On Monday morning I went to school. I arrived half an hour before the
proper time, and as my classes had already been arranged, I had nothing
to do but loiter about and take stock of the place. It stood, a long,
low, unlovely building of soot-darkened brick, in its own grounds, not
far from the centre of the town. Just now, on this gray autumn morning,
it presented an appearance of singular, of almost jail-like dullness,
though in summer, as I was to learn, when the grass was green, and the
tall dusty elms waved against a blue sky, and the sun shone through
narrow, small-paned windows, and splashed on wooden floors, on hacked
wooden desks and forms, on faded maps, and bare, discoloured walls, it
could be pleasant enough, in spite of the complete absence of anything
save the sunlight and the trees that might appeal to a sense of beauty.
Beside the main building was a Preparatory School, and at the back,
separated from it by a yard, where a score or so of boys were at
present kicking about a football, were the Mathematical Schools, and
beyond these, the larger playing-field. It was really a day-school,
only two masters living on the premises, with about a couple of dozen
boarders: the rest of the scholars, numbering between a hundred and
fifty and two hundred, were day-boys.
As I hung about uneasily, not venturing to join the others, I was
painfully conscious of my isolation. Not one of those faces had I ever
seen before, nor had I the slightest knowledge of the school itself,
for George, who had been at a National School, could tell me nothing
about it. Nobody took any notice of me. Several masters passed, and
disappeared through mysterious doors, and when, at ten o’clock, a
white-haired, white-bearded patriarch rang a huge hand-bell in the
porch, and I watched the boys scattering with extraordinary rapidity in
various directions, it looked to me as if I might very easily spend my
whole day in the yard. I had no idea which door to try, yet at the same
time I was anxious not to be late. I was still hovering uncertainly
about the porch, like a soul strayed into the wrong Paradise, when a
boy, running past, glanced at me, stopped, and asked me where I wanted
to go to.
I told him I wanted to go to Mr. Lowden’s class.
“It’s the end door on the left over there,” he said, good-humouredly,
and I thanked him and hurried off.
Coming in, I found the whole class already in their places, but a boy
at the end of the third form moved up to make room for me, and I sat
down. Mr. Lowden, who was standing, with a piece of chalk in one hand
and a duster in the other, close by the black-board, asked me my name,
and then informed me I was late and that he objected to lateness. I
said nothing, but took down on the slate in front of me the sum he had
just written out.
I worked at it, and was struck by the animated conversations that were
going on all over the room, in spite of Mr. Lowden’s efforts to check
them.
“Has anybody finished yet?” Mr. Lowden asked, and the boy who had
moved up to make room for me held up his hand, cracking his fingers. I
glanced at him. He had a round, merry face, rosy cheeks, bright eyes
and dimples.
“How often have I told you not to crack your fingers, Knox?” asked Mr.
Lowden, discontentedly. “Well, what answer do you get?”
“Ten bob, a deuce an’ a make.”
“Come in to-day, Knox, at recess.”
He wrote down another sum, and I had begun to copy it, when something
went off with a sharp report under my feet. Mr. Lowden was gazing
straight at me, and he instantly told me to stay in at recess.
I knew well enough what had happened, that I had trodden on a wax match
softened and rolled up with the head inside. I told Mr. Lowden that I
hadn’t done it on purpose.
“I can’t help that: you must stay in.”
“But it wasn’t my fault if I didn’t know it was there,” I argued.
“You must stay in,” repeated Mr. Lowden, in a silly, obstinate kind of
voice, horribly irritating, “and, Knox, you stay in after school as
well as at recess.”
“I don’t see what _he_ has to do with it, any way,” I muttered.
The boy beside me laughed.
“Oh, yes: Knox put it there,” Mr. Lowden said monotonously.
I had taken a dislike to Mr. Lowden, and at the same time I thought him
a fool. A few days later something happened to make me dislike him even
more. He had read aloud a problem which we were to work out mentally,
putting down our answers when he gave us the word. My answer was right,
but, unfortunately, when he asked me how I got it, the problem itself
had gone out of my head. For the life of me I couldn’t remember it; yet
I was ashamed to say so, and simply sat silent while he repeated two or
three times, as if it were some kind of refrain, “Well, now, how did
you work the sum, Waring?”
As I was unable to tell him, he said, “You must have copied the answer
from Knox.”
“I didn’t,” I protested, angrily.
