The Lighter Side of School Life Part 1

The Lighter Side of School Life.

by Ian Hay.

CHAPTER ONE

THE HEADMASTER

First of all there is the Headmaster of Fiction. He is invariably called "The Doctor," and he wears cap and gown even when birching malefactors--which he does intermittently throughout the day--or attending a cricket match. For all we know he wears them in bed.

He speaks a language peculiar to himself--a language which at once enables you to recognise him as a Headmaster; just as you may recognise a stage Irishman from the fact that he says "Begorrah!", or a stage sailor from the fact that he has to take constant precautions with his trousers. Thus, the "Doctor" invariably addresses his cowering pupils as "Boys!"--a form of address which in reality only survives nowadays in places where you are invited to "have another with me"--and if no audience of boys is available at the moment, he addresses a single boy as if he were a whole audience. To influential parents he is servile and oleaginous, and he treats his staff with fatuous pomposity. Such a being may have existed--may exist--but we have never met him.

What of the Headmaster of Fact? To condense him into a type is one of the most difficult things in the world, for this reason. Most of us have known only one Headmaster in our lives--if we have known more we are not likely to say so, for obvious reasons--and it is difficult for Man (as distinct from Woman), to argue from the particular to the general.

Moreover, the occasions upon which we have met the subject of our researches at close quarters have not been favourable to dispa.s.sionate character-study. It is difficult to form an unbia.s.sed or impartial judgment of a man out of material supplied solely by a series of brief interviews spread over a period of years--interviews at which his contribution to the conversation has been limited to a curt request that you will bend over, and yours to a sequence of short sharp e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns.

However, some of us have known more than one Headmaster, and upon us devolves the solemn duty of distilling our various experiences into a single essence.

What are the characteristics of a _great_ Headmaster? Instinct at once prompts us to premise that he must be a scholar and a gentleman. A gentleman, undoubtedly, he must be; but nowadays scholarship--high cla.s.sical scholarship--is a hindrance rather than a help. To supervise the instruction of modern youth a man requires something more than profound learning: he must possess _savoir faire_. If you set a great scholar--and a great scholar has an unfortunate habit of being nothing but a great scholar--in charge of the multifarious interests of a public school, you are setting a razor to cut grindstones. As well appoint an Astronomer Royal to command an Atlantic liner. He may be on terms of easy familiarity with the movements of the heavenly bodies, yet fail to understand the right way of dealing with refractory stokers.

A Headmaster is too busy a personage to keep his own scholarship tuned up to concert pitch; and if he devotes adequate time to this object--and a scholar must practise almost as diligently as a pianist or an acrobat if he is to remain in the first flight--he will have little leisure left for less intellectual but equally vital duties. Nowadays in great public schools the Head, although he probably takes the Sixth for an hour or two a day, delegates most of his work in this direction to a capable and up-to-date young man fresh from the University, and devotes his energies to such trifling details as the organisation of school routine, the supervision of the cook, the administration of justice, the diplomatic handling of the Governing Body, and the suppression of parents.

So far then we are agreed--the great advantage of dogmatising in print is that one can take the agreement of the reader for granted--that a Headmaster must be a gentleman, but not necessarily a scholar--in the very highest sense of the word. What other virtues must he possess?

Well, he must be a majestic figurehead. This is not so difficult as it sounds. The dignity which doth hedge a Headmaster is so tremendous that the dullest and fussiest of the race can hardly fail to be impressive and awe-inspiring to the plastic mind of youth. More than one King Log has left a name behind him, through standing still in the limelight and keeping his mouth shut. But then he was probably lucky in his lieutenants.

Next, he must have a sense of humour. If he cannot see the entertaining side of youthful depravity, magisterial jealousy, and parental fussiness, he will undoubtedly go mad. A sense of humour, too, will prevent him from making a fool of himself, and a Headmaster must never do that. It also engenders Tact, and Tact is the essence of life to a man who has to deal every day with the ignorant, and the bigoted, and the sentimental. (These adjectives are applicable to boys, masters, and parents, and may be applied collectively or individually with equal truth.) Not that all humorous people are tactful: bitter experience of the practical joker has taught us that. But no person can be tactful who cannot see the ludicrous side of things. There is a certain Headmaster of to-day, justly celebrated as a brilliant teacher and a born organiser, who is lacking--entirely lacking--in that priceless gift of the G.o.ds, a sense of humour, with which is incorporated Tact. Shortly after he took up his present appointment, one of the most popular boys in the school, while leading the field in a cross-country race, was run over and killed by an express train which emerged from a tunnel as he ran across the line, within measurable distance of accomplishing a record for the course.

