Part 22

The playroom (it was the old nursery rechristened) was indeed better. It was all glorious with paper chains of green and white festooned from corner to corner. On the floor to the right under the window was every toy soldier that Peter possessed drawn up in review array—a gorgeous new Scots Grey band in the front that Oswald had given him. But that was nothing. The big armchair had been drawn out into the middle of the room, and on it was _Peter’s own lion-skin_. And a piece of red stair-carpet had been put for Joan to go up to the throne upon. And beside the throne was a little table, and on the table was a tinsel robe from Clarkson’s and a wonderful gilt crown and a sceptre. Oswald had brought them along that morning.

“The crown is for _you_, Joan!” said Peter. “The sceptre was bought for _you_.”

Little white-faced Joan stood stockishly with the crown in one hand and the sceptre in the other. “Put the crown on, Joan,” said Peter. “It’s yours. It’s a rest’ration ceremony.”

But she didn’t put it on.

“It’s lovely—and it’s lovely,” whispered Joan in a sort of rapture, and stared about her incredulously with her big dark eyes. It was home again—_home_, and Mrs. Pybus had passed like an evil dream in the night. She had never really believed it possible before that Mrs. Pybus could pass away. Even while Aunt Phyllis and Mary had been nursing her, Mrs. Pybus had hovered in the background like something more enduring, waiting for them to pass away as inexplicably as they had come. Joan had heard the whining voice upon the stairs every day and always while she was ill, and once Mrs. Pybus had come and stood by her bedside and remarked like one who maintains an argument, “She’ll be ’appy enough ’ere when she’s better again.”

_No more Mrs. Pybus!_ No more whining scoldings. No more unexpected slaps and having to go to bed supperless. No more measles and uneasy misery in a bed with grey sheets. No more dark dreadful sayings that lurked in the mind like jungle beasts. She was home, home with Peter, out of that darkness....

And yet—outside was the darkness still....

“Joan,” said Peter, trying to rouse her. “There’s a cake like a birthday for tea....”

When Oswald came in she was still holding the gilt crown in her hand.

She let Peter take it from her and put it on her head, still staring incredulously about her. She took the sceptre limply. Peter was almost gentle with this strange, staring Joan.

§ 13

For some days Oswald regarded Joan as a grave and thoughtful child. She seemed to be what country people call “old-fashioned.” She might have been a changeling. He did not hear her laugh once. And she followed Peter about as if she was his shadow.

Then one day as he cycled over from Chastlands he heard a strange tumult proceeding from a little field on Master’s farm, a marvellous mixture of familiar and unfamiliar sounds, an uproar, wonderful as though a tinker’s van had met a school treat and the twain had got drunk together. The source of this row was hidden from him by a little coppice, and he dismounted and went through the wood to investigate. Joan and Peter had discovered a disused cowshed with a sloping roof of corrugated iron, and they had also happened upon an abandoned kettle and two or three tin cans. They were now engaged in hurling these latter objects on to the resonant roof, down which they rolled thunderously only to be immediately returned. Joan was no longer a slip of pensive dignity, Peter was no longer a marvel of intellectual curiosities. They were both shrieking their maximum. Oswald had never before suspected Joan of an exceptionally full voice, nor Peter of so vast a wealth of gurgling laughter. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’” yelled Joan. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’.”

“Hoo!” cried Peter. “Hoo! Go it, Joan. Wow!”

And then, to crown the glory, _the kettle burst_. It came into two pieces. That was too perfect! The two children staggered back. Each seized a half of the kettle and kicked it deliberately. Then they rolled away and fell on their stomachs amidst the grass, kicking their legs in the air.

But the spirit of rowdyism grows with what it feeds upon.

“Oh, let’s do something _reely_ awful!” cried Joan. “Let’s do something _reely_ awful, Petah!”

Peter’s legs became still and stiff with interrogation.

