Part 10

He turned over Sycamore’s letter again, and it seemed no longer a jest and an insult that Arthur had made him Peter’s guardian. Sycamore’s phrases did somehow convey the hesitating Arthur, penitent of the advantages that had restored him Dolly and still fatuously confident of Oswald’s good faith.

“But I can’t do it, my man,” said Oswald. “It’s too much for human nature. Your own people must see to your own breed.”

He sat quite still for a long time thinking of another child that now could never be born.

“Why didn’t I stick to her?” he whispered. “Why didn’t I hold out for her?”

He took up Sycamore’s letter again.

“But why the devil did he shove in old Charlotte?” he exclaimed. “The man was no better than an idiot. And underhand at that.”

His eye went to a pile of still unopened letters. “Ah! here we are!” he said, selecting one in a bulky stone-grey envelope.

He opened it and extracted a number of sheets of stone-grey paper covered with a vast, loose handwriting, for which previous experience had given Oswald a strong distaste.

_My dear Nephew_, her letter began.

_I suppose you have already heard the unhappy end of that Stubland marriage. I have always said that it was bound to end in a tragedy...._

“Oh Lord!” said Oswald, and pitched the letter aside and fell into deep thought....

He became aware of Muir standing and staring down at him. One of the boys must have gone off to Muir and told him of Oswald’s emotion.

“Hullo,” said Muir. “All right?”

“I’ve been crying,” said Oswald drily. “I’ve had bad news. This fever leaves one rotten.”

“Old Wilkinson has sent us up a bottle of champagne,” said Muir. “He’s thought of everything. The cook’s got curry powder again and there’s a basket of fish. We shall dine tonight. It’s what you want.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Oswald.

§ 4

After dinner, the best dinner they had had for many weeks, a dinner beautifully suggestive to a sick man of getting back once more to a world in which there is enough and comfort, Oswald’s tongue was loosened and he told his story. He was not usually a communicative man but this was a brimming occasion; Muir he knew for a model of discretion, Muir had been his colleague, his nurse and his intimate friend to the exclusion of all others, for three eventful months, and Muir had already made his confidences. So Oswald told about Dolly and how his scar and his scruples had come between them, and what he thought and felt about Arthur, and so to much experimental wisdom about love and the bitterness of life. He mentioned the children, and presently Muir, who had the firm conscientiousness of the Scotch, brought him back to Peter.

“He was a decent little chap,” said Oswald. “He was tremendously like Dolly.”

“And not like that other man?” said Muir sympathetically.

“No. Not a bit.”

“I’m thinking you ought to stand by him for all you’re worth.”

Oswald thought.

“I will,” he said....

The next morning life did not seem nearly so rounded and kindly as it had been after his emotional storm of the evening before; he was angry and jealous about Dolly and Arthur again, and again disposed to regard his guardianship as an imposition, but he felt he had given his word overnight and that he was bound now to stand by Joan and Peter as well as he could. Moreover neither Lady Charlotte nor the sisters Stubland were really, he thought, people to whom children should be entrusted. His party reached Luba’s the next evening, and he at once arranged to send a cable to Mr. Sycamore accepting his responsibility and adding: “Prefer children should go on as much as possible mother’s ideas until my return.”

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH THE SCHOOL OF ST. GEORGE AND THE VENERABLE BEDE

§ 1

So for a time this contest of the newer England of free thought, sentimental socialism, and invested profits (so far as it was embodied in the Stubland sisters) and the traditional landowning, church-going Tory England (so far that is as Lady Charlotte Sydenham was able to represent it), for the upbringing of Joan and Peter was suspended, and the Stubland sisters remained in control of these fortunate heirs of the ages. The two ladies determined to make the most of their opportunity to train the children to be, as Aunt Phœbe put it, “free and simple, but fearlessly advanced, unbiassed and yet exquisitely cultivated, inheritors of the treasure of the past purged of all ancient defilement, sensuous, passionate, determined, forerunners of a superhumanity”—for already the phrases at least of Nietzsche were trickling into the restricted but turbid current of British thought.