Next morning the order went forth that the whole school were to a.s.semble in the great hall. They repaired thither, not unpleasantly thrilled.

There would be a funeral oration, and boys are curiously partial to certain forms of emotionalism. They like to be harangued before a football-match, for instance, in the manner of the Greeks of old. These boys had already had a taste of the Head's quality as a speaker, and they felt that he would do their departed hero justice. They reminded one another of the moving words which the late Head had spoken when an Old Boy had fallen in battle a few years before under particularly splendid circ.u.mstances. They remembered how pleased the Old Boy's father and mother had been about it. Their comrade, whom they had revered and loved as recently as yesterday, would receive a fitting farewell too; and they would all feel the prouder of the school for the words that they were about to hear. They did not say this aloud, for the sentimentality of boys is of the inarticulate kind, but the thought was uppermost in their minds.

Presently they were all a.s.sembled, and the Head appeared upon his rostrum. There was a deathlike stillness: not a boy stirred.

Then the Head spoke.

"Any boy," he announced, "found trespa.s.sing upon the railway-line in future will be expelled. You may go."

They went. The organisation of that school is still a model of perfection, and its scholarship list is exceptionally high. But the school has never forgiven the Head, and never will so long as tradition and sentiment count for anything in this world.

So far, then, we have acc.u.mulated the following virtues for the Headmaster. He must be a gentleman, a picturesque figure-head, and must possess a sense of humour.

He must also, of course, be a ruler. Now you may rule men in two ways--either with a rapier or a bludgeon; but a man who can gain his ends with the latter will seldom have recourse to the former. The Headmaster who possesses on the top of other essential qualities the power of being uncompromisingly and divinely rude, is to be envied above all men. For him life is full of short cuts. He never argues. "_L'ecole, c'est moi_," he growls, and no one contradicts him. Boys idolise him. In his presence they are paralysed with fear, but away from it they glory in his ferocity of mien and strength of arm. Masters rave impotently at his _brusquerie_ and absolutism; but A says secretly to himself: "Well, it's a treat to see the way the old man keeps B and C up to the collar."

As for parents, they simply refuse to face him, which is the head and summit of that which a master desires of a parent.

Such a man is Olympian, having none of the foibles or soft moments of a human being. He dwells apart, in an atmosphere too rarefied for those who intrude into it. His subjects never regard him as a man of like pa.s.sions with themselves: they would be quite shocked if such an idea were suggested to them. I once asked a distinguished _alumnus_ of a great school, which had been ruled with consummate success for twenty-four years by such a Head as I have described, to give me a few reminiscences of the great man as a _man_--his characteristics, his mannerisms, his vulnerable points, his tricks of expression, his likes and dislikes, and his hobbies.

My friend considered.

"He was a holy terror," he announced, after profound meditation.

"Quite so. But in what way?"

My friend thought again.

"I can't remember anything particular about him," he said, "except that he _was_ a holy terror--and the greatest man that ever lived!"

"But tell me something personal about him. How did his conversation impress you?"

"_Conversation?_ Bless you, he never _conversed_ with anybody. He just told them what he thought about a thing, and that settled it. Besides, I never exchanged a word with him in my life. But he was a great man."

"Didn't you meet him all the time you were at school?"

"Oh yes, I _met_ him," replied my friend with feeling--"three or four times. And that reminds me, I _can_ tell you something personal about him. The old swine was left-handed! A great man, a great man!"

Happy the warrior who can inspire worship on such sinister foundations as these!

The other kind has to prevail by another method--the Machiavellian. As a successful Headmaster of my acquaintance once brutally but truthfully expressed it: "You simply have to employ a certain amount of low cunning if you are going to keep a school going at all." And he was right. A man unendowed with the divine gift of rudeness would, if he spent his time answering the criticisms or meeting the objections of colleagues or parents or even boys, have no time for anything else. So he seeks refuge either in finesse or flight. If a parent rings him up on the telephone, he murmurs something courteous about a wrong number and then leaves the receiver off the hook. If a housemaster, swelling with some grievance or scheme of reform, bears down upon him upon the cricket field on a summer afternoon, he adroitly lures him under a tree where another housemaster is standing, and leaves them there together. If an enthusiastic junior discharges at his head some glorious but quite impracticable project, such as the performance of a pastoral play in the school grounds, or the enforcement of a vegetarian diet upon the School for experimental purposes, he replies: "My dear fellow, the Governing Body will never hear of it!" What he means is: "The Governing Body shall never hear of it."

