A Knight on Wheels Part 22

_Elsie has gone to bed. I found her writing this letter, and she showed it to me quite frankly. As the child seemed really eager to write to you, I have undertaken to finish her letter and explain the circ.u.mstances. I feel sure you will understand, and pardon the liberty. Do not trouble to reply._

_Yours faithfully_ _Ellen Wardale._

Mr. Mablethorpe laid down the letter.

"Ellen Wardale is a good sort," he said. "As for Elsie Hope, she has not asked me to write to her, so I shall do so. Now, Philip, get out "The Lost Legacy," and we will have a go at Chapter Fourteen. It is going to be a difficult bit. The hero, who is the greatest nincomp.o.o.p that I have yet created, finds himself suspected by the heroine of having transferred his affections to another lady. (Between ourselves, it would have been a very sensible thing if he had done so, but, of course, he is incapable of such wisdom.) As the story is not half over, we can't afford to get him out of the mess just yet; so this morning I want him to make an even greater a.s.s of himself than before, and so prolong the agony to eighty thousand words. Here goes!"

After this they would work steadily until lunchtime.

II

Philip had other duties to perform. He attended to the wants of Boanerges, and in time reduced that unreliable vehicle to quite a surprising degree of docility.

He became gradually infected with the Romance of our mechanical age. He saw himself, a twentieth-century Galahad, roaming through the land in a hundred-horse-power armoured car, seeking adventure, repelling his country's invaders, carrying despatches under cover of night, and conveying beauteous ladies to places of safety. He spent much of his spare time seated upon the garden wall, watching for the motors that whizzed north and south along the straight white road. (It is regrettable to have to record that many of these disregarded Dumps's notice-board.) He saw poetry in the curve of a radiator, and heard music in the whirring of a clutch.

One day, in an expansive moment, he confided these emotions to Mr.

Mablethorpe. That many-sided man did not laugh, as Philip had half-feared he would, but said:--

"_Romance brought up the nine-fifteen_--eh? I must introduce you to a kindred spirit."

And he led Philip to a shelf filled with a row of books. Some were bound in dark blue, and consisted mainly of short stories; the others, smaller and slimmer, were dark red, and contained poetry.

"There," said Mr. Mablethorpe, "are the works of the man whom I regard as the head of our profession. Wire in!"

Philip spent the next three days learning "MacAndrew's Hymn" by heart.

There were many other books in the library, upon which Philip browsed voraciously. Uncle Joseph's selection of literature had been a little severe, but here was far richer fare. Philip discovered a writer called Robert Louis Stevenson, but though he followed his narratives breathlessly found him lacking in feminine interest. The works of Jules Verne filled him with rapture; for their peculiar blend of high adventure and applied science was exactly suited to his temperament. He had other more isolated favourites--"The Wreck of the Grosvenor"; "Lorna Doone"; "The Prisoner of Zenda"; and "To Have and to Hold," which latter he read straight through twice. But he came back again and again to the shelf containing the red and blue volumes, and the magician who dwelt therein never failed him. There were two fascinating stories called "The Ship that Found Herself," and ".007." After reading these Philip ceased to regard Boanerges as a piece of machinery; he endowed him with a soul and a sense of humour. There was a moving tale of love and work called "William the Conqueror"; there was a palpitating drama of the sea called "Bread upon the Waters"; and there was one story which he read over and over again--it took his thoughts back in some hazy fashion to Peggy Falconer and Hampstead Heath--called "The Brushwood Boy."

Only one book upon this shelf failed to please him. It was a complete novel, and dealt with a love affair that went wrong and never came right. The hero, a cantankerous fellow, became blind, and the unfeminine independent heroine never knew, so went her own way and left him to die.

This tragic tale haunted Philip's dreams. It shocked his innate but unconscious belief in the general tendency of things to work together for good. He considered that the author should have compelled these two wrong-headed people to "make allowances for one another," and so come together at the last. He even took the opinion of Mr. Mablethorpe on the subject. Mr. Mablethorpe said:--

"His best book, Philip. But--I read it less than any of the others."

Then he introduced Philip to "Brugglesmith," and the vapours were blown away by gusts of laughter.

III

Philip's orthodox education was not neglected. After a year's attendance as a day-boy at the establishment near St. Albans he was sent to Studley, a great public school in the south of England.

Here many things surprised him.

Having spent most of his life in the company of grown men, he antic.i.p.ated some difficulty in rubbing along with boys of his own age.