In their design the Stubland sisters were greatly aided by the sudden appearance of Miss Murgatroyd in the neighbourhood, and the rapid and emphatic establishment of the School of Saint George and the Venerable Bede within two miles of The Ingle-Nook door.

Miss Murgatroyd was a sturdy, rufous lady with a resentful manner, as though she felt that everything and everybody were deliberately getting in her way, and an effort of tension that passed very readily from anger to enthusiasm and from enthusiasm to anger. Her place was in the van. She did not mind very much where the van was going so long as she was in it. She was a born teacher, too, and so overpoweringly moved to teach that what she taught was a secondary consideration. She wanted to do something for mankind—it hardly mattered what. In America she would have been altogether advanced and new, but it was a peculiarity of middle-class British liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century just as it was of middle-class French liberalism a hundred years before, that it was strongly reactionary in colour. In the place of Rousseau and his demand for a return to the age of innocence, we English had Ruskin and Morris, who demanded a return to the Middle Ages. And in Miss Murgatroyd there was Rousseau as well as Ruskin; she wanted, she said, the best of everything; she was very comprehensive; she epitomized the movements of her time.

A love disappointment—the man had fled inexplicably to the ends of the earth and vanished—had exacerbated in Miss Murgatroyd a passion for the plastic affections of children; she had resolved to give herself wholly to the creation of a new sort of school embodying all the best ideals of the time. She saw herself a richly-robed, creative prophetess among the clustering and adoring young.

She had had a certain amount of capital available, and this she had expended upon the adaptation of a pleasant, many-roomed, modern house that looked out bravely over the valley of the Weald about a mile and three-quarters from The Ingle-Nook, to the necessities of a boarding-school, and here she presently accumulated her scholars. She furnished it very brightly in art colours and Morris patterns; wherever possible the woodwork was stained a pleasing green and perforated with heart-shaped holes; there were big, flat, obscurely symbolical colour-prints by Walter Crane, reproductions in bright colours of the works of Rossetti and Burne Jones and Botticelli, and a full-size cast of the Venus of Milo. The name was Ruskinian in spirit with a touch of J. R. Green’s _Short History of the English People_.

Miss Murgatroyd was indiscriminately receptive of new educational ideas; she meant to miss nothing; and some of these ideas were quite good and some were quite silly; and nearly every holiday she went off with a large notebook and much enthusiasm to educational congresses and conferences and summer schools and got some more. One that she acquired quite early, soon after the battle of Omdurman, was to put all her girls and most of her boys into Djibbahs—loose, pretty garments that were imitated from and named after the Dervish form of shirt. Hers was one of the first of those numerous “djibbah schools” that still flourish in England.

Also she had a natural proclivity towards bare legs and sandals and hatlessness, and only a certain respect for the parents kept the school from waves of pure vegetarianism. And she did all she could to carry her classes out of the class-rooms and into the open air....

The end of the nineteenth century was a happy and beautiful time for the bodies of the children of the more prosperous classes. Children had become precious. Among such people as the Stublands one never heard of such a thing as the death of a child; all their children lived and grew up. It was a point upon which Arthur had never tired of insisting. Whenever he had felt bored and wanting a brief holiday he had been accustomed to go off with a knapsack to study church architecture, and he had never failed to note the lists of children on the monuments. “There you are again,” he would say. “Look at that one: ‘and of Susan his wife by whom he had issue eleven children of whom three survived him.’ That’s the universal story of a woman’s life in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Nowadays it would read, ‘by whom he had issue three children who all survived him.’ And you see here, she died first, worn out, and he married again. And here are five more children, and three die in infancy and childhood. There was a frightful boom in dying in those days; dying was a career in itself for two-thirds of the children born. They made an art of early death. They were trained to die in an edifying manner. Parents wrote books about their little lost saints. Instead of rearing them——”....