“Oh, Petah!” said Joan. “If I could only smash a window. Frow a brick frough a real window, a Big Glass Window. Just one Glass Window.”

“_Where’s_ a window?” said Peter, evidently in a highly receptive condition.

From which pitch of depravity Oswald roused him by a prod in the back....

§ 14

But after that Joan changed rapidly. Colour crept back into her skin, and a faintly rollicking quality into her bearing. She became shorter again and visibly sturdier, and her hair frizzed more and stuck out more. Her laugh and her comments upon the world became an increasingly frequent embroidery upon the quiet of The Ingle-Nook. She seemed to have a delusion that Peter was just within earshot, but only just.

Oswald wondered how far her recent experiences had vanished from her mind. He thought they might have done so altogether until one day Joan took him into her confidence quite startlingly. He was smoking in the little arbour, and she came and stood beside him so noiselessly that he did not know she was there until she spoke. She was holding her hands behind her, and she was regarding the South Downs with a pensive frown. She was paying him the most beautiful compliment. She had come to consult him.

“Mrs. Pybus said,” she remarked, “that every one who doesn’t believe there’s a God goes straight to Hell....

“I don’t believe there’s a God,” said Joan, “and Peter _knows_ there isn’t.”

For a moment Oswald was a little taken aback by this simple theology. Then he said, “D’you think Peter’s looked everywhere, Joan?”

Then he saw the real point at issue. “One thing you may be sure about, Joan,” he said, “and that is that there isn’t a Hell. Which is rather a pity in its way, because it would be nice to think of this Mrs. Pybus of yours going there. But there’s no Hell at all. There’s nothing more dreadful than the dreadful things _in_ life. There’s no need to worry about Hell.”

That he thought was fairly conclusive. But Joan remained pensive, with her eyes still on the distant hills. Then she asked one of those unanswerable children’s questions that are all implication, imputation, assumption, misunderstanding, and elision.

“But if there isn’t a Hell,” said Joan, “what does God do?”

§ 15

It was after Joan had drifted away again from these theological investigations that Oswald, after sitting some time in silence, said aloud and with intense conviction, “I love these children.”

He was no longer a stranger in England; he had a living anchorage. He looked out over the autumnal glories of the Weald, dreaming intentions. These children must be educated. They must be educated splendidly. Oswald wanted to see Peter serving the empire. The boy would have pluck—he had already the loveliest brain—and a sense of fun. And Joan? Oswald was, perhaps, not quite so keen in those days upon educating Joan. That was to come later....

After all, the empire, indeed the whole world of mankind, is made up of Joans and Peters. What the empire is, what mankind becomes, is nothing but the sum of what we have made of the Joans and Peters.

CHAPTER THE TENTH A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS

§ 1

So it was that a systematic intention took hold of the lives of Joan and Peter. They had been snatched apart adventurously and disastrously out of the hands of an aimless and impulsive modernism and dragged off into dusty and decaying corners of the Anglican system. Now they were to be rescued by this Empire worshipper, this disfigured and suffering educational fanatic, and taught——?

What was there in Oswald’s mind? His intentions were still sentimental and cloudy, but they were beginning to assume a firm and definite form. Just as the Uganda children were being made into civilized men and women according to the lights and means of the Protectorate government, so these two children had to be made fit rulers and servants of the greatest empire in the world. They had to know all that a ruling race should know, they had to think and act as befitted a leading people. All this seemed to him the simple and obvious necessity of the case. But he was a sick man, fatigued much more readily than most men, given to moods of bitter irritability; he had little knowledge of how he might set about this task, he did not know what help was available and what was impossible. He made enquiries and some were very absurd enquiries; he sought advice and talked to all sorts of people; and meanwhile Joan and Peter spent a very sunny and pleasant November running wild about Limpsfield—until one day Oswald noted as much and packed them off for the rest of the term to Miss Murgatroyd again. The School of St. George and the Venerable Bede was concentrating upon a Christmas production of _Alice in Wonderland_. There could not be very much bad teaching anyhow, and there would be plenty of fun.

