There is a silly system here by which one has toenter the names of all the boys one punishes in a book: I simply can't remember to do it. It's like looking at "roll" lists. I'm always slack about checking the reasons that my boys give for their absence. I always believe what a boy tells me. How can you expect boys to tell the truth if you always verify their statements by outside corroborative evidence? It seems to me to be asking for trouble.
There seems to be everlasting espionage here. The school sergeant is known to be in the "secret service" of the Head Master, and is popularly supposed to wander about with a pair of field-glasses scouring the countryside for miscreants. This seems a quaint conception of education. Wherever and whenever we meet boys we are expected to extract information from them as to their precise occupation.
The only safe place seems to be on the cricket field, and even there you are surrounded by seniors waiting to lash you if you drop a catch or (in their opinion) field badly.
I spend most of my afternoons, when I am not wanted to fill up last place in a Common Room eleven, in coaching the "Rabbits," which is a league composed entirely of those who are unable to play cricket at all, the worst two dozen in the school. It is really amusing: no one could possibly pretend to take it seriously. The only time when it perhaps gets monotonous is when some elderly fag appears and insists on playing, and I find him coercing all the others to field for and bowl to him, while he scores about a hundred and fifty. That only happens when there is no master about. The House matches this term have been frenziedly exciting and Chichester and Ihave spent most afternoons watching them. It is an Arcadian, simple life in the summer term. Every morning at 6.30 I pull Dearden out of bed and race him down to the sea in pyjamas. We have a hasty bathe and arrive just in time for chapel at 7, unshaven. We there (pernicious custom) have to take a "roll" of our form. We look down chapel to see the faces of friends and at some intimate verses in the hymn or psalms we smile as at some hidden secret between ourselves. 7.25 sees us running to first school. We run everywhere at Radchester. I hate these dreary lessons before breakfast: 8 o'clock seems an interminable distance ahead. There is supposed to be cocoa in Common Room between 7.20 and 7.25, but no one ever has time to drink it, unless he cares to risk being late for form, which is not a vice masters here are prone to. At 8 o'clock on two days of the week two of us have to deny ourselves breakfast until the whole school has finished, for we have to say grace in hall, collect the names of all absentees, walk round to see that no one cuts the cloth or indulges in undue ribaldry, and then when all is over we dismiss them. Only then (at 8.30) do we get our own breakfast. By this time all the best of the food is gone. Feversham will probably be helping himself to his fourth egg and sausage and fifth piece of toast, the morning papers will all have been seized and we shall be thoroughly irritable.
One of the things that makes me loathe the Common Room system is this herding together for breakfast, a meal that ought to be eaten in communion with the morning paper and no living soul to interrupt.
From 9 to 9.45 we punish, we practise fielding, we correct work. From 9.45 to 1.15 we rush from subjectto subject, from class to class, attempting to drive some rudiments of mathematics and English into the heads of boys who don't want to know anything. If only they were born poor and knew that they had to depend on their wits for their livelihood, it would be infinitely easier for us. Occasionally one gets an hour off in the morning (I get three in the week) and this is spent either in writing letters, taking the illustrated weeklies from the House Room, or in going for a lonely walk or bathe. Sometimes I lie on the sand-dunes and eat and read, or try to write a few words more of an article. At 1.20 we all assemble in hall again, this time taking our food with the boys. I like this meal; the food is not good but the conversation is. I love all the clique that sits at my end of the table. Jimmy Haye, who sits on my right hand, is an argumentative soul who frequently sulks and refuses to speak to me when he thinks that I am doing the wrong thing, such as going about with Chichester, speaking against the classics at a debate, or advocating educational reform. Jimmy is a boy I should much like to know intimately, but he rarely comes up to my rooms: he doesn't care to mix with the riff-raff he finds there. I have occasionally persuaded him to come for a walk; he spends most of his life in "ragging" in the house and in being bullied by Naylor, the senior maths. tutor, who is endeavouring to raise him to the standard required for University scholarship. On my left sits Montague, Jimmy's greatest friend. He is easy-going, clever, very good at games, quite wild and irresponsible in the house, with a temper like a fiend. He has Spanish blood in him and has travelled all over the world. He treats me as I like to be treated—as aboon companion: although he doesn't take advantage of my standing invitation to use my rooms as an hotel he always comes to me for advice when he is implicated in a row. He likes to take me for walks on Sundays and pour out his many grievances against life. Sometimes neither he nor Haye talk to me at all for a month, then they suddenly relent, become their old gay selves again and chatter away, to my endless enjoyment.
It is at lunch-time that I generally hear the scandal of the day. In the afternoon immediately after lunch there is punishment drill—some twenty to fifty miscreants have to run or march round the square under direction of the drill-sergeant for half an hour, while other people are changing, going out to nets or playing tennis.
