Of Human Bondage
was impatient and choleric. With no one to call him to account, with
only small boys to face him, he had long lost all power of
self-control. He began his work in a rage and ended it in a passion. He
was a man of middle height and of a corpulent figure; he had sandy
hair, worn very short and now growing gray, and a small bristly
moustache. His large face, with indistinct features and small blue
eyes, was naturally red, but during his frequent attacks of anger it
grew dark and purple. His nails were bitten to the quick, for while
some trembling boy was construing he would sit at his desk shaking with
the fury that consumed him, and gnaw his fingers. Stories, perhaps
exaggerated, were told of his violence, and two years before there had
been some excitement in the school when it was heard that one father
was threatening a prosecution: he had boxed the ears of a boy named
Walters with a book so violently that his hearing was affected and the
boy had to be taken away from the school. The boy’s father lived in
Tercanbury, and there had been much indignation in the city, the local
paper had referred to the matter; but Mr. Walters was only a brewer, so
the sympathy was divided. The rest of the boys, for reasons best known
to themselves, though they loathed the master, took his side in the
affair, and, to show their indignation that the school’s business had
been dealt with outside, made things as uncomfortable as they could for
Walters’ younger brother, who still remained. But Mr. Gordon had only
escaped the country living by the skin of his teeth, and he had never
hit a boy since. The right the masters possessed to cane boys on the
hand was taken away from them, and Squirts could no longer emphasize
his anger by beating his desk with the cane. He never did more now than
take a boy by the shoulders and shake him. He still made a naughty or
refractory lad stand with one arm stretched out for anything from ten
minutes to half an hour, and he was as violent as before with his
tongue.
No master could have been more unfitted to teach things to so shy a boy
as Philip. He had come to the school with fewer terrors than he had
when first he went to Mr. Watson’s. He knew a good many boys who had
been with him at the preparatory school. He felt more grownup, and
instinctively realised that among the larger numbers his deformity
would be less noticeable. But from the first day Mr. Gordon struck
terror in his heart; and the master, quick to discern the boys who were
frightened of him, seemed on that account to take a peculiar dislike to
him. Philip had enjoyed his work, but now he began to look upon the
hours passed in school with horror. Rather than risk an answer which
might be wrong and excite a storm of abuse from the master, he would
sit stupidly silent, and when it came towards his turn to stand up and
construe he grew sick and white with apprehension. His happy moments
were those when Mr. Perkins took the form. He was able to gratify the
passion for general knowledge which beset the headmaster; he had read
all sorts of strange books beyond his years, and often Mr. Perkins,
when a question was going round the room, would stop at Philip with a
smile that filled the boy with rapture, and say:
“Now, Carey, you tell them.”
The good marks he got on these occasions increased Mr. Gordon’s
indignation. One day it came to Philip’s turn to translate, and the
master sat there glaring at him and furiously biting his thumb. He was
in a ferocious mood. Philip began to speak in a low voice.
“Don’t mumble,” shouted the master.
Something seemed to stick in Philip’s throat.
“Go on. Go on. Go on.”
Each time the words were screamed more loudly. The effect was to drive
all he knew out of Philip’s head, and he looked at the printed page
vacantly. Mr. Gordon began to breathe heavily.
“If you don’t know why don’t you say so? Do you know it or not? Did you
hear all this construed last time or not? Why don’t you speak? Speak,
you blockhead, speak!”
The master seized the arms of his chair and grasped them as though to
prevent himself from falling upon Philip. They knew that in past days
he often used to seize boys by the throat till they almost choked. The
veins in his forehead stood out and his face grew dark and threatening.
He was a man insane.
Philip had known the passage perfectly the day before, but now he could
remember nothing.
“I don’t know it,” he gasped.
“Why don’t you know it? Let’s take the words one by one. We’ll soon see
if you don’t know it.”
Philip stood silent, very white, trembling a little, with his head bent
down on the book. The master’s breathing grew almost stertorous.
“The headmaster says you’re clever. I don’t know how he sees it.
General information.” He laughed savagely. “I don’t know what they put
you in his form for, Blockhead.”
He was pleased with the word, and he repeated it at the top of his
voice.
“Blockhead! Blockhead! Club-footed blockhead!”
That relieved him a little. He saw Philip redden suddenly. He told him
to fetch the Black Book. Philip put down his Caesar and went silently
out. The Black Book was a sombre volume in which the names of boys were
written with their misdeeds, and when a name was down three times it
meant a caning. Philip went to the headmaster’s house and knocked at
his study-door. Mr. Perkins was seated at his table.
“May I have the Black Book, please, sir.”
“There it is,” answered Mr. Perkins, indicating its place by a nod of
his head. “What have you been doing that you shouldn’t?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Mr. Perkins gave him a quick look, but without answering went on with
his work. Philip took the book and went out. When the hour was up, a
few minutes later, he brought it back.
“Let me have a look at it,” said the headmaster. “I see Mr. Gordon has
black-booked you for ‘gross impertinence.’ What was it?”