How is one to learn where one’s children may be educated?

This story has its comic aspects: Oswald went first to the Education Department!

He thought that if one had two rather clever and hopeful children upon whom one was prepared to lavish time and money, an Imperial Education Department would be able to tell an anxious guardian what schools existed for them and the respective claims and merits and inter-relationships of such schools. But he found that the government which published a six-inch map of the British Isles on which even the meanest outhouse is marked, had no information for the enquiring parent or guardian at all in this matter of schools. An educational map had still to become a part of the equipment of the civilized state. As it was inconceivable that party capital could be made out of the production of such a map, it was likely to remain a desideratum in Great Britain for many years to come.

In an interview that remained dignified on one side at least until the last, Oswald was referred to the advertisement columns of _The Times_ and the religious and educational papers, and to—“a class of educational _agents_,” said the official with extreme detachment. “Usually, of course, people _hear_ of schools.”

So it was that England still referred back to the happy days of the eighteenth century when our world was small enough for everybody to know and trust and consult everybody, and tell in a safe and confidential manner everything that mattered.

“Oh, my God!” groaned Oswald suddenly, giving way to his internal enemies. “My God! Here are two children, brilliant children—with plenty of money to be spent on them! Doesn’t the Empire care a twopenny damn what becomes of them?”

“There is an Association of Private Schoolmasters, I believe,” said the official, staring at him; “but I don’t know if it’s any good.”

§ 2

Joan was rehearsing a special dance in costume and Peter was word-perfect as the White Knight long before Oswald had found even a hopeful school for either of them. He clung for some time to the delusion that there must exist somewhere a school that would exactly meet Peter’s natural and reasonable demand for an establishment where one would learn about “guns and animals, mountains, machines and foreign people,” that would give lessons about “the insides of animals” and “how engines work” and “all that sort of thing.” The man wanted a school kept by Leonardo da Vinci. When he found a curriculum singularly bare of these vital matters, he began to ask questions.

His questions presently developed into a very tiresome and trying Catechism for Schoolmasters. He did not allow for the fact that most private schoolmasters in England were rather overworked and rather under-exercised men with considerable financial worries. Indeed, he made allowances for no one. He wanted to get on with the education of Joan and Peter—and more particularly of Peter.

His Catechism varied considerably in detail, but always it ran upon the lines of the following questions.

“What sort of boy are you trying to make?”

“How will he differ from an uneducated boy?”

“I don’t mean in manners, I mean how will he differ in imagination?”

“Yes—I said—imagination.”

“Don’t you _know_ that education is building up an imagination? I thought everybody knew that.”

“Then what _is_ education doing?”

Here usually the Catechized would become troublesome and the Catechist short and rude. The Catechism would be not so much continued as resumed after incivilities and a silence.

“What sort of curriculum is my ward to go through?”

“Why is he to _do_ Latin?”

“Why is he to _do_ Greek?”

“Is he going to read or write or speak these languages?”

“Then what is the strange and peculiar benefit of them?”

“What will my ward know about Africa when you have done with him?”

“What will he know about India? Are there any Indian boys here?”

“What will he know about Garibaldi and Italy? About engineering? About Darwin?”

“Will he be able to write good English?”

“Do your boys do much German? Russian? Spanish or Hindustani?”

“Will he know anything about the way the Royal Exchange affects the Empire? But why shouldn’t he understand the elementary facts of finance and currency? Why shouldn’t every citizen understand what a pound sterling really means? All our everyday life depends on that. What do you teach about Socialism? Nothing! Did you say Nothing? But he may be a member of Parliament some day. Anyhow he’ll be a voter.”

“But if you can’t teach him everything why not leave out these damned classics of yours?”...

