CHAPTER III

I

In the art prospectus, printed on a glazed paper with many choice illustrations, Chawley School was a perfect place. The school, once a manor, celebrated for its architectural beauty, was situated in a magnificent park of five acres, with an ornamental lake and a drive one mile long. The gardens in front of the house were extensive and well kept. One of the illustrations showed fifty small boys, all dressed alike, in grey shorts and blue flannel jackets, with grey socks with red tops, and straw hats with red bands, squatted on the splendid lawn, all showing bended bare knees and round happy faces. In their midst were three masters, one middle-aged and two quite young, and a lady. The letterpress under this charming picture of sunlit foliage and smiling humanity, said "Afternoon Tea." The prospectus also mentioned the covered swimming pool in the grounds, the boys' own garden, the large airy dormitories and class rooms. It then drew rapturous attention to the staff. The school was run by the Rev. Shayle Tobin, M.A., Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford, with a double first, a blue for cricket, and for some years famous as a half-back.

One Sunday morning, six head boys, conscious of leadership and the great world of a public school approaching, shuffled their feet in the Manor pew in the village church. Behind them in other pews sat other little boys, more angelic in appearance and devilish in action. They were all dressed alike, in black Eton jackets, white collars, grey trousers and shoes. Even at the tender age of ten to thirteen their faces gave promise or otherwise. The new young assistant master who sat guarding them in the third pew found himself studying, during the dreary sermon, the shapes of the heads ranged in front of him like turnips on a table. There were long heads, round heads, oval, pointed, blunt, flat and dinted. Handsome, well-made, ugly, emaciated, intelligent, stupid, good-natured, deceitful, mischievous and lovable. John Dean ranged up and down the row. This was his first Sunday morning in church. It was his Sunday on duty; the other assistant master had gone into Southampton.

The young assistant master was not the only critical person letting his thoughts wander from the Harvest Festival Sermon. John gazed abstractedly at the figure of the Rev. Samuel Piggin, ringed round with bunches of carrots, a few grapes and six tomatoes balanced on the top of a sheaf of wheat, which demonstrated God's bounty, despite a ruinously wet summer and a harvest, half of which lay rotting in the fields.

Miss Piggin, twenty-nine years of age, with spectacles, and ardent in romance, was quite thrilled by the first glimpse, as she turned to the East in the recital of the Creed, of the handsome young master. His profile would have enhanced the wrapper of those shilling reprints to which, for want of romance, she was addicted. Nor was she alone in her sudden interest. Several young ladies sitting behind John found great fascination in the clean curve from the nape of the neck up to the wavy brown head. Other younger ladies, favourably placed in the side pews, could not have been more fascinated had Apollo himself renounced his pagan origin and come to church. The proud mouth, the dark eyes, the fine brow surmounted by a wavy mass of chestnut hair, the whole poised on an athlete's shoulders, were attractions against which the sermon competed in vain. The doctor's daughter, for three years determined to be a missionary's wife, found her gaze wandering from the altar to the school pew.

One little boy with a freckled face and a genius for mischief, ceased making chewed pellets from a hymn sheet when he noticed the rapt attention directed towards the pew in which he sat. He nudged the boy at his side, and both, suddenly conscious of the suppressed excitement that flowed over them, sniggered and brought a reproof from their new master. Something in the freckled boy's mute mirth as he looked at him, caused John to turn round, when he met the troubled gaze of a dozen pairs of amorous eyes. He quickly turned again and felt the blood mounting to his neck and face. The little boys sniggered again. John made a mental note not to the little boys' advantage. Miss Piggin also made one--to call when her father paid his formal visit; and not to be outwitted, the doctor's daughter decided she would motor in with her father on Monday morning, when he paid his usual visit to examine all the boys at the beginning of term.

Hitherto missionaries had absorbed her hero-worship, but then, assistant masters, as a class, had not seemed attractive. The former master drank, to the scandal of the village, which met him in the bar of the "Red Cow" where he grossly libelled all those, and their wives, who kept preparatory schools. His predecessor had a squint, the one before was lame, and the one before him was an old man of sixty, who had suddenly and most inconveniently died of bronchitis in term time. Sixty pounds a year and free board somewhat limited the available supply of assistant masters. Messrs. Sloggart and Slingsby, the scholastic agents, had told the Rev. Mr. Tobin that they were afraid he would have to add another ten pounds.

John liked Mr. Tobin on first contact. He was a man of about fifty years of age, with, a tanned face and kindly blue eyes. The famous athlete was fast disappearing in a bulky schoolmaster, who added weight each term with considerable anxiety, coupled with a feeling that his appearance at least was a good advertisement of the school. He had a genuine love of boys and worked hard with them, being strict and kind, with a determination to do his best for them! The boys, in fact, were watched day and night; convicts would not have had closer attention, and the same supervision extended to the two assistant masters.