Master Philip at this period of his career was surprisingly grownup: in fact he was within a dangerously short distance of becoming a prig. But he went to school in time. In three weeks the latent instincts of boyhood had fully developed, and Philip played Rugby football, indulged in unwholesome and clandestine cookery, rioted noisily when he should have been quiescent, and generally tumbled in and out of sc.r.a.pes as happily and fortuitously as if he had been born into a vigorous family of ten.

He achieved a respectable position for himself among his fellows, but upon a qualification which would have surprised an older generation. The modern schoolboy is essentially a product of the age he lives in, and the G.o.ds he worships are constantly adding to their number. Of what does his Pantheon consist? Foremost, of course, comes the athlete. He is a genuine and permanent deity. His worshippers behold him every day, excelling at football and cricket, lifting incredible weights in the dormitory before going to bed, or running a mile in under five minutes.

His qualifications are written on his brow, and up he goes to the pinnacle of Olympus, where he endures from age to age. Second comes the boy whose qualifications are equally good, but have to be accepted to a certain extent upon hearsay--the sportsman. A reputed good shot or straight rider to hounds is admitted to Olympus _ex officio_, and is greatly in request, in the role of Sir Oracle, during those interminable discussions--corresponding to the symposia in which those of riper years indulge in clubs and mess-rooms--which invariably arise when the rank and file of the House are a.s.sembled round a common-room fire, in the interval, say, between tea and preparation.

There are other and lesser lights. The wag, for instance. The scholar, as such, has no seat in the sun. His turn comes later in life, when the athletes are licking stamps and running errands.

But the Iron Age in which we live has been responsible for a further addition to the scholastic aristocracy--the motor expert. A boy who can claim to have driven a Rolls-Royce at fifty miles an hour is accorded a place above the salt by popular acclamation. No one with any claim to social distinction can afford to admit ignorance upon such matters as high-tension magnetos and rotary valves. The humblest f.a.g can tell at a glance whether a pa.s.sing vehicle is a Wolseley or a Delaunay Belleville.

Science masters, for years a despised--or at the best a tolerated--race, now achieve a degree of popularity and respect hitherto only attainable by Old Blues, because they understand induced currents and the mysteries of internal combustion. Most curious portent of all, a boy in the Lower School, who cannot be trusted to work out a sum in simple arithmetic without perpetrating several gross errors, and to whom physics and chemistry, as such, are a sealed book ent.i.tled "Stinks," will solve in his head, readily and correctly, such problems as relate to petrol-mileage or the ratio of gear-wheels, and remedy quite readily and skilfully the ticklish troubles that arise from faulty timing-wheels and short circuits.

It was upon these qualifications that Philip originally obtained admission to the parliament which perennially fugged and argued around the fire on winter evenings. It was true that he had never been fined for exceeding the speed limit in Hyde Park, like Ashley major, nor been run into in the Ripley Road, like Master Crump; but his technical knowledge was very complete for a boy of his age; and being an admirable draughtsman, he could elucidate with paper and pencil mysteries which both he and his audience realised could not be explained by the English language.

In time, too, he became a fair athlete. Cricket he hated, but he developed into a st.u.r.dy though clumsy forward at football; and his boxing showed promise. His speciality was the strength of his wrist and forearm. On gala nights, when the prefects had been entertaining a guest at tea,--an old boy or a junior master,--Philip, then a l.u.s.ty f.a.g rising sixteen, was frequently summoned before the quality, to give his celebrated exhibition of poker-bending.

Having discovered that the boys at Studley were much more grown-up than he had expected, Philip was not altogether surprised to find that some of the masters were incredibly young--not to say childish. There was Mr.

Brett, his Housemaster. Mr. Brett was a typical product of a great system--run to seed. British public schools are very rightly the glory of those who understand them, but they are the despair of those who do not. Generally speaking, they produce a type of man with no special propensities and consequently no special fads. He has been educated on stereotyped and uncommercial lines. He is not a specialist in any branch of knowledge. His critics say that he is unfitted for any profession; that he cannot write a business letter; that he is frequently incapable of expressing himself in decent English. But--public-school tradition has taught him to run straight and speak the truth. The f.a.gging system has taught him to obey an order promptly. The prefectorial system has taught him to frame an order and see that it is carried out. Games have taught him to play for his side and not for himself. The management of games has instilled into him the first principles of organisation and responsibility. Taking him all round, he is the very man we want to run a half-educated empire.