The record of an irritable man seeking the impossible is not to be dwelt upon too closely. During his search for the boys’ school that has yet to exist, Oswald gave way to some unhappy impulses; he made himself distressing and exasperating to quite a number of people. From the first his attitude to scholastic agents was hostile and uncharitable. His appearance made them nervous and defensive from the outset, more particularly the fierce cocking of his hat and the red intensity of his eye. He came in like an accusation rather than an application.

“And tell me, are these all the schools there are?” he would ask, sitting with various printed and copygraphed papers in his hand.

“All we can recommend,” the genteel young man in charge would say.

“All you are _paid_ to recommend?” Oswald would ask.

“They are the best schools available,” the genteel young man would fence.

“Bah!” Oswald would say.

A bad opening....

From the ruffled scholastic agents Oswald would go on in a mood that was bound to ruffle the hopeful school proprietor. Indeed some of these interviews became heated so soon and so extravagantly that there was a complete failure to state even the most elementary facts of the case. Lurid misunderstandings blazed. Uganda got perplexingly into the dispute. From one admirable establishment in Eastbourne Oswald retreated with its principal calling after him from his dignified portico, “I wouldn’t take the little nigger at any price.”

When his doctor saw him after this last encounter he told him; “You are not getting on as well as you ought to do. You are running about too much. You ought to be resting completely.”

So Oswald took a week’s rest from school visiting before he tried again.

§ 3

If it had not been for the sense of Joan and Peter growing visibly day by day, Oswald might perhaps have displayed more of the patience of the explorer. But his was rather the urgency of a thirsty traveller who looks for water than the deliberation of a trigonometrical survey. In a little while he mastered the obvious fact that preparatory schools were conditioned by the schools for which they prepared. He found a school at Margate, White Court, which differed rather in quality, and particularly in the quality of its proprietor, than in the nature of its arrangements from the other schools he had been visiting, and to this he committed Peter. Assisted by Aunt Phyllis he found an education for Joan in Highmorton School, ten miles away; he settled himself in a furnished house at Margate to be near them both; and having thus gained a breathing time, he devoted himself to a completer study of the perplexing chaos of upper-class education in England. What was it “up to”? He had his own clear conviction of what it ought to be up to, but the more he saw of existing conditions, the more hopelessly it seemed to be up to either entirely different things or else, in a spirit of intellectual sabotage, up to nothing at all. From the preparatory schools he went on to the great public schools, and from the public schools he went to the universities. He brought to the quest all the unsympathetic detachment of an alien observer and all the angry passion of an anxious patriot. With some suggestions from Matthew Arnold.

“Indolence.” “Insincerity.” These two words became more and more frequent in his thoughts as he went from one great institution to another. Occasionally the headmasters he talked to had more than a suspicion of his unspoken comments. “Their imaginations are dead within them,” said Oswald. “If only they could see the Empire! If only they could forget their little pride and dignity and affectations in the vision of mankind!”

His impressions of headmasters were for the most part taken against a background of white-flannelled boys in playing-fields or grey-flannelled boys in walled court-yards. Eton gave him its river effects and a bright, unforgetable boatman in a coat of wonderful blue; Harrow displayed its view and insisted upon its hill. Physically he liked almost all the schools he saw, except Winchester, which he visited on a rainy day. Almost always there were fine architectural effects; now there was a nucleus of Gothic, now it was time-worn Tudor red brick, now well-proportioned grey Georgian. Most of these establishments had the dignity of age, but Caxton was wealthily new. Caxton was a nest of new buildings of honey-coloured stone; it was growing energetically but tidily; it waved its hand to a busy wilderness of rocks and plants and said, “our botanical garden,” to a piece of field and said “our museum group.” But it had science laboratories with big apparatus, and the machinery for a small engineering factory. Oswald with an experienced eye approved of its biological equipment. All these great schools were visibly full of life and activity. At times Oswald was so impressed by this life and activity that he felt ashamed of his enquiries; it seemed ungracious not to suppose that all was going well here, that almost any of these schools was good enough and that almost any casual or sentimental considerations, Sydenham family traditions or the like, should suffice to determine which was to have the moulding of Peter. But he had set his heart now on getting to the very essentials of this problem; he was resolved to be blinded by no fair appearances, and though these schools looked as firmly rooted and stoutly prosperous as British oaks and as naturally grown as they, though they had an air of discharging a function as necessary as the beating of a heart and as inevitably, he still kept his grip on the idea that they were artificial things of men’s contriving, and still pressed his questions: What are you trying to do? What are you doing? How are you doing it? How do you fit in to the imperial scheme of things?