Mr. Tobin had little imagination, and the whole of it had been expended in the prospectus.

The grounds of Chawley School were certainly extensive. The former tenant, like the present, had found them too much so, and let them go wild. The lawns on the front part of the house were kept tidy; elsewhere the walks were weed-grown. The ornamental lake stank, and might have been the death place of Shelley's "Sensitive Plant." The prospectus mentioned boating on the lake as one of the diversions of the fortunate boys. The only boat was an old punt, one end of which had been long submerged among the water lilies. It was the floating end that appeared in the prospectus photograph. Afternoon tea on the lawn was also slightly different from the photograph. Three quarters of the boys had never been on the lawn. Every Sunday, as a reward, six top form boys, with the assistant master, were invited to tea with Mrs. Tobin on the lawn. A fear of her presence was mingled with the love of her cake, and had the boys had a free will in the matter they had rather not have been rewarded.

Mrs. Tobin was a tall woman of about forty-eight years. She was cold and looked at people with eagle eyes. Her voice was deep, her features gaunt, framed in straight brown hair brushed severely back. She had the full equipment of a bishopric's conventions and never forgot her very reverend origin. She was the business woman, and constantly reminded her husband of the fact. She knew that to make a school pay, it required at least fifty boys. All over that number represented profit. Chawley School had forty-nine boys. She lived her days as though on the edge of a precipice. Mr. Tobin, as became a sportsman, delighted in feeding his boys, and invited them to a second helping of favourite puddings. Fortunate youngsters who sat at his end of the table! At Mrs. Tobin's end a second request did not bring a refusal, but, "Are you sure you have not had sufficient?" John, who struggled desperately with his pies, found a problem in the differential calculus easier than the elementary mathematics required for cutting a pie into fourteen portions to the satisfaction of twelve hungry boys.

Often, when his fourteenth turn came he received a small piece of pie crust as his share. Sawley, a sharp little fellow who sat at John's right, soon noticed this and generously offered his share. "We get more than usual now, sir," he explained. "Why don't you serve yourself first? The other masters always did."

"Masters?" queried John. "Why how many masters have you had?"

The boy smiled, then looked cautiously round to Mrs. Tobin's table.

"Six, sir," he whispered.

"And how long have you been here?"

"Six terms, sir."

John's heart sank.

"I don't expect you'll stay--will you, sir?" asked the boy in a burst of confidence.

John snubbed him, in duty bound. So he was one of a procession! He began to understand the bubbling curiosity which his arrival had aroused. His arrival! That had marked the end of a long mood of despondency which began as soon as he had left the cheerful faces of the Marshs. The misery he had endured in the three-mile ride from the station to the school! Peering out of the window he watched the long road with its straggling cottages, brown and gold in their autumnal creepers. Then the village stores with a fat man looking curiously at the school cab, next a rise and on the other side a glimpse, through the trees, of Chawley School, fronted by a broad stream and bordered by rook-haunted elm trees. As the cab drew up at the main door, the Rev. Shayle Tobin came to greet him. His box was taken up and he followed the head master into the wide hall. There was no furniture in it except a round mahogany table with an electro plate card tray, and a hat stand. The head-master's living apartments opened off on the right, and a wide corridor traversed the whole length of the building. John was led to the left, which contained the class rooms. If anything more had been needed to depress him the room, somewhat grandly called the Masters' Common Room, would have done it.

"We have not had time to get straight yet. The Matron will make this more comfortable soon," Tobin said. There was certainly room for improvement. A worn carpet covered the floor. On the left side stood a small table covered with a crimson cloth stained with ink. The wall paper was a faded, patternless drab colour. There were two chairs, one a basket chair with a short leg, the other a stiff Sheraton. There were no pictures on the walls, the fire grate had two broken bars and no fender.

The head-master next led the way to John's bedroom. This appeared to be a great improvement. The size of the room, in contrast to the Common Room, made John feel more lonely than ever, and he shuddered when he thought of winter mornings. But it was well furnished in a heavy mid-Victorian manner. There was a white, marble-topped wash stand with a red-flowered jug and basin, a large swinging mirror and wardrobe. The carpet was faded but good. This at least was an endurable room and he could live in it.

It was shortly before tea on the first day of term that John met his colleague. Gerald Woodman, a scholar of St. John's College, Oxford, was tall and heavily built for his twenty-five years. He appeared much older because of his great reserve and a perpetual melancholy. He had dark hair and dark eyes, an enormous appetite and no sentiment. In his short life he had arrived at a creed of absolute cynicism. He talked with reluctance, but John found later that at heart he was a good fellow whose foibles were the inheritance of a period of religious mania. He was now a robust atheist. The Church no longer seemed a desirable refuge; he had become a schoolmaster. Although fourteen stone in weight, he was possessed by a fear of starvation and deplored his thinness; when in cricket flannels, his thighs wobbled so much that all the boys grinned, but even this did not reassure him.

