects of this discovery the recollection of the
robust and primitive traditions of his old School--and the old School's
method of instilling those traditions--may have a sobering and steadying
effect upon him. No man ever developed his mind by neglecting his body,
and if the memory of a coarse and ruthless school tradition can persuade
the Super-Intellectual to play hockey or go down to the river after
lunch, instead of sitting indoors drinking liqueurs and discussing
Maupassant with a coterie of the elect, then the can-can in the Lower
Dormitory has not been danced altogether in vain.
* * * * *
Then come the rank and file. There are many types. There is the
precocious type, marked out for favourable notice by aptitude at games
and attractive manners. Such an one stands in danger of being taken up
by older boys than himself; which means that he will suffer the fate of
all those who stray out of their proper station. At first he will be an
object of envy and dislike; later, when his patrons have passed on
elsewhere, he may find himself friendless.
At the opposite end of the scale comes the Butt. His life is a hard one,
but not without its compensations; for although he is the target of all
the practical humour in the House, his post carries with it a certain
celebrity; and at any rate a Butt can never be unpopular. So he is safe
at least from the worst disaster that can befall a schoolboy. Besides,
you require a good deal of character to be a Butt.
And there is the Buffoon. He is distinct from the Butt, because a Butt
is usually a Butt _malgre lui_, owing to some peculiarity of appearance
or temperament; whereas the Buffoon is one of those people who yearn for
notice at any price, and will sell their souls "to make fellows laugh."
You may behold him, the centre of a grinning group, tormenting some shy
or awkward boy--very often the Butt himself; while in school he is the
bugbear of weak masters. The larger his audience the more exuberant he
becomes: he reaches his zenith at a breaking-up supper or in the back
benches on Speech Day. One is tempted to feel that when reduced to his
own society he must suffer severely from depression.
Then there is the Man of the World. He is a recognised authority on fast
life in London and Bohemian revels in Paris. He is a patron of the
drama, and a perfect mine of unreliable information as to the private
life of the originals of the dazzling portraits which line his
study--and indeed half the studies in the House. The picture-postcard,
as an educative and refining influence, has left an abiding mark upon
the youth of the present day. We of an older and more rugged
civilisation, who were young at a period when actresses' photographs
cost two shillings each, were compelled in those days to restrict our
gallery of divinities to one or two at the most. (Too often our
collection was second-hand, knocked down for sixpence at some
end-of-term auction, or reluctantly yielded in composition for a
long-outstanding debt by a friend in the throes of a financial crisis.)
But nowadays, with the entire Gaiety chorus at a penny apiece, the
youthful connoisseur of female beauty has emancipated himself from the
pictorial monogamy (or at the most, bigamy) of an earlier generation. He
is a polygamist, a pantheist. He can erect an entire feminine Olympus
upon his mantelpiece for the sum of half-a-crown. And yet, bless him, he
is just as unsophisticated as we used to be--no more and no less. The
type does not change.
Lastly, comes the little boy--the Squeaker, the Tadpole, the Nipper,
what you will. His chief characteristic is terrific but short-lived
enthusiasm for everything he undertakes, be it work, play, a friendship,
or a private vendetta.
He begins by taking education very seriously. He is immensely proud of
his first set of books, and writes his name on nearly every page,
accompanied by metrical warnings to intending purloiners. He equips
himself with a perfect arsenal of fountain-pens, rubber stamps, blue
pencils, and ink-erasers. He starts a private mark-book of his own, to
check possible carelessness or dishonesty on the part of his
form-master. Then he gets to work, with his books disposed around him
and his fountain-pen playing all over his manuscript. By the end of a
fortnight he has lost all his books, and having broken his fountain-pen,
is detected in a pathetic attempt to write his exercise upon a sheet of
borrowed paper with a rusty nib held in his fingers or stuck into a
splinter from off the floor.
It is the same with games. Set a company of small boys to play cricket,
and their solemnity at the start is almost painful. Return in half an
hour, and you will find that the stately contest has resolved itself
into a reproduction of the parrot-house at the Zoo, the point at issue
being a doubtful decision of the umpire's. Under the somewhat confiding
arrangement which obtains in Lower School cricket, the umpire for the
moment is the gentleman whose turn it is to bat next; so litigation is
frequent. Screams of "Get out!" "Stay in!" "Cads!" "Liars!" rend the
air, until a big boy or a master strolls over and quells the riot.
The small boy's friendships, too, are of a violent but ephemeral nature.