Miss Murgatroyd’s school was indeed healthy and pretty and full of physical happiness, but the teaching and mental training that went on in it was of a lower quality. Mental strength and mental balance do not show in quite the same way as their physical equivalents. Minds do not grow as bodies do, through leaving the windows open and singing in the sun.

§ 2

Aunt Phœbe was an old acquaintance of Miss Murgatroyd. They had met at Adelboden during one of the early Fabian excursions in Switzerland. Afterwards Miss Murgatroyd had been charmed by Aunt Phœbe’s first book, a little thin volume of bold ideas in grey covers and a white back, called, _By-thoughts of a Stitchwoman_. In it Aunt Phœbe represented herself rather after the fashion of one of those richly conceived women who sit and stitch in the background of Sir Frederick Leighton’s great wall paintings at South Kensington, “The Industrial Arts applied to Peace” and “The Industrial Arts Applied to War” (her needlework was really very bad indeed) and while she stitched she thought. She thought outrageously; that was the idea; and she represented all the quiet stitching sex as thinking as outrageously. Miss Murgatroyd had a kindred craving for outrageous thinking, and the book became the link of a great intellectual friendship. They vied with one another in the extremity of their opinions and the mystical extravagance of their expressions. They maintained a tumescent flow of thought that was mostly feeling and feeling that was mostly imitation, far over the heads of the nice little children, who ran about the bright and airy school premises free from most of the current infections of body and spirit, and grew as children do grow under favourable circumstances, after the manner of Nature in her better moods, that is to say after the manner of Nature ploughed and weeded and given light and air.

So far as Aunt Phœbe was concerned, the great thoughts were confined to one or two intimates and—a rather hypothetical circle—her readers. Her mental galumphings were a thing apart. A kind of shyness prevented her with strangers and children. But Miss Murgatroyd was impelled by a sense of duty to build up the character of her children by discourse, more particularly on Sundays. On Sunday mornings the whole school went to church; in the afternoon it had a decorous walk, or it read or talked, and Miss Mills, the junior assistant, read aloud to the little ones; in the evening it read or it drew and painted, except for a special half hour when Miss Murgatroyd built its character up. That was her time. Thus, for example, she built it up about Truth.

“Girls,” she began, “I want to talk to you a little this evening about Truth. I want you to think about Truth, to concentrate your minds upon it and see just all it means and can mean to us. You know we must all tell the Truth, but has it ever occurred to you to ask _why_ we must tell the Truth? I want you to ask that. I want you to be aware of why you have to be good in this way and that. I do not want you to be unthinkingly good. I want you to be

’Not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife!’

or a heroine as the case may be. And so, why do we tell the Truth? Is it because if we did not do so people would be deceived and things go wrong? Partly. Is it because if we did not do so, people would not trust us? Also yes, partly. But the real reason, girls and boys, is this, the real reason is that Lying Lips are an Abomination to the Lord, they are disgusting to Him, and so they ought to be disgusting to us. That is the real reason why we should tell the truth. Because it is a thing offensive and disgraceful, and if we did not do so, then we should tell a Lie.

(“Doris, _do_ stop plaiting your sister’s hair, please. There is a time for all things.)

“I hope there is no one here who can bear to think calmly of telling a Lie; and yet every time you do not tell the Truth manfully and bravely you do that. It is an offence so dreadful that we are told in Scripture that whosoever calleth his brother a liar—no doubt without sufficient evidence—is in danger of Hell Fire. I hope you will think of that if ever you should be tempted at any time to tell a Lie.