Possibly these truths had been known to Mr. Brett in his early days.

But, as already stated, his principles had run to seed. In the vegetable world,--of which schoolmasters are dangerously p.r.o.ne to become distinguished members,--whenever judicious watering and pruning are lacking, time operates in one of two ways. A plant either withers and wilts, or it shoots up into a monstrous and unsightly growth. In Mr.

Brett's intellectual arboretum every shrub had wilted save two--Cla.s.sics and cricket. These twain, admirable in moderation, had grown up like mustard trees, and now overshadowed the whole of Mr. Brett's mental outlook. In his House he devoted his ripe scholarship and untiring care exclusively to boys who were likely to do well in the Sixth: his mathematicians and scientists were left to look after themselves. French and German he openly described as "a sop to the parental Cerberus." His Modern-Side boys forgave the slight freely--in fact, they preferred it; and their heavily supervised cla.s.sical brethren envied them their freedom. But cricket was a different matter. Mr. Brett had probably begun by regarding Cla.s.sics as the greatest intellectual, and cricket as the greatest moral, stimulus in the schoolboy world--a common, and, on the whole, perfectly tenable, att.i.tude of mind. But by the time that Philip came under his charge it is greatly to be feared that he regarded both as nothing more than a means to an end--Cla.s.sics as an avenue to Scholarships and House advertis.e.m.e.nt, cricket as an admirable instrument wherewith to lacerate the feelings of other Housemasters.

Cricket was rather overdone at Studley in those days. There were cricket leagues and cricket cups innumerable. Play was organised exactly like work: the control of their pastimes was taken from the hands of the boys themselves and put into the hands of blindly enthusiastic masters.

Masters flocked on to the field every afternoon and bowled remorselessly at every net. Healthy young barbarians who did not happen to possess any apt.i.tude for cricket, and whose only enjoyment of the game lay in the long handle and blind swiping, were compelled to spend their allotted ten minutes standing in an att.i.tude which made it impossible for them to slog the ball, listening giddily the while to impa.s.sioned harangues upon the subject of playing forward and keeping a straight bat. Cricket, thus highly officialized, soon began to be accepted by the boys as a mere extension of school routine; and being turned from play to work was treated by them as they treated Caesar and Euclid--that is to say, they did just as much as they were compelled to do and no more. But their enthusiastic preceptors took no account of this. They glowed internally to think how unselfishly they were devoting their spare time to improving the standard of school cricket,--as, indeed, they were,--and cementing the _entente cordiale_ between master and boy,--as most a.s.suredly they were not. It did not occur to them that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Nine boys out of ten would have been grateful enough for half an hour's coaching a week; but to be compelled to spend every afternoon repressing one's natural instincts, debarred, by that unwritten law which decrees that no boy may address his fellows with any degree of familiarity in the presence of a master, from exchanging the joyous but primitive repartees and impromptus of the young, struck the most docile Studleian as "a bit too thick."

Worse still, these excellent men quarrelled among themselves as to the respective merits of their pupils. Many a humble f.a.g, contentedly supping off sweet biscuits and contraband sardines in the privacy of his study, would have been amazed (and greatly embarra.s.sed) if he had known that his merits as a leg-break bowler were being maintained or denied with the utmost vehemence over Common Room port by two overheated graduates of Oxford University. Housemasters plotted and schemed to have the dates of matches put forward or set back, in order that some star performer of their own, at present in the sick-house or away at a funeral, might be enabled to return in time to take part in the fray.

Elderly gentlemen who ought to have known better rose straight from their knees after evening prayers and besought their pupils to make runs for the honour of the House.

Into this strange vortex the unsuspecting Philip found himself whirled.

His first term was comparatively normal. He went to Studley in January, and being, as already recorded, a healthy young animal, soon found his place among his fellows. Of Mr. Brett he could make little or nothing.

He was by reason of his training in many ways a grown-up boy. There were times when the cackle of the House Common Room bored him, at which he would have enjoyed a few minutes' conversation with an older man--say upon the morning's news, or some book recently disinterred from the top shelf of the House library. But intercourse with his Housemaster was not for him. Mr. Brett, finding that Philip knew little Latin and no Greek, had dismissed him abruptly to the Modern Side, as one of that noxious but necessary band of pariahs whose tainted but necessary contributions make it possible for the elect to continue the pursuit of Cla.s.sics. As for Philip's football promise, it was nothing to Mr. Brett. This most consistent of men considered the worship of football "a fetish."

