Of Human Bondage
profession for which he was so admirably suited. He had been an
assistant master at Wellington and then at Rugby.
But there was quite a difference between welcoming his success at other
schools and serving under his leadership in their own. Tar had
frequently given him lines, and Squirts had boxed his ears. They could
not imagine how the Chapter had made such a mistake. No one could be
expected to forget that he was the son of a bankrupt linendraper, and
the alcoholism of Cooper seemed to increase the disgrace. It was
understood that the Dean had supported his candidature with zeal, so
the Dean would probably ask him to dinner; but would the pleasant
little dinners in the precincts ever be the same when Tom Perkins sat
at the table? And what about the depot? He really could not expect
officers and gentlemen to receive him as one of themselves. It would do
the school incalculable harm. Parents would be dissatisfied, and no one
could be surprised if there were wholesale withdrawals. And then the
indignity of calling him Mr. Perkins! The masters thought by way of
protest of sending in their resignations in a body, but the uneasy fear
that they would be accepted with equanimity restrained them.
“The only thing is to prepare ourselves for changes,” said Sighs, who
had conducted the fifth form for five and twenty years with
unparalleled incompetence.
And when they saw him they were not reassured. Dr. Fleming invited them
to meet him at luncheon. He was now a man of thirty-two, tall and lean,
but with the same wild and unkempt look they remembered on him as a
boy. His clothes, ill-made and shabby, were put on untidily. His hair
was as black and as long as ever, and he had plainly never learned to
brush it; it fell over his forehead with every gesture, and he had a
quick movement of the hand with which he pushed it back from his eyes.
He had a black moustache and a beard which came high up on his face
almost to the cheek-bones, He talked to the masters quite easily, as
though he had parted from them a week or two before; he was evidently
delighted to see them. He seemed unconscious of the strangeness of the
position and appeared not to notice any oddness in being addressed as
Mr. Perkins.
When he bade them good-bye, one of the masters, for something to say,
remarked that he was allowing himself plenty of time to catch his
train.
“I want to go round and have a look at the shop,” he answered
cheerfully.
There was a distinct embarrassment. They wondered that he could be so
tactless, and to make it worse Dr. Fleming had not heard what he said.
His wife shouted it in his ear.
“He wants to go round and look at his father’s old shop.”
Only Tom Perkins was unconscious of the humiliation which the whole
party felt. He turned to Mrs. Fleming.
“Who’s got it now, d’you know?”
She could hardly answer. She was very angry.
“It’s still a linendraper’s,” she said bitterly. “Grove is the name. We
don’t deal there any more.”
“I wonder if he’d let me go over the house.”
“I expect he would if you explain who you are.”
It was not till the end of dinner that evening that any reference was
made in the common-room to the subject that was in all their minds.
Then it was Sighs who asked:
“Well, what did you think of our new head?” They thought of the
conversation at luncheon. It was hardly a conversation; it was a
monologue. Perkins had talked incessantly. He talked very quickly, with
a flow of easy words and in a deep, resonant voice. He had a short, odd
little laugh which showed his white teeth. They had followed him with
difficulty, for his mind darted from subject to subject with a
connection they did not always catch. He talked of pedagogics, and this
was natural enough; but he had much to say of modern theories in
Germany which they had never heard of and received with misgiving. He
talked of the classics, but he had been to Greece, and he discoursed of
archaeology; he had once spent a winter digging; they could not see how
that helped a man to teach boys to pass examinations, He talked of
politics. It sounded odd to them to hear him compare Lord Beaconsfield
with Alcibiades. He talked of Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule. They
realised that he was a Liberal. Their hearts sank. He talked of German
philosophy and of French fiction. They could not think a man profound
whose interests were so diverse.
It was Winks who summed up the general impression and put it into a
form they all felt conclusively damning. Winks was the master of the
upper third, a weak-kneed man with drooping eye-lids, He was too tall
for his strength, and his movements were slow and languid. He gave an
impression of lassitude, and his nickname was eminently appropriate.
“He’s very enthusiastic,” said Winks.
Enthusiasm was ill-bred. Enthusiasm was ungentlemanly. They thought of
the Salvation Army with its braying trumpets and its drums. Enthusiasm
meant change. They had goose-flesh when they thought of all the
pleasant old habits which stood in imminent danger. They hardly dared
to look forward to the future.
“He looks more of a gipsy than ever,” said one, after a pause.
“I wonder if the Dean and Chapter knew that he was a Radical when they
elected him,” another observed bitterly.
But conversation halted. They were too much disturbed for words.
When Tar and Sighs were walking together to the Chapter House on
Speech-Day a week later, Tar, who had a bitter tongue, remarked to his
colleague:
“Well, we’ve seen a good many Speech-Days here, haven’t we? I wonder if
we shall see another.”
Sighs was more melancholy even than usual.
“If anything worth having comes along in the way of a living I don’t
mind when I retire.”
