The Lighter Side of School Life Part 8

Then there is Flabb. He finds a prefect's lot a very tolerable one. He fully appreciates the fleshpots in the prefect's room; and he feels that it is pleasant to have f.a.gs to whiten his cricket-boots and make toast for his tea. He maintains friendly relations with the rest of the House, and treats small boys kindly. He performs his mechanical duties--roll-call, supervision of Prep, and the like--with as little friction as possible. But he does not go out of his way to quell riots or put down bullying; and when any unpleasantness arises between the Prefects and the House, Flabb effaces himself as completely as possible.

Finally, there is Manby, the head of the House. He is high up in the Sixth, and a good all-round athlete. He weighs twelve stone ten, and fears nothing--except a slow ball which comes with the bowler's arm. To him government comes easily. The House hangs upon his lightest word, and his lieutenants go about their business with a.s.surance and despatch. He is a born organiser and a natural disciplinarian. His prestige overawes the unofficial aristocracy of the House--always the most difficult section. And he stands no nonsense. A Manby of my acquaintance once came upon twenty-two young gentlemen in a corner of the cricket-field, who, having privily abandoned the orthodox game arranged for their benefit that afternoon, were indulging in a pleasant but demoralising pastime known as "tip-and-run." Manby, addressing them as "slack little swine, a disgrace to the House," chastised them one by one, and next half-holiday made them play tip-and-run under a broiling sun and his personal supervision from two o'clock till six.

A House with a Manby at the head of it is safe. It can even survive a weak Housemaster. Greater Britain is run almost entirely by Manbys.

Taking it all round, the prefectorial machine works well. It is by no means perfect, but it is infinitely more efficient than any other machine. The chief bar to its smooth running is the inherent loyalty of boys to one another and their dislike of anything which savours of tale-bearing. Schoolboys have no love for those who go out of their way to support the arm of the Law, and a prefect naturally shrinks from being branded as a master's jackal. Hence, that ideal--a perfect understanding between a Housemaster and his prefects--is seldom achieved. What usually happens is that when the Housemaster is autocratically inclined he runs the House himself, while the prefects are mere lay figures; and when the Housemaster is weak or indolent the prefects take the law into their own hands and run the House, often extremely efficiently, with as little reference to their t.i.tular head as possible. He is a great Housemaster who can co-operate closely with his prefects without causing friction between the prefects and the House, or the prefects and himself.

But sometimes an intolerable strain is thrown upon the machine--or rather, upon the most sensitive portions of it.

Look at this boy, standing uneasily at the door of his study, with his fingers upon the handle. Outside, in the pa.s.sage, a riot is in progress.

It is only an ordinary exuberant "rag": he himself has partic.i.p.ated in many such. But the Law enjoins that this particular pa.s.sage shall be kept perfectly quiet between the hours of eight and nine in the evening; and it is this boy's particular duty, as the only prefect resident in the pa.s.sage, to put the Law into effect.

He stands in the darkness of his study, nerving himself. The crowd outside numbers ten or twelve; but he is not in the least afraid of that. This enterprise calls for a different kind of courage, and a good deal of it. Jackson is not a particularly prominent member of the House, except by reason of his office: others far more distinguished than himself are actually partic.i.p.ating in the disturbance outside. It will be of no avail to emerge wrathfully and say: "Less row, there!" He said that three nights ago. Two nights ago he said it again, and threatened reprisals. Last night he named various offenders by name, and stated that if the offence was repeated he would report them to the Housemaster. _To-night he has got to do it._ The revellers outside know this: the present turmoil is practically a challenge. To crown all, he can hear, above the din, in the very forefront of battle, the voice of Blake, once his own familiar friend.

With Blake Jackson had reasoned privily only that afternoon, warning him that the House would go to pot if its unt.i.tled aristocracy took to inciting others, less n.o.ble, to deeds of lawlessness. Blake had replied by recommending his late crony to return to his study and boil his head.

And here he was, leading to-night's riot.

What will young Jackson do? Watch him well, for from his action now you will be able to forecast the whole of his future life.