John had recently passed through the brief pimply period inseparable from youth, and in desperation one day bought a bottle containing five hundred blood pills. As if alarmed at the prospect, the pimples immediately disappeared. Mr. Woodman saw the pills on John's dressing table and asked if he might have a few to set his blood in order. John gave him them. Those pills probably saved the first assistant master from a second nervous breakdown. He swallowed five after each meal and declared with deep satisfaction that he was putting on weight; he was optimistic until the bottle was finished, when his habitual melancholy returned.

Their first evening at Chawley School was spent in a conference with the Head-master who drew up the curriculum. The hours were arranged between them. John received one afternoon per week off duty and the alternate Sundays. The class hours were 8:30 a.m. to 11, a break of half an hour during which they supervised games, then 11:30 to 1 p.m. An hour for lunch, then work until 3 p.m. Games followed until five, a period during which John changed into football shorts and raced about the field in a scrimmage of shouting boys. He enjoyed this and quite forgot all his woes. Tea was at five, a blessed interval of one hour's peace, then school again until 7:30, when the boys went up to bed. Dinner, in the household apartments, with Mrs. Tobin in an evening gown and facetiously cheerful, was at eight. After dinner the two masters left the rosy warmth of the dining room for their own bare quarters, where the interval between dinner and bedtime was spent in the correction of the day's exercise books; a monotonous routine, dulling the senses, and demoralizing human beings with its hopelessness. There was no sense of advancement. The end of the term came slowly, then the holidays, then term again, with the same subjects to drill into the same reluctant little boys.

Mr. Woodman, in a voice of deepest melancholy, foretold all this on the first night. When he learned that John was new to his profession he smiled at him like a butcher on a good sheep delivered for slaughter.

"Whatever made you do it?" he asked. "Do anything, be a scavenger, a policeman--you will at least retain your self respect. You will not have to endure the chilliness of schoolmasters' wives, the scorn of parents, the buffoonery of boys. We are fools out of motley, something masquerading as gentlemen on the stipend of stevedores. My God, Dean, pack your trunk and flee to-night. This is the end of all things. Have you dreams, ambitions, hope, courage, youth? Abandon all who enter this profession!"

John remonstrated. There was the great opportunity of forming character, surely it was a noble thing to teach the young, to gain the confidence, if not the affection of boys, to watch them grow in intelligence, to trace the operations of their fresh minds slowly opening on a wonderful world? Mr. Woodman listened patiently to John's panegyric, and peered at him over the top of the gold-rimmed spectacles he wore when correcting exercise books in the jumping incandescent light.

"Dear me! This is almost pathetic! Your innocence moves me. I hope you will pardon my saying you must be very young. Eighteen? Ah! that is a blessed age, but you have yet to learn what boys are. Let me warn you and save you much pain. They are devils incarnate. And don't cherish any illusion about being a schoolmaster. We are a race of pariahs. At forty we have no feelings left; we are desiccated text books. At fifty we are old fools haunting the doorsteps of the scholastic agents or short-sightedly sitting on the prepared pins of our loving pupils. Don't think you will receive any gratitude for your labour; you won't. Your cheque at the end of term wipes out all obligations. After three years' close attention, they are not even your boys. They pass on to a public school and repudiate you. Boys are sent to preparatory schools by lazy parents who wish to get rid of the responsibility of their offspring, or by upstarts who want to start the new generation in the grooves of social respectability. They will hold you in utter contempt because you cannot do anything better than bring up their children for them. Epictetus was a prince in comparison with the modern schoolmaster!"

Woodman's theory, nevertheless, was not strictly applied. He was firm with his boys, made them work hard and was a martinet in detail, but he was a sportsman and the boys responded to his sense of fair play. As for John, by the third day of term, he was devoted to them, although hating more and more the dreary routine of his life. It was fascinating to study this dozen or so of young lives given into his keeping, to note the amazing divergence of character which manifested itself so early. John found himself looking through them to the parents beyond. He had a perfect index to the home life and the characters that had influenced them. The generous boy and the greedy, the frank and the secretive, the imaginative and the stolid, the sharp and the dull, the graceful, the strong, the quick, the ugly, the slow, the boy of bright honour, and the boy with a tendency to deceit, the potential coward or hero--they were all here in embryo. Education after all was only a wind that could bend the branches, it could not change the nature of the plant.