But his outstanding characteristic is a passion for organising secret
societies of the most desperate and mysterious character, all of which
come speedily to a violent or humiliating dissolution.
I was once privileged to be introduced into the inner workings of a
society called "The Anarchists." It was not a very original title, but
it served its time, for the days of the Society were few and evil. Its
aims were sanguinary and nebulous; the Rules consisted almost entirely
of a list of the penalties to be inflicted upon those who transgressed
them. For instance, under Rule XXIV any one who broke Rule XVII was
compelled to sit down for five minutes upon a chair into the seat of
which a pot of jam had been emptied. (Economists will be relieved to
hear that the jam was afterwards eaten by the executioners, the criminal
being very properly barred from participating.)
The Anarchists had a private code of signals with which to communicate
with one another in the presence of outsiders--in Prep, for instance.
The code was simplicity itself. A single tap with a pencil upon the
table denoted the letter A; two taps, B; and so on. As may be imagined,
Y and Z involved much mental strain; and as the transmitter of the
message invariably lost count after fourteen or fifteen taps, and began
all over again without any attempt either at explanation or apology, the
gentleman who was acting as receiver usually found the task of decoding
his signals a matter of extreme difficulty and some exasperation.
Before the tangle could be straightened out a prefect inevitably swooped
down and awarded both signallers fifty lines for creating a disturbance
in Preparation.
However, the Anarchists, though they finished after the manner of their
kind, did not slip into oblivion so noiselessly as some of their
predecessors. In fact, nothing in their inky and jabbering life became
them like their leaving of it.
One evening the entire brotherhood--there were about seven of them--were
assembled in a study which would have held four comfortably, engaged in
passing a vote of censure upon one Horace Bull, B.A., their form-master.
Little though he knew it, Bull had been a marked man for some weeks. The
Czar of all the Russias himself could hardly have occupied a more
prominent position in the black books of Anarchy in general. To-day he
had taken a step nearer his doom by clouting one Nixon minor,
Vice-President of the Anarchists, on the side of the head.
It was during the geography hour. Mr. Bull had asked Nixon to define a
watershed. Nixon, who upon the previous evening had been too much
occupied with his duties as Vice-President of the Anarchists to do much
Prep, had replied with a seraphic smile that a watershed was "a place to
shelter from the rain." As an improvised effort the answer seemed to him
an extremely good one; but Mr. Bull had promptly left his seat,
addressed Nixon as a "cheeky little hound," and committed the assault
complained of.
"This sort of thing," observed Rumford tertius, the President, "can't go
on. What shall we do?"
"We might saw one of the legs of his chair through," suggested one of
the members.
"Who's going to do it?" inquired the President. "We'll only get slain."
Silence fell, as it usually does when the question of belling the cat
arrives at the practical stage.
"We could report him to the Head," said another voice. "We might get him
the sack for assault--even quod! We could show Nixon's head to him. It
would be a sound scheme to make it bleed a bit before we took him up."
The speaker fingered a heavy ruler lovingly, but Mr. Nixon edged coldly
out of reach.
"Certainly," agreed the President, "Bashan ought to be stopped knocking
us about in form."
"I'd rather have one clout over the earhole," observed an Anarchist who
so far had not spoken, "than be taken along to Bashan's study and given
six of the best. That is what the result would be. Hallo, Stinker,
what's that?"
The gentleman addressed--a morose, unclean, and spectacled youth of
scientific proclivities--was the latest recruit to the gang. He had been
admitted at the instance of Master Nixon, who had pointed out that it
would be a good thing to enrol as a member some one who understood
"Chemistry and Stinks generally." He could be used for the manufacture
of bombs, and so on.
Stinker had produced from his pocket a corked test-tube, tightly packed
with some dark substance.
"What's that?" inquired the Anarchists in chorus. (They nearly always
talked in chorus.)
"It's a new kind of explosive," replied the inventor with great pride.
"I hope it's better than that new kind of stinkpot you invented for
choir-practice," remarked a cynic from the corner of the study. "That
was a rotten fraud, if you like! It smelt more like lily-of-the-valley
than any decent stink."
"Dry up, Ashley minor!" rejoined the inventor indignantly. "This is a
jolly good bomb. I made it to-day in the Lab, while The Badger was
trying to put out a bonfire at the other end."
"Where does the patent come in?" inquired the President judicially.
"The patent is that it doesn't go off all at once."
"We know _that_!" observed the unbelieving Ashley.
"Do you chuck it or light it?" asked Nixon.