“I don’t know, sir. Mr. Gordon said I was a club-footed blockhead.”
Mr. Perkins looked at him again. He wondered whether there was sarcasm
behind the boy’s reply, but he was still much too shaken. His face was
white and his eyes had a look of terrified distress. Mr. Perkins got up
and put the book down. As he did so he took up some photographs.
“A friend of mine sent me some pictures of Athens this morning,” he
said casually. “Look here, there’s the Akropolis.”
He began explaining to Philip what he saw. The ruin grew vivid with his
words. He showed him the theatre of Dionysus and explained in what
order the people sat, and how beyond they could see the blue Aegean.
And then suddenly he said:
“I remember Mr. Gordon used to call me a gipsy counter-jumper when I
was in his form.”
And before Philip, his mind fixed on the photographs, had time to
gather the meaning of the remark, Mr. Perkins was showing him a picture
of Salamis, and with his finger, a finger of which the nail had a
little black edge to it, was pointing out how the Greek ships were
placed and how the Persian.
XVII
Philip passed the next two years with comfortable monotony. He was not
bullied more than other boys of his size; and his deformity,
withdrawing him from games, acquired for him an insignificance for
which he was grateful. He was not popular, and he was very lonely. He
spent a couple of terms with Winks in the Upper Third. Winks, with his
weary manner and his drooping eyelids, looked infinitely bored. He did
his duty, but he did it with an abstracted mind. He was kind, gentle,
and foolish. He had a great belief in the honour of boys; he felt that
the first thing to make them truthful was not to let it enter your head
for a moment that it was possible for them to lie. “Ask much,” he
quoted, “and much shall be given to you.” Life was easy in the Upper
Third. You knew exactly what lines would come to your turn to construe,
and with the crib that passed from hand to hand you could find out all
you wanted in two minutes; you could hold a Latin Grammar open on your
knees while questions were passing round; and Winks never noticed
anything odd in the fact that the same incredible mistake was to be
found in a dozen different exercises. He had no great faith in
examinations, for he noticed that boys never did so well in them as in
form: it was disappointing, but not significant. In due course they
were moved up, having learned little but a cheerful effrontery in the
distortion of truth, which was possibly of greater service to them in
after life than an ability to read Latin at sight.
Then they fell into the hands of Tar. His name was Turner; he was the
most vivacious of the old masters, a short man with an immense belly, a
black beard turning now to gray, and a swarthy skin. In his clerical
dress there was indeed something in him to suggest the tar-barrel; and
though on principle he gave five hundred lines to any boy on whose lips
he overheard his nickname, at dinner-parties in the precincts he often
made little jokes about it. He was the most worldly of the masters; he
dined out more frequently than any of the others, and the society he
kept was not so exclusively clerical. The boys looked upon him as
rather a dog. He left off his clerical attire during the holidays and
had been seen in Switzerland in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine
and a good dinner, and having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a
lady who was very probably a near relation, was thenceforward supposed
by generations of schoolboys to indulge in orgies the circumstantial
details of which pointed to an unbounded belief in human depravity.
Mr. Turner reckoned that it took him a term to lick boys into shape
after they had been in the Upper Third; and now and then he let fall a
sly hint, which showed that he knew perfectly what went on in his
colleague’s form. He took it good-humouredly. He looked upon boys as
young ruffians who were more apt to be truthful if it was quite certain
a lie would be found out, whose sense of honour was peculiar to
themselves and did not apply to dealings with masters, and who were
least likely to be troublesome when they learned that it did not pay.
He was proud of his form and as eager at fifty-five that it should do
better in examinations than any of the others as he had been when he
first came to the school. He had the choler of the obese, easily roused
and as easily calmed, and his boys soon discovered that there was much
kindliness beneath the invective with which he constantly assailed
them. He had no patience with fools, but was willing to take much
trouble with boys whom he suspected of concealing intelligence behind
their wilfulness. He was fond of inviting them to tea; and, though
vowing they never got a look in with him at the cakes and muffins, for
it was the fashion to believe that his corpulence pointed to a
voracious appetite, and his voracious appetite to tapeworms, they
accepted his invitations with real pleasure.
Philip was now more comfortable, for space was so limited that there
were only studies for boys in the upper school, and till then he had
lived in the great hall in which they all ate and in which the lower
forms did preparation in a promiscuity which was vaguely distasteful to
him. Now and then it made him restless to be with people and he wanted
urgently to be alone. He set out for solitary walks into the country.
There was a little stream, with pollards on both sides of it, that ran
through green fields, and it made him happy, he knew not why, to wander
along its banks. When he was tired he lay face-downward on the grass
and watched the eager scurrying of minnows and of tadpoles. It gave him
a peculiar satisfaction to saunter round the precincts. On the green in
the middle they practised at nets in the summer, but during the rest of
the year it was quiet: boys used to wander round sometimes arm in arm,