All hope of further intimacy between this antagonistic pair ended during the following summer term, when to Philip's unutterable amazement, Mr.

Brett declined to speak to him for the s.p.a.ce of three days, because Philip, by inadvertently running out the most promising batsman on his side in the course of a Junior House League match, had deprived Mr.

Brett of a possible two points out of the total necessary to secure the Junior House Cricket Cup. The incident did not disturb Philip's peace of mind to any extent. It merely crystallised his opinion of his Housemaster. He possessed a large measure of his uncle's gift of terse summarisation of character.

"This chap," he observed to himself, "is the most almighty and unutterable sweep in the scholastic profession, besides being a silly baby. I must turn him down, that's all."

Henceforward Philip went his own way. He met his Housemaster but seldom, for he was naturally excluded from such unofficial hospitalities as Sunday breakfasts and half-holiday teas. Neither did the two come into official collision, for Philip was a glutton for work and reached the top of the Modern Side by giant strides. The only direct result of their strained relations was that Philip was not made a prefect when the time came. Mr. Brett could not reconcile his conscience to placing in a position of authority a boy who was neither in Cla.s.sic nor a cricketer, who was lacking in _esprit-de-corps_, and made a fetish of football and science.

But Philip was contented enough. True, he could not take his meals at the high table, neither could he set f.a.gs running errands for him, but he possessed resources denied to most boys. He became the devoted disciple of one of the junior Science masters, Mr. Eden, who, almost delirious with joy at having discovered a boy who loved Science for its own sake and not merely because the pursuit thereof excused him from Latin Verse, took Philip to his bosom. Under his direction Philip read widely and judiciously, and was permitted in fulness of time to embark upon "research work"--that is, to potter about the laboratory during his spare hours and make himself familiar with the use and manipulation of every piece of apparatus that he encountered.

He had his friends in the House, too. There was Desborough, a big lazy member of the Fifth, the son of an Irish baronet, much more interested in sport than games, though he was a pa.s.sable enough athlete. Desborough disliked the rigidity of Mr. Brett's regime, and pined occasionally for the s.p.a.cious freedom of his country home, with its dogs and guns by day, and bridge and billiards in the evening. Then there was Laird, a Scot of Scots, much too deeply interested in the question of his future career as a Cabinet Minister to suffer compulsory games and unprofitable conversation with any degree of gladness. And there was Lemaire, the intellectual giant of the House, who, though high up in the Sixth, was considered by Mr. Brett to have forfeited all right to a position of authority among his fellows by having been born into the world with a club foot. But though he could play no games, Lemaire exacted more respect and consideration from the House than Mr. Brett dreamed of, for he possessed a quick wit and a blistering tongue.

It was with these three that Philip foregathered during his later years at school. The Quartette, as they were called, resembled second-year undergraduates rather than third-year schoolboys in their att.i.tude to life and their methods of recreation. Being endowed with no authority they escaped the obsession of responsibility which lies so heavily upon the shoulders of youthful officialdom, and they conformed to the rules of the House and School with indulgent tolerance, observing the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Which was just as well, for boys in their position could have done incalculable harm had they felt so disposed. The prefects were secretly afraid of them, and left them to themselves. The House as a whole venerated them, especially Philip and Desborough, and would gladly have been admitted to greater intimacy. But the Quartette would have none of them. They preferred to hold aloof from the turbulent _camaraderie_ of the Common Room and congregate in one or other of their studies, where it was rumoured that they talked politics.

But rumour was wrong, or at any rate only partially in possession of the facts, as you shall hear.

IV

The Studley masters were not a particularly gregarious body. The Head lived in secluded state with his wife and four daughters in his official residence on the north side of the Close, emerging periodically to overawe the Sixth, preach in Chapel, or discharge a thunderbolt in Big School. The Housemasters dwelt severally in their own strongholds, thanking Heaven that their Houses were not as other Houses were; and the Junior Staff lived roundabout, in cottages and chummeries and snuggeries, throughout Studley Village.

But once a week the whole hierarchy foregathered in the Masters' Common Room and dined together. Usually the Head presided in person; and from the soup to the savoury every soul present talked shop.

Schoolmasters appear to be quite unique in this respect. For three months on end they live in everlasting contact with boys. Sleepy boys confront them in those grisly hours of school which occur before breakfast. Restless and inattentive boys occupy their undivided attention from breakfast until luncheon. In the afternoon they play games with, or watch games played by, energetic and overheated boys.