Chapter 3

During the past week there has taken place, almost without our knowledge, a great migration of boys. From their homes, out on to the roads and railways, has been pouring a flood of big boys, middle-sized boys, small boys, old boys, new boys, all tending towards the various schools where they are supposed to make all the best parts of human knowledge their own and to live a life of dignified abstraction from the troubles of the world, in the midst of their own _argot_ and their own special traditions.

Of the big boys and the middle-sized boys I have little to say. They are already imbued, if one may say so, with the influence of their school, and can hold their own with the masters and their fellow-boys. Much as they enjoy their holidays, they show no undue reluctance to take up again the burden of their studies at a place which they will afterwards consider as having given them some of the happiest days of their lives. Many of them indeed are already or are in process of becoming the trusted coadjutors of the headmaster and his colleagues in the work of maintaining good order and discipline in the school. They are monitors--tremendous word!--or prefects or præpostors, and their _mitis sapientia_, no less than their muscular strength, causes them to be feared and venerated.

Of such awful beings one must not speak lightly lest some terrific fate reserved for scoffers overtake one. No, my concern at present is rather with the little boys who have gone up for the first time to their preparatory school, those forlorn scraps of humanity who are beginning a life entirely new to them in all its details. Hitherto, except for visits to the seaside with their parents and family, they have not spent a night away from home. Now they are separated from their parents and plunged into a world of perfect strangers. Everything is done to make them at ease and comfortable in their new surroundings; the headmaster is kindness itself, the matron beams on them with smiles and fortifies them with encouragement; but just at first the wrench for the little fellows is great. In a day or two, however, they will begin to acclimatise themselves; the strangeness will begin to wear off; and having borne up bravely against their first sense of loneliness in the midst of a crowd they will gradually become parts of the machine to the making of which many gentle and sympathising hands for years past have contributed.

"Schools are not what they were," says one of my friends. "There is no bullying nowadays and little roughness of any kind. Masters are not looked upon as the natural enemies of boys. Corporal punishment, except for the gravest offences, is abolished. Whereas, formerly, little boys were at once sucked into the vortex of a Public School, there are now Preparatory Schools, where Tommie and Dickie and Harry, aged from nine to ten, learn the business of Public Schooling in a manner suited to their age and capacity. When we were boys," he continues, "these admirable buffer states were so few that they might almost be said not to exist at all; they now flourish everywhere. The path of the little boy is thus made easier for him."

"But," I said, "is a little boy, then, never brought to a sense of his unimportance by being physically, if not morally, kicked? Is he to pass his life in a condition of Sybaritic softness?"

"You need not," he said, "worry about that. Softness makes no appeal to the average English boy."

When therefore, on a day in last week, it happened to me to take a little boy I happen to know to his Preparatory School on his first day of his first term there, I did so with no undue depression. "Be a good boy," I said to him; "never tell a lie, never push yourself forward, and don't swank about yourself." It was good advice so far as it went, but it did not make any great impression on him, for he only answered, "Of course," or "Of course I shan't," to every item that I put before him. I wonder how many fathers have recently inculcated these and similar high-toned principles on their little boys, only to meet with the same uninterested acquiescence. And even our parting was not so dejected as it might have been, for by that time another new boy had come upon the scene, and he and mine had been irresistibly drawn to one another, and were chatting gaily when it was time for me to go.

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CHILDREN'S TALES FOR GROWN-UPS.

IX.

THE UNWRITTEN TREATY.

"Be careful," said the worm to the slug, "there is one of those nasty birds over there. What ugly things they are!"

"Not half so ugly as men. Ugh!" said the slug.

"Men are big, not ugly. They don't eat worms."

"But they cut them in two with spades."

"Only by accident. There is nothing so ugly as a bloated over-grown bird eating a slender delicate worm."

"Except," said the slug, "a monstrous man crushing a tender slug under his clumsy hoofs. Birds I can tolerate. They are not so big as men."

"But they hop quicker and eat more for their size," said the worm.

"Not slugs, they don't eat slugs. We have a treaty with the birds, you know."

"Was it signed?" asked the worm.