He may remain mutely in his study, stop his ears, and allow the storm to blow itself out. He may appear before the roysterers and utter vain repet.i.tions, thereby salving his conscience without saving his face. Or he may go out like a man and fulfil his promise of last night. It sounds simple enough on paper. But consider what it means to a boy of seventeen, possessing no sense of perspective to tone down the magnitude of the disaster he is courting. Jackson hesitates. Then, suddenly:

"I'll be _d.a.m.ned_ if I take it lying down!" he mutters.

He draws a deep breath, turns the handle, and steps out. Next moment he is standing in the centre of a silent and surly ring, jotting down names.

"You five," he announces to a party of comparatively youthful offenders, "can come to the prefect's room after prayers and be tanned. You three"--he indicates the incredulous Blake and two burly satellites--"will have to be reported. I'm sorry, but I gave you fair warning last night."

He turns on his heel and departs in good order to his study, branded--for life, he feels convinced--as an officious busybody, a presumptuous upstart, and worst of all, a betrayer of old friends. He has of his own free will cast himself into the nethermost h.e.l.l of the schoolboy--unpopularity--all to keep his word.

And yet for acts of mere physical courage they give men the Victoria Cross.

NUMBER II. THE OPPOSITION

To conduct the affairs of a nation requires both a Government and an Opposition. So it is with school politics. The only difference is that the scholastic Opposition is much franker about its true aims.

The average schoolboy, contemplating the elaborate arrangements made by those in authority for protecting him from himself--rules, roll-calls, bounds, lock-ups, magisterial discipline and prefectorial supervision--decides that the ordering and management of the school can be maintained without any active a.s.sistance from him; and he plunges joyously into Opposition with all the abandon of a good sportsman who knows that the odds are heavily against him. He breaks the Law, or is broken by the Law, with equal cheerfulness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE INTELLECTUAL]

The most powerful member of the Opposition is the big boy who has not been made a prefect, and is not likely to be made a prefect. He enjoys many privileges--some of them quite unauthorised--and has no responsibilities. He is one of the happiest people in the world. He has reached the age and status at which corporal punishment is supposed to be too degrading to be feasible: this immunity causes him to realise that he is a personage of some importance; and when he is addressed rudely by junior form-masters he frequently stands upon his dignity and speaks to his Housemaster about it. His position in the House depends firstly upon his athletic ability, and secondly upon the calibre of the prefects. Given a timid set of prefects, and an unquestioned reputation in the football world, Master Bullock has an extremely pleasant time of it. He possesses no f.a.gs, but that does not worry him.

I once knew a potentate of this breed who improvised a small gong out of the lid of a biscuit-tin, which he hung in his study. When he beat upon this with a tea-spoon, all within earshot were expected to (and did) come running for orders. Such as refrained were chastised with a toasting-fork.

Then comes a great company of which the House recks nothing, and of whom House history has little to tell--the Cave-Dwellers, the Swots, the Smugs, the Saps. These keep within their own lurking-places, sedulously avoiding the noisy conclaves which crowd sociably round the Hall fire.

For one thing, the conversation there bores them intensely, and for another they would seldom be permitted to join in it. The _role_ of Sir Oracle is strictly confined to the athletes of the House, though the Wag and the Oldest Inhabitant are usually permitted to offer observations or swell the chorus. But the Cave-Dwellers, never.

The curious part about it is that not by any means all the Cave-Dwellers are "Swots." It is popularly supposed that any boy who exhibits a preference for the privacy of his study devotes slavish attention therein to the evening's Prep, thus stealing a march upon his more sociable and less self-centred brethren. But this is far from being the case. Many of the Cave-Dwellers dwell in caves because they find it more pleasant to read novels, or write letters, or develop photographs, or even do nothing, than listen to stale House gossip or indulge in everlasting small cricket in a corridor.

They are often the salt of the House, but they have no conception of the fact. They entertain a low opinion of themselves: they never expect to rise to any great position in the world: so they philosophically follow their own bent, and leave the glory and the praise to the athletes and their _umbrae_. It comes as quite a shock to many of them, when they leave school and emerge into a larger world, to find themselves not only liked but looked up to; while the heroes of their schooldays, despite their hairy arms and club ties, are now dismissed in a word as "hobbledehoys."