XVI
A year passed, and when Philip came to the school the old masters were
all in their places; but a good many changes had taken place
notwithstanding their stubborn resistance, none the less formidable
because it was concealed under an apparent desire to fall in with the
new head’s ideas. Though the form-masters still taught French to the
lower school, another master had come, with a degree of doctor of
philology from the University of Heidelberg and a record of three years
spent in a French lycee, to teach French to the upper forms and German
to anyone who cared to take it up instead of Greek. Another master was
engaged to teach mathematics more systematically than had been found
necessary hitherto. Neither of these was ordained. This was a real
revolution, and when the pair arrived the older masters received them
with distrust. A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were
instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And
heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that
untidy head of his. The school was small as public schools go, there
were not more than two hundred boarders; and it was difficult for it to
grow larger, for it was huddled up against the Cathedral; the
precincts, with the exception of a house in which some of the masters
lodged, were occupied by the cathedral clergy; and there was no more
room for building. But Mr. Perkins devised an elaborate scheme by which
he might obtain sufficient space to make the school double its present
size. He wanted to attract boys from London. He thought it would be
good for them to be thrown in contact with the Kentish lads, and it
would sharpen the country wits of these.
“It’s against all our traditions,” said Sighs, when Mr. Perkins made
the suggestion to him. “We’ve rather gone out of our way to avoid the
contamination of boys from London.”
“Oh, what nonsense!” said Mr. Perkins.
No one had ever told the form-master before that he talked nonsense,
and he was meditating an acid reply, in which perhaps he might insert a
veiled reference to hosiery, when Mr. Perkins in his impetuous way
attacked him outrageously.
“That house in the precincts—if you’d only marry I’d get the Chapter to
put another couple of stories on, and we’d make dormitories and
studies, and your wife could help you.”
The elderly clergyman gasped. Why should he marry? He was fifty-seven,
a man couldn’t marry at fifty-seven. He couldn’t start looking after a
house at his time of life. He didn’t want to marry. If the choice lay
between that and the country living he would much sooner resign. All he
wanted now was peace and quietness.
“I’m not thinking of marrying,” he said.
Mr. Perkins looked at him with his dark, bright eyes, and if there was
a twinkle in them poor Sighs never saw it.
“What a pity! Couldn’t you marry to oblige me? It would help me a great
deal with the Dean and Chapter when I suggest rebuilding your house.”
But Mr. Perkins’ most unpopular innovation was his system of taking
occasionally another man’s form. He asked it as a favour, but after all
it was a favour which could not be refused, and as Tar, otherwise Mr.
Turner, said, it was undignified for all parties. He gave no warning,
but after morning prayers would say to one of the masters:
“I wonder if you’d mind taking the Sixth today at eleven. We’ll change
over, shall we?”
They did not know whether this was usual at other schools, but
certainly it had never been done at Tercanbury. The results were
curious. Mr. Turner, who was the first victim, broke the news to his
form that the headmaster would take them for Latin that day, and on the
pretence that they might like to ask him a question or two so that they
should not make perfect fools of themselves, spent the last quarter of
an hour of the history lesson in construing for them the passage of
Livy which had been set for the day; but when he rejoined his class and
looked at the paper on which Mr. Perkins had written the marks, a
surprise awaited him; for the two boys at the top of the form seemed to
have done very ill, while others who had never distinguished themselves
before were given full marks. When he asked Eldridge, his cleverest
boy, what was the meaning of this the answer came sullenly:
“Mr. Perkins never gave us any construing to do. He asked me what I
knew about General Gordon.”
Mr. Turner looked at him in astonishment. The boys evidently felt they
had been hardly used, and he could not help agreeing with their silent
dissatisfaction. He could not see either what General Gordon had to do
with Livy. He hazarded an inquiry afterwards.
“Eldridge was dreadfully put out because you asked him what he knew
about General Gordon,” he said to the headmaster, with an attempt at a
chuckle.
Mr. Perkins laughed.
“I saw they’d got to the agrarian laws of Caius Gracchus, and I
wondered if they knew anything about the agrarian troubles in Ireland.
But all they knew about Ireland was that Dublin was on the Liffey. So I
wondered if they’d ever heard of General Gordon.”
Then the horrid fact was disclosed that the new head had a mania for
general information. He had doubts about the utility of examinations on
subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common
sense.
Sighs grew more worried every month; he could not get the thought out
of his head that Mr. Perkins would ask him to fix a day for his
marriage; and he hated the attitude the head adopted towards classical
literature. There was no doubt that he was a fine scholar, and he was
engaged on a work which was quite in the right tradition: he was
writing a treatise on the trees in Latin literature; but he talked of
it flippantly, as though it were a pastime of no great importance, like
billiards, which engaged his leisure but was not to be considered with
seriousness. And Squirts, the master of the Middle Third, grew more
ill-tempered every day.
It was in his form that Philip was put on entering the school. The Rev.
B. B. Gordon was a man by nature ill-suited to be a schoolmaster: he