"There was no need. You see it is a matter of convenience. We don't get eaten, and the birds don't get their beaks slimy."

"Convenience is a great thing," said the worm, "but it isn't everything. Well, good-bye; I am going in till the bird goes."

"And I am staying out till the man comes."

"Slugs are nasty slimy things," said the thrush, "but in these hard times one must eat what one can get," and he swallowed the slug with a wry face.

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WELL-MEANT.

Extract from a New Zealand school-boy's letter:--

"We also had songs, the College song, and the Harrow School song, for the special benifit (_sic_) of the Governor, who is an Etonian."

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

I was some way into _Thorgills of Treadholt_ (WARD, LOCK), thinking what an unusually plausible and imaginative yarn it was, when I turned back for possible enlightenment, and found a note to the effect that it was a transcription of an Icelandic saga. Those old fellows knew their business. I am not sagacious enough to guess where Mr. MAURICE HEWLETT has passed beyond transcription to creation, but I can tell you that he offers his readers a very charming and finished piece of work. Boys of all ages should delight in this record of the fights and wanderings and stout diplomacy of the chieftain _Thorgills_, who was destined from his cradle to be a notable leader of men. His marriage with _Thorey_ was a romance of as exquisite a flavour as any that our sophisticated age can show, and its tragic end wrings the heart with its infinite pathos. By some singular discretion Mr. HEWLETT has chosen to eschew the least approach to Wardour-Street idiom, and this gives the narrative a simplicity, a sanity and a vivid sense of reality which are extraordinarily more effective than the goodliest tushery, of which flamboyant art Mr. HEWLETT is no mean master. I am sure he has chosen this time a more excellent way. There are transcriptions and transcriptions. This is brilliantly done.

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I cannot help regretting that Miss RHODA BROUGHTON has not thought fit to publish her total fictional tonnage (if without disrespect I may employ a metaphor of the moment) on the title-page of her latest volume. Certainly the tale of her output must by this time reach impressive dimensions. And the wonder is that _A Thorn in the Flesh_ (STANLEY PAUL) betrays absolutely no evidence of staleness. If the outlook here is a thought less romantic than in certain novels that drew sighs from my adolescent breast, this is a change inherent in the theme. For the matter of the present work is a study in conjugal tedium. _Parthenope_ (name of ill-omen) was one of those unhappy and devastating beings who go through life fated to bore their nearest and dearest to the verge of lunacy. So that her marriage to poor well-meaning _Willy Steele_ had not endured for more than a matter of weeks before the wretched man fled from his newly-made nest, with the heart-cry (uttered to _Parthenope's_ female relatives, themselves too sympathetic to resent it), "I cannot stand her any longer!" This unfortunate _débâcle_ is very ingeniously contrasted with the courtship of another couple, immune from the curse; and the whole story is as fresh as it is amusing. Perhaps it might have been told in fewer words; at times the slender theme seems a trifle overladen. But probably your true Broughtonians (who must be reckoned in thousands) would condemn such a suggestion as heresy; and, if they be satisfied, as they certainly will be, then all is well.

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It is a tribute at once to the art of her treatment and the actuality of her theme that, after reading the delicate little study of modern romance that ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL calls _The Lovers_ (HEINEMANN), I cannot determine whether the clever writer was reproducing or inventing--she begins so convincingly with the statement that it was her first chapter, itself an article in _The Century_, describing the life of The Lovers as she watched it from her window, that brought about her friendship with the originals, and thus her knowledge of their further history. Anyhow, true or not, it is the kind of story that has been going on all round us in these days of love and heroism. Mrs. PENNELL first began to watch her pair of _amoureux_ in their attic, which was overlooked from her higher window (most readers could probably make a shrewd guess at its postal district) in those seemingly so distant years when the young champions of artistic London used to meet at a certain _café_, wonderfully clad, to consume vast quantities of milk. Then came the War; the boy-husband enlisted, went to the Front--and the end is as we all have known it many and many times. In this little book the too familiar story is given with a restraint and absence of striving after effect that leave me, as I say, uncertain whether its appeal is due to art or actuality. But in either case Mrs. PENNELL has told it very well.