So challenged these various high and headmasters had most of them the air of men invited to talk of things that are easier to understand than to say. They were not at all pompous about their explanations; from first to last Oswald never discovered the pompous schoolmaster of legend and history; without exception they seemed anxious to get out of their gowns and pose as intelligent laymen; but they were not intelligent laymen, they did not explain, they did not explain, they waved hands and smiled. They “hoped” they were “turning out clean English gentlemen.” They didn’t train their men specially to any end at all. The aim was to develop a general intelligence, a general goodwill.

“In relation to the empire and its destiny?” said Oswald.

“I should hardly fix it so definitely as that,” said Overtone of Hillborough.

“But don’t you set before these youngsters some general aim in life to which they are all to contribute?”

“We rather leave the sort of contribution to them,” said Overtone.

“But you must put something before them of where they are, where they are to come in, what they belong to?” said Oswald.

“That lies in the world about them,” said Overtone. “King and country—we don’t need to preach such things.”

“But what the King signifies—if he signifies anything at all—and the aim of the country,” urged Oswald. “And the Empire! The Empire—our reality. This greatness of ours beyond the seas.”

“We don’t stress it,” said Overtone. “English boys are apt to be suspicious and ironical. Have you read that delightful account of the patriotic lecture in _Stalky and Co_? Oh, you _should_.”

A common evasiveness characterized all these headmasters when Oswald demanded the particulars of Peter’s curriculum. He wanted to know just the subjects Peter would study and which were to be made the most important, and then when these questions were answered he would demand: “And why do you teach this? What is the particular benefit of that to the boy or the empire? How does this other fit into your scheme of a clear-minded man?” But it was difficult to get even the first questions answered plainly. From the very outset he found himself entangled in that longstanding controversy upon the educational value of Latin and Greek. His circumstances and his disposition alike disposed him to be sceptical of the value of these shibboleths of the British academic world. Their share in the time-table was enormous. Excellent gentlemen who failed to impress him as either strong-minded or exact, sought to convince him of the pricelessness of Latin in strengthening and disciplining the mind; Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely. Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither beautifully nor precisely. Lippick, irregularly bald and with neglected teeth, a man needlessly unpleasing to the eye, descanted upon the Greek spirit, and its blend of wisdom and sensuous beauty. He quoted Euripides at Oswald and breathed an antique air in his face—although he knew that Oswald knew practically no Greek.

“Well,” said Oswald, “but compare this,” and gave him back three good minutes of Swahili.

“But what does it mean? It’s gibberish to me. A certain melody perhaps.”

“In English,” Oswald grinned, “you would lose it all. It is a passage of—oh! quite fantastic beauty.”...

No arguments, no apologetics, stayed the deepening of Oswald’s conviction that education in the public schools of Great Britain was not a forward-going process but a habit and tradition, that these classical schoolmasters were saying “nothing like the classics” in exactly the same spirit that the cobbler said “nothing like leather,” because it was the stuff they had in stock. These subjects were for the most part being slackly, tediously, and altogether badly taught to boys who found no element of interest in them, the boys were as a class acquiring a distaste and contempt for learning thus presented, and a subtle, wide demoralization ensued. They found a justification for cribs and every possible device for shirking work in the utter remoteness and uselessness of these main subjects; the extravagant interest they took in school games was very largely a direct consequence of their intense boredom in school hours.