Then comes the Super-Intellectual--the "Highbrow." He is a fish out of the water with a vengeance, but he does exist at school--somehow. He congregates in places of refuge with others of the faith; and they discuss the _English Review_, and mysterious individuals who are only referred to by their initials--as G. B. S. and G. K. C. Sometimes he initiates these discussions because they really interest him, but more often, it is to be feared, because they make him feel superior and grown-up. Somewhere in the school grounds certain youthful schoolmates of his, inspired by precisely similar motives but with different methods of procedure, are sitting in the centre of a rhododendron bush smoking cigarettes. In each case the idea is the same--namely, a hankering after meats which are not for babes. But the smoker puts on no side about his achievements, whereas the "highbrow" does. He loathes the vulgar herd and holds it aloof. He does not inform the vulgar herd of this fact, but he confides it to the other highbrows, and they applaud his discrimination. Intellectual sn.o.bbery is a rare thing among boys, and therefore difficult to account for. Perhaps the pose is a form of reaction. It is comforting, for instance, after you have been compelled to dance the can-can in your pyjamas for the delectation of the Lower Dormitory, to foregather next morning with a few kindred spirits and discourse pityingly and scathingly upon the gross philistinism of the lower middle cla.s.ses.

No, the lot of the aesthete at school is not altogether a happy one, but possibly his tribulations are not without a certain beneficent effect.

When he goes up to Oxford or Cambridge he will speedily find that in the tolerant atmosphere of those intellectual centres the prig is not merely permitted to walk the earth but to flourish like the green bay-tree.

Under the intoxicating effects of this discovery the recollection of the robust and primitive traditions of his old School--and the old School's method of instilling those traditions--may have a sobering and steadying effect upon him. No man ever developed his mind by neglecting his body, and if the memory of a coa.r.s.e and ruthless school tradition can persuade the Super-Intellectual to play hockey or go down to the river after lunch, instead of sitting indoors drinking liqueurs and discussing Maupa.s.sant with a coterie of the elect, then the can-can in the Lower Dormitory has not been danced altogether in vain.

Then come the rank and file. There are many types. There is the precocious type, marked out for favourable notice by apt.i.tude at games and attractive manners. Such an one stands in danger of being taken up by older boys than himself; which means that he will suffer the fate of all those who stray out of their proper station. At first he will be an object of envy and dislike; later, when his patrons have pa.s.sed on elsewhere, he may find himself friendless.

At the opposite end of the scale comes the b.u.t.t. His life is a hard one, but not without its compensations; for although he is the target of all the practical humour in the House, his post carries with it a certain celebrity; and at any rate a b.u.t.t can never be unpopular. So he is safe at least from the worst disaster that can befall a schoolboy. Besides, you require a good deal of character to be a b.u.t.t.

And there is the Buffoon. He is distinct from the b.u.t.t, because a b.u.t.t is usually a b.u.t.t _malgre lui_, owing to some peculiarity of appearance or temperament; whereas the Buffoon is one of those people who yearn for notice at any price, and will sell their souls "to make fellows laugh."

You may behold him, the centre of a grinning group, tormenting some shy or awkward boy--very often the b.u.t.t himself; while in school he is the bugbear of weak masters. The larger his audience the more exuberant he becomes: he reaches his zenith at a breaking-up supper or in the back benches on Speech Day. One is tempted to feel that when reduced to his own society he must suffer severely from depression.

Then there is the Man of the World. He is a recognised authority on fast life in London and Bohemian revels in Paris. He is a patron of the drama, and a perfect mine of unreliable information as to the private life of the originals of the dazzling portraits which line his study--and indeed half the studies in the House. The picture-postcard, as an educative and refining influence, has left an abiding mark upon the youth of the present day. We of an older and more rugged civilisation, who were young at a period when actresses' photographs cost two s.h.i.+llings each, were compelled in those days to restrict our gallery of divinities to one or two at the most. (Too often our collection was second-hand, knocked down for sixpence at some end-of-term auction, or reluctantly yielded in composition for a long-outstanding debt by a friend in the throes of a financial crisis.) But nowadays, with the entire Gaiety chorus at a penny apiece, the youthful connoisseur of female beauty has emanc.i.p.ated himself from the pictorial monogamy (or at the most, bigamy) of an earlier generation. He is a polygamist, a pantheist. He can erect an entire feminine Olympus upon his mantelpiece for the sum of half-a-crown. And yet, bless him, he is just as unsophisticated as we used to be--no more and no less. The type does not change.