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"Father, what is the difference between Tories and Radicals?" "Radicals, my dear, are the infamous crew who wish to destroy all the noble institutions for which the Tories would give their life-blood." "And which are you, Father?" I have inflicted this ancient (and, I always think, rather touching) scrap of dialogue upon you because it exactly illustrates my impression of _The Soul of Ulster_ (HURST AND BLACKETT). In other words, this little book, written as ably and attractively as you would expect from the author of _The First Seven Divisions_, is really less a dispassionate survey of the Home Rule difficulty than a piece of special pleading for the Northern cause. According, therefore, to your own attitude towards this problem will characters occupies her rural stage--an old grandmother, be your estimate of Lord ERNEST HAMILTON'S arguments. To the bigoted (or confirmed) Orangeman they will seem revelation; to the confirmed (or bigoted) Nationalist they will as clearly seem rubbish. Even I, who admit the justice of the author's contentions, fancied now and again (as in the matter of the "Peep-o'-Day Boys," for example) that a slightly more generous admission of faults on his own side would have strengthened the presentation of his case. One of the most interesting chapters of a quite short volume is that in which the author explains his belief, at first rather startling, that the eventual solution of the vexed question may be provided through the Sinn Fein movement. That hope, and the reasons for it, are certainly alone worth the half-crown for which you can examine them.

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SERGE AKSAKOFF, a distinguished Russian writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, gave the world a portrait of his grandfather. It is now translated with a singular felicity by Mr. J.D. DUFF, under the title, _A Russian Gentleman_ (ARNOLD), and I should like to say that I, who have suffered something from translations out of the Russian, have very rarely read one which ran with such plausible smoothness and gave so clear an impression of a charming original. STEFAN MIHAILOVITCH BAGROFF was reckoned a good sort and a just if rather uncompromising man. His character is drawn with faithful exactness and praised with simple filial appreciation. The foibles of this worthy patriarch, such as the dragging of his wife along the floor when he was excessively annoyed, so that she went with her head bound for a year thereafter, are excused on the ground of his general decency. And indeed he was a lovable old boy, and the simple and unselfconscious artistry with which the author develops his character, and that of his daughter-in-law, SOFYA NIKOLAYEVNA, delights the jaded literary palate. AKSAKOFF has a quite singular power of selecting just the incident, the phrase, the gesture, the feature of the landscape which make you exclaim with a start, "Why, I'm seeing and hearing all this!" It is such a book as an historian of the modern school would delight in, more engrossing than fiction of the most realistic type. There is incident in it too--as of the degenerate KUROLYESSOFF, a cousin-in-law of MIHAILOVITCH, who used to flog his serfs, sometimes to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern Orenburg into the adjoining province of Ufa, and the building of the mill and the dam, are astonishingly vivid and agreeable.

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_A Maid o' Dorset_ (CASSELL) can be recommended to anyone in need of light refreshment after a course of sterner literature. Here we are back again in the world of small things; but if "M.E. FRANCIS'S" theme is trivial there is no denying the art with which she handles it. Just a quartette of characters occupies her rural stage--an old grandmother, wise with the wisdom of years, her granddaughter, a middle-aged farmer and a young gipsy "dairy-chap." To the horror of her relations the Maid o' Dorset conceives an infatuation for the gipsy, a clever rogue but no match for the grandmother. I have met a good many farmers in my time, but never one so simple-minded as _Solomon Blanchard_. It is all very Franciscan, and seems easy enough, but if you think, for that reason, that you could do it yourself, you couldn't. Its charm lies in its fragrance, and that is a quality which is not lightly come by.

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OUR HELPFUL CONTEMPORARIES.

"The majority of the Russian soldiers are not so naif as, after having deposed the Tsar, to set to work for the King of Prussia.

"Note.--'Travailler from le Rois des Prusses' is the French colloquial equivalent for 'To work for nothing.'"--_Pall Mall Gazette_.

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FAINT PRAISE.

"Commander Wedgwood said there was no newspaper in this country--not even the _Daily Mail_--which had not printed during the three years of war something to which objection could not be taken."--_Daily Paper_.