II

At the end of the first week, John was in a highly nervous condition. The monotony of the work, the regularity of the hours, the seclusion in a small world, the absence of all friends and his isolation miles away from all who knew him and with whom he could talk intimately, preyed upon his mind until one evening he reached a point of frenzy. He banged down a pile of exercise books, kicked a cushion vigorously, and then swore at the wall, from the other side of which came sounds of a small boy practising Czerny's One Hundred and One Exercises for the pianoforte. Woodman watched this outburst of wild rage with amusement.

"Beat your wings, my poor little moth! You will soon tire and subside--we have all passed along that _via dolorosa_," he commented.

"It is unendurable!" cried John, flinging himself in a chair.

"The capacity of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortu--"

"Oh, shut up!" snapped John. Woodman regarded him sympathetically. He had grown to like this bright lad, so freshly enthusiastic, and bit by bit he had learned his story. In exchange he had shown John some of the poetry which he wrote secretly. Strangely enough it was highly sentimental, the safety valve of suppressed romanticism.

"Come on to the lake," he urged. John followed. It was their favourite pastime. They had resurrected the old punt, and in danger of a wetting, they often pushed it along through the thick water lilies that bent under its prow, and slowly closed again on the track they made. Meanwhile, the rooks, watching them from the elms above, cawed loudly, and the water hens showed alarm. The two masters became incredibly young once they were in the punt. They rocked it to see how near shipwreck they could go; they sang in a loud voice all the absurd ditties they could remember. Had their young charges seen and heard them, it would have been an amazing revelation of the humanity of masters out of school. As it was, Mr. Tobin complained that some of their noise had carried across the lawns to the open dormitory windows. But they simply had to sing; it was their one outlet of pent up youth within them. They would punt about until the dusk had given place to darkness, when the elms seemed gigantic and a rising moon peered in between the branches and watched the rippling reflection of her light. Around them all was quiet save for the weird squeal of a weasel in the woodland or the melancholy hoot of an owl.

One evening John was more noisy than ever, and Woodman threatened to capsize him, but there was good reason for this exhilaration. The mail had brought an acceptance of a long poem from the Editor of the _British Review_. He had written in competition with Woodman, who urged him to send it to an editor. With no faith, but some hope, John obeyed. His surprise, when the acceptance came, was unbounded. It was a long satirical story in the manner of Masefield. John had feared it was too long, for it took twenty pages, and here were the proof sheets and the offer of three guineas for his work! Those proof sheets kept him in a state of elation for several days. He had never seen himself in print except in the school magazine, and here was a great review printing his work! John cashed the cheque and ordered one pound's worth of copies of the review when it came out, which he distributed among his friends at some cost. Then he must see the reviewers' comments, and another guinea went to a press-cutting agency, which sent all the advertisements containing his name, and one criticism, if the slightly disparaging dismissal could be termed a criticism--"Mr. John Dean contributes some verses of a satirical nature." The net profit on the transaction was five shillings and sixpence which John invested in paper and envelopes. He had tasted printers' ink. John had seen a way out. He subscribed to the _Bookman_, devoured the _Times Literary Supplement_, and enquired the cost of joining the Society of Authors.

By the middle of November, with its dark winter nights when the wind howled among the chimneys, swayed the leafless branches, scurried along the cold flags of the corridors and rattled the shutters of the school-room windows, John had reached a point of nervous desperation. One night he beat his hands on the walls of his room in mere foolish impotence of rage. Even the placid Woodman, swallowing blood pills and putting on weight, became alarmed. There was an intensity in John's despair that made him apprehensive. It was in vain that he encouraged his literary work and discussed the novel which John had begun as a distraction, but had now discarded. He dragged him out for long walks down the bleak country lanes, but could not get him to talk. He was thin, with rings under his eyes, and the rose-red of healthy youth in his cheeks had given place to a hectic flush. He had moments of hilarious mirth, as alarming and as unnatural as his despair, and one night he had aroused Woodman in his bedroom, declaring he could not sleep alone in his room any longer and begged to be allowed to sleep on the couch. Woodman assented gladly but he was awakened later by a sound of sobbing in the darkness. He lit a candle and leaned up on his elbow.

"Dean--my dear fellow--you must not go on like this--you'll make yourself ill."

He heard John clear his voice.

"I know--I'm a fool--I'm horribly ashamed of myself--but--but, oh, my God, I am wretched."

"Why, you silly old thing, this morning you were making your boys yell with laughter."

"And got snubbed by Tobin for it," retorted John. "Put out the light, Woodman--I'll behave--and thanks awfully."

Woodman doused the candle with the matchbox. In the morning John was normal again. Neither made any allusion to the scene in the night. It was a bad dream.