“But now I want you to think a little of what is Truth. It is clear you cannot tell the truth unless you know what truth is. Well, what is truth? One thing, I think, will occur to you all at once as part at least of the answer. Truth is straightness. When we say a ruler is true we mean that it is straight, and when we say a wall or a corner is out of truth we mean that it isn’t straight. And, in vulgar parlance, when we say a man is a straight man we mean one whose acts and words are true. And another thing of which our great teacher Ruskin so often reminds us is, that Truth is Simplicity. True people are always simple, and simple people are usually too simple to be anything but true. Truth never explains. It never argues. When I have to ask a girl—and sometimes I have to ask a girl—did she or did she not do this or that, then if she answers me simply and straightly Yes or No, I feel I am getting the truth, but if she answers back, ’that depends,’ or ’Please, Miss Murgatroyd, may I explain just how it was?’ then I know that there is something coming—something else coming, and not the straight and simple, the homespun, simple, valiant English Truth at all. Yes and No are the true words, because as Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers generally taught us in the Science of Logic long ago, and taught it to us for all time, a thing either is or else it is not; it is no good explaining or trying to explain, nothing can ever alter that now for ever. Either you _did_ do the thing or you didn’t do the thing. There is no other choice. That is the very essence of Logic; it would be impossible to have Logic without it.”...

So Miss Murgatroyd building up in her pupils’ minds by precept and example, the wonderful art and practice of English ratiocination.

§ 3

At first Joan and Peter did not see very much of Miss Murgatroyd. She moved about at the back of things, very dignified and remote, decorative and vaguely terrible. Their business lay chiefly with Miss Mills.

Miss Mills was also an educational enthusiast, but of a milder, gentler type than Miss Murgatroyd; she lacked Miss Murgatroyd’s confidence and boldness; she sometimes doubted whether everything wasn’t almost too difficult to teach. She was no blind disciple of her employer. She had a suppressed sense of academic humour that she had acquired by staying with an aunt who kept a small Berlin-wool shop in Oxford, and once or twice she had thought of the most dreadful witticisms about Miss Murgatroyd. Though she had told them to no one, they had kept her ears hot for days. Often she wanted quite badly to titter at the school; it was so different from an ordinary school. Yet she liked wearing a djibbah and sandals. That was fun. She had no educational qualifications, but year by year she was slowly taking the diploma of Associate of the London College of Preceptors. It is a kindly college; the examinations for the diploma may be taken subject by subject over a long term of years. She used to enjoy going up to London for her diploma at Christmas and Midsummer. Her great difficulty was the arithmetic. The sums never came right.

Miss Murgatroyd was usually very severe upon what she called the Fetish of Examinations; she herself had neither degree nor diploma, it was a moral incapacity, and she admitted that she could as soon steal as pass an examination; but it was understood that Miss Mills pursued this qualification with no idea whatever of passing but merely “for the sake of the stimulus.” She made a point of never preparing at all (“cramming” that is) for any of the papers she “took.” This put the thing on a higher level altogether.

She had already done the Theory and Practice of Education part of the diploma. For that she had read parts of _Leonard and Gertrude_, and she had attended five lectures upon Froebel. Those were days long before the Montessori System, which is now so popular with our Miss Millses; the prevalent educational vogues in the ’nineties were Kindergarten and Swedish drill (the Ling System). Miss Mills was an enthusiast for the Kindergarten. She began teaching Joan and Peter queer little practices with paper mats and paper-pattern folding, and the stringing of beads. As Joan and Peter had been doing such things for a year or so at home as “play,” their ready teachability impressed her very favourably. All the children who fell under Miss Mills got a lot of Kindergarten, even though some of them were as old as nine or ten. They had lots of little songs that she made them sing with appropriate action. All these little songs dealt with the familiar daily life—as it was lived in South Germany four score years ago. The children pretended to be shoemakers, foresters, and woodcutters and hunters and cowherds and masons and students wandering about the country, and they imitated the hammering of shoes, the sawing of stone or the chopping down of trees, and so forth. It had never dawned upon Miss Mills that such types as these were rare objects upon the Surrey countryside. In the country about her there were no masons because there was no stone, no cowherds because there were no cows on the hills and the cows below grazed in enclosed fields, trees and wood were handled wholesale by machinery, and people’s boots came from Northampton or America, and were repaired in London. If any one had suggested songs about golf caddies, jobbing gardeners, or traction-engines, or steam-ploughs, or sawmills, or rate-collectors, or grocers’ boys, or season-ticket holders, or stockbrokers from London stealing rights-of-way, or carpenters putting up fences and trespass-notice boards, she would have thought it a very vulgar suggestion indeed.