Lastly, comes the little boy--the Squeaker, the Tadpole, the Nipper, what you will. His chief characteristic is terrific but short-lived enthusiasm for everything he undertakes, be it work, play, a friends.h.i.+p, or a private vendetta.

He begins by taking education very seriously. He is immensely proud of his first set of books, and writes his name on nearly every page, accompanied by metrical warnings to intending purloiners. He equips himself with a perfect a.r.s.enal of fountain-pens, rubber stamps, blue pencils, and ink-erasers. He starts a private mark-book of his own, to check possible carelessness or dishonesty on the part of his form-master. Then he gets to work, with his books disposed around him and his fountain-pen playing all over his ma.n.u.script. By the end of a fortnight he has lost all his books, and having broken his fountain-pen, is detected in a pathetic attempt to write his exercise upon a sheet of borrowed paper with a rusty nib held in his fingers or stuck into a splinter from off the floor.

It is the same with games. Set a company of small boys to play cricket, and their solemnity at the start is almost painful. Return in half an hour, and you will find that the stately contest has resolved itself into a reproduction of the parrot-house at the Zoo, the point at issue being a doubtful decision of the umpire's. Under the somewhat confiding arrangement which obtains in Lower School cricket, the umpire for the moment is the gentleman whose turn it is to bat next; so litigation is frequent. Screams of "Get out!" "Stay in!" "Cads!" "Liars!" rend the air, until a big boy or a master strolls over and quells the riot.

The small boy's friends.h.i.+ps, too, are of a violent but ephemeral nature.

But his outstanding characteristic is a pa.s.sion for organising secret societies of the most desperate and mysterious character, all of which come speedily to a violent or humiliating dissolution.

I was once privileged to be introduced into the inner workings of a society called "The Anarchists." It was not a very original t.i.tle, but it served its time, for the days of the Society were few and evil. Its aims were sanguinary and nebulous; the Rules consisted almost entirely of a list of the penalties to be inflicted upon those who transgressed them. For instance, under Rule XXIV any one who broke Rule XVII was compelled to sit down for five minutes upon a chair into the seat of which a pot of jam had been emptied. (Economists will be relieved to hear that the jam was afterwards eaten by the executioners, the criminal being very properly barred from partic.i.p.ating.)

The Anarchists had a private code of signals with which to communicate with one another in the presence of outsiders--in Prep, for instance.

The code was simplicity itself. A single tap with a pencil upon the table denoted the letter A; two taps, B; and so on. As may be imagined, Y and Z involved much mental strain; and as the transmitter of the message invariably lost count after fourteen or fifteen taps, and began all over again without any attempt either at explanation or apology, the gentleman who was acting as receiver usually found the task of decoding his signals a matter of extreme difficulty and some exasperation.

Before the tangle could be straightened out a prefect inevitably swooped down and awarded both signallers fifty lines for creating a disturbance in Preparation.

However, the Anarchists, though they finished after the manner of their kind, did not slip into oblivion so noiselessly as some of their predecessors. In fact, nothing in their inky and jabbering life became them like their leaving of it.

One evening the entire brotherhood--there were about seven of them--were a.s.sembled in a study which would have held four comfortably, engaged in pa.s.sing a vote of censure upon one Horace Bull, B.A., their form-master.

Little though he knew it, Bull had been a marked man for some weeks. The Czar of all the Russias himself could hardly have occupied a more prominent position in the black books of Anarchy in general. To-day he had taken a step nearer his doom by clouting one Nixon minor, Vice-President of the Anarchists, on the side of the head.

It was during the geography hour. Mr. Bull had asked Nixon to define a watershed. Nixon, who upon the previous evening had been too much occupied with his duties as Vice-President of the Anarchists to do much Prep, had replied with a seraphic smile that a watershed was "a place to shelter from the rain." As an improvised effort the answer seemed to him an extremely good one; but Mr. Bull had promptly left his seat, addressed Nixon as a "cheeky little hound," and committed the a.s.sault complained of.

"This sort of thing," observed Rumford tertius, the President, "can't go on. What shall we do?"

"We might saw one of the legs of his chair through," suggested one of the members.

"Who's going to do it?" inquired the President. "We'll only get slain."