He has other diplomatic resources at his call. Here is an example.

A Headmaster once called his flock together and said:

"A very unpleasant and discreditable thing has happened. The munic.i.p.al authorities have recently erected a pair of extremely ornate and expensive--er--lamp-posts outside the residence of the Mayor of the town. These lamp-posts appear to have attracted the unfavourable notice of the School. Last Sunday evening, between seven and eight o'clock, they were attacked and wrecked, apparently by volleys of stones."

There was a faint but appreciative murmur from those members of the School to whom the news of this outrage was now made public for the first time. But a baleful flash from the Head's spectacles restored instant silence.

"Several parties of boys," he continued, "must have pa.s.sed these lamp-posts on that evening, on their way back to their respective houses after Chapel. I wish to see all boys who in any way partic.i.p.ated in the outrage in my study directly after Second School. I warn them that I shall make a severe example of them." His voice rose to a blare. "I will not have the prestige and fair fame of the School lowered in the eyes of the Town by the vulgar barbarities of a parcel of ill-conditioned little street-boys. You may go!"

The audience rose to their feet and began to steal silently away. But they were puzzled. The Old Man was no fool as a rule. Did he really imagine that chaps would be such mugs as to own up?

But before the first boy reached the door the Head spoke again.

"I may mention," he added very gently, "that the attack upon the--er--lamp-posts was witnessed by a gentleman resident in the neighbourhood, a warm friend of the School. He was able to identify _one_ of the culprits, whose name is in my possession. That is all."

And quite enough too! When the Head visited his study after Second School, he found seventeen malefactors meekly awaiting chastis.e.m.e.nt.

But he never divulged the name of the boy who had been identified, or for that matter the ident.i.ty of the warm friend of the School. I _wonder!_

One more quality is essential to the great Headmaster. He must possess the Sixth Sense. He must see nothing, yet know everything that goes on in the School. Etiquette forbids that he should enter one of his colleague's houses except as an invited guest; yet he must be acquainted with all that happens inside that house. He is debarred by the same rigid law from entering the form-room or studying the methods and capability of any but the most junior form-masters; and yet he must know whether Mr. A. in the Senior Science Set is expounding theories of inorganic chemistry which have been obsolete for ten years, or whether Mr. B. in the Junior Remove is accustomed meekly to remove a pool of ink from the seat of his chair before beginning his daily labours. He must not mingle with the boys, for that would be undignified; yet he must, and usually does, know every boy in the School by sight, and something about him. He must never attempt to acquire information by obvious cross-examination either of boy or master, or he will be accused of prying and interference; and he can never, or should never, discuss one of his colleagues with another. And yet he must have his hand upon the pulse of the School in such wise as to be able to tell which master is incompetent, which prefect is untrustworthy, which boy is a bully, and which House is rotten. In other words, he must possess a Red Indian's powers of observation and a woman's powers of intuition. He must be able to suck in school atmosphere through his pores. He must be able to judge of a man's keenness or his fitness for duty by his general att.i.tude and conversation when off duty. He must be able to read volumes from the demeanour of a group in the corner of the quadrangle, from a small boy's furtive expression, or even from the _timbre_ of the singing in chapel. He must notice which boy has too many friends, and which none at all.

Such are a few of the essentials of the great Headmaster, and to the glory of our system be it said that there are still many in the land.

But the type is changing. The autocratic t.i.tan of the past has been shorn of his locks by two Delilahs--Modern Sides and Government Interference.

First, Modern Sides.

Time was when A Sound Cla.s.sical Education, Lady Matron, and Meat for Breakfast formed the alpha and omega of a public school prospectus. But times have changed, at least in so far as the Sound Cla.s.sical Education is concerned. The Headmaster of the old school, who looks upon the cla.s.sics as the foundation of all education, and regards modern sides as a sop to the parental Cerberus, finds himself called upon to cope with new and strange monsters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HEADMASTER OF FICTION]