“Then why can’t you tell me how you got it?”
Again silence.
“You must be telling a lie, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Lowden, in his
apathetic voice, “and the silliest kind of lie, because it’s obvious to
everybody.”
“I’m not telling a lie.”
Mr. Lowden shrugged his shoulders; he never seemed to get angry, or
even moderately interested, no matter what the circumstances. “If
you’re not, then why can’t you tell me how you worked the sum? If you
had done it once, you could do it again.”
“I did do it.”
“Well, how?”
Renewed silence.
“You’d better stay in at recess.”
And I stayed in.
Yet Mr. Lowden was really only a mild and inoffensive young man, who
had been inspired with the unlucky idea that he could earn his living
by teaching boys, when he had neither the desire nor the capacity
to understand them. The aversion I felt for him was really founded
primarily upon grounds less rational than those I have mentioned.
The secret of the matter was that physically he was repulsive to me.
He suffered, I imagine, from some affection of the lungs or throat,
for he wore, winter and summer, a thick white muffler, fastened by
an opal pin. His face was pale, cadaverous, and hollow-cheeked; his
moustache scanty; his hair lank and damp; but what I disliked most was
his peculiar odour. Whether this emanated from his person, or from the
pastilles he was perpetually sucking, I don’t know. It was something
sickly and persistent, and for no reason that I know of I associated it
with death. When he sat down on the form beside me to work out a sum, I
used to edge gradually away from him, until he would notice it, and ask
me in a querulous voice what I was doing, and perhaps keep me in. This
physical repulsion I could never have conquered, even had it not been
backed up by that kind of mental sickliness which characterized him,
and which had made him punish me once at least unjustly. He left six
months later, and nobody among the boys ever knew or cared what became
of him. Perhaps he went to another school, perhaps the mysterious odour
which had sickened me had been really the odour of death....
* * * * *
When I think now of those who were in charge of my education, upon my
word I cannot help but be filled with wonder. What did they teach me?
What did I ever get from them that I could not have got, with less
trouble, for myself? Never once did any of my masters show the faintest
interest in me, or make even the most perfunctory attempt to get to
know me, to get to know what I was capable of, if I had any definite
tastes, if I were good or bad, moral or immoral, intelligent or a fool.
What they did instead was to ask me a couple of questions from a book,
and, if I failed to answer either of these satisfactorily, keep me in
to sit for twenty minutes with my lesson-book open on the desk before
me and my thoughts miles away. Of my masters only one, Mr. Johnson, had
any distinction, and he, unfortunately, was a mathematician. He had
written a “Euclid” so perfect in its expression that he had managed to
get a kind of æsthetic charm into the dry bones of geometry. He was an
Englishman, but was slightly Jewish in type. He wore a long, flowing
beard and moustache, like an early northern chief, and he had small,
sleepy, gray eyes, which during school hours were usually closed. Most
of his time he passed, either in reverie or slumber, in his chair
on a daïs at the end of the room; but when aroused he had, for the
unmathematical, a richly terrifying voice, and a disheartening manner
of slashing down a long black cane on the desk, within a few inches of
your nose. His classes were models of order. Never a faintest sound. In
dead silence you played your game of noughts and crosses, or did your
Latin composition, or wrote out cricket teams――but you never spoke,
and rarely moved. Of all those whose business it was to mould my mind
his figure remains the least spoiled by time. I remember the shock I
received when, some years after I left school, I came upon Dr. Melling,
the head English master, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, sucking an orange,
and dressed in garments that Moses or Ikey would have bid for but
languidly. When I spoke to him he seemed so narrow, so unimaginative,
so unintelligent, that I felt half-ashamed, as one might who has
learned by accident a secret he ought never to have known. Even in
stature he was curiously shrunken, though he neither stooped nor showed
signs of decrepitude or age. But Johnson I can see now, as I saw him so
often then, coming up the path between the two front cricket-fields,
a large black bag in his hand, which one had been told contained his
lunch. I can see him leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, like
one of those beautiful owls that ignore from their cage in the Zoo the
staring stranger, his beard spread out over his waistcoat, his hands
folded on his stomach. Johnson was a gentleman, and, though he knew
nothing of, and cared little for, boys, if chance brought him into
temporary relation with one, even a very small and idle one, he took it
for granted that he was a gentleman too, and in his deep, slow, musical
voice, and in his sleepy eyes, there would come a curious charm.