Kindergarten did not occupy all the time-table of Miss Mills. She regarded kindergarten as a special subject. She also taught her class to read, she taught them to write, she imparted the elements of history and geography, she did not so much lay the foundations of mathematics as accumulate a sort of rubble on which Mr. Beldame, the visiting mathematical master (Tuesdays and Thursdays), was afterwards to build. Here again Joan and Peter were fortunate. Peter had learnt his alphabet before he was two; Joan had not been much later with it, and both of them could read easy little stories already before they came under Miss Mills’ guidance. That English spelling was entirely illogical, had not troubled them in the least. Insistence upon logical consistency comes later in life. Miss Mills never discovered their previous knowledge. She had heard of a method of teaching to read which was called the “Look and Say Method,” and the essence of it was that you never learnt your letters. It was devised for the use of those older children who go to elementary schools from illiterate homes, and who are beginning to think for themselves a little. From the first by this method the pupils learnt the letters in combination.

“Now, Peter,” Miss Mills would say, “this is ’to.’ Look and say—to.”

“To,” said Peter.

“Now I put this little squiggle to it.”

(“P,” said Peter privately).

“And it is ’top’.”

“Top,” said Peter.

“And now _this_ is ’co.’ What is this? Look and say.”

Peter regarded “cop” for a moment. He knew c-o-p was the signal for “cop,” just as S.O.S. is the signal for “help urgently needed,” but he knew also it was forbidden to read out the letters of the signal.

“Cop,” said Peter, after going through the necessary process of thought.

His inmost feeling about the matter was that Miss Mills did not know her letters, but had some queer roundabout way of reading of her own, and that he was taking an agreeable advantage of her....

Then Miss Mills taught Peter to add and subtract and multiply and divide. She had once heard some lectures upon teaching arithmetic by graphic methods that had pleased her very much. They had seemed so clear. The lecturer had suggested that for a time easy sums might be shown in the concrete as well as in figures. You would first of all draw your operation or express it by wood blocks, and then you would present it in figures. You would draw an addition of 3 to 4, thus:

┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ├──────┤ ├──────┤ ├──────┤ ├──────┤ ├──────┤ added to ├──────┤ makes this heap ├──────┤ └──────┘ ├──────┤ ├──────┤ └──────┘ ├──────┤ ├──────┤ └──────┘

And then when your pupil had counted it and verified it you would write it down:

3 + 4 = 7

But Miss Mills, when she made her notes, had had no time to draw all the parallelograms; she had just put down one and a number over it in each case, and then her memory had muddled the idea. So she taught Joan and Peter thus: “See,” she said, “I will make it perfectly plain to you. Perfectly plain. You take three—so,” and she drew

┌───┐ │ │ │ 3 │ │ │ └───┘

“and then you take four—so,” and she drew

┌───┐ │ │ │ 4 │ │ │ └───┘

“and then you see three plus four makes seven—so:

┌───┐ ┌───┐ ┌───┐ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 3 │ + │ 4 │ = │ 7 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘

“Do you see now how it must be so, Peter?”

Peter tried to feel that he did.

Peter quite agreed that it was nice to draw frames about the figures in this way. Afterwards he tried a variation that looked like the face of old Chester Drawers:

┌───┐ ┌───┐ │ │ │ │ │ 3 │ ┼ │ 4 │ │ │ ║ │ │ └───┘ ┼ └───┘ ▼ ┌───┐ │ │ │ 7 │ │ │ └───┘