We bowl at nets till 3.30. Not many days pass without an accident. It's a wonder to me that boys aren't killed at this exercise: all the nets are very close together and hardly protected at all. Once the House matches start, of course, nets are "dropped" and we simply lie on rugs and applaud or groan according to the fortunes of the game. Most of the masters sit on an elevated mound, Olympians on their dung-hill, near which sacred spot no boy may approach.
At 3.45 we get a scrappy tea in our own rooms: the old witch of a bedmaker is supposed to put out the tea-things and the kettle, and produce the roll and butter provided by the school. She frequently forgets, just as she forgets to dust the room or wash up the dirty things. Usually I have to write orders for chocolate, walnut cakes, and fruit and jams or bananas and cream, and dispatch fags to the tuck-shop.There are never less than half a dozen urchins clamouring for tea: at 4.15 the bell rings for afternoon school.
Shall I ever forget in the years to come this hellish bell? It rings not less than fifty times a day, usually for five minutes at a time: nothing is so calculated to get on a new-comer's nerves as its incessant tolling, day and night, calling us to some fresh duty.
At 6 o'clock the school goes into hall for tea. If one is on duty that means more "calling of rolls" and counting of absentees; if not we have a blessed half-hour in which to prepare for Common Room dinner at 6.30. At 7 we hurry off to take prep. The senior men get half a crown a night for taking prep. in Big School, we poor juniors have to hustle along to supervise one of the other innumerable preps. for no reward. I hate this invigilation. It means that one tries to correct work, but has to interrupt oneself all the time in order to help boys over ridiculous points about cisterns and pipes, quadratic graphs or a line in Homer. Of course one can refuse all aid: most men do lest they should be found ignorant of some department of school study. At 8.45 we again rush to chapel and at 9 another prep. starts, in studies this time, and juniors start to turn on baths as a sign of bed. At 10 o'clock work for the day is over except for masters and the Sixth Form. Shouts and screams come from all the dormitories, and twenty minutes later we go round to see that every one is in bed.
By eleven most of the buildings are in darkness. Bridge-parties and conversations over whisky are kept up till twelve or one, but it isn't every night that we have time to indulge in these practices.Such is our normal day, but it's the unusual that finds its chronicling most frequently in this diary.
August 1, 1911
To-morrow we go away to Aldershot for the annual camp; another school year is over and I now have two years to look back over. I don't know that my experience has taught me much yet, except a distrust of the old men. I still love boys as much as ever, though not in the mass. I hate them at school lectures when they cough in order to make a nervous lecturer break down, or when they express mock approval by prolonged ironic laughter and stamping of feet. I hate them most of all when they choose to "rag" an unfortunate master who can't keep order in hall or at "roll." I always funk taking both these ceremonies, though I have never had any trouble except in my dreams. If I did I suppose I should half-kill the boy nearest to me and let out with my fists all round.
I like boys best singly in my rooms. Chichester makes up to me for lack of wife or sister or brother. I am never happy when he is out of my sight. He has shown up a prodigious quantity of good verse and some short stories, all of which I store away in the hope that some day I shall have collected enough to publish.
I've got a new idea in English composition with the lower forms. I take in a copy of a really good picture and get them to describe it: as a model for this I read Pater's description of the "Mona Lisa" with a copy staring them in the face as I read. I don't know where I got this idea from, but I find that itbrings out a good deal of latent talent from boys who can never express themselves on paper in normal circumstances.
I wish it could be possible to have school without the first and last days of term: they are never-ending. At the beginning one misses all the comforts of civilization and mourns the absence of all society: at the end, after a strenuous turmoil of thirteen weeks there is nothing whatever left to do. Marks are all added up, examination papers corrected, reports written, prize sheets made, clothes packed. Boys besiege one's rooms with requests for photographs, and with a catch in the throat say good-bye. They are going into the firm, going up to the University, going abroad—going to the ends of the earth on their different missions, and Radchester will know them no more. Their office another will take and one gasps at the handful that will be left to carry on the glorious traditions of the House and school. The last day is pitiable.
Most masters are unfeignedly glad to get away. I never am. I sometimes chafe about the eighth or ninth week, but by the thirteenth I have become so used to the life that I hate the thought of any change. I have learnt to do without civilization. I just want my boys by my side always: I want to go on teaching English. I don't mind a holiday from mathematics. I wish I could find the soul of algebra and geometry. It's hard to make a moral lesson out of a circle. I am not Sir Thomas Browne. I shall miss my daily bickerings with Jimmy Haye and Montagu in hall. I shall miss the cricket and the bathing; above all, I shall miss Chichester and the rug. Luckily he is coming to camp this year. Camp lets one downgently. Gradually the longing for society steals over one again and the strenuous ten days' soldiering makes one pine for clean sheets and mufti, ordinary hours and meals at a table, but while it lasts it's just one great picnic.
August 10, 1911
It'sbeen a good camp in every way. I was battalion scout most of the time and had the extraordinary luck to outwit a whole section of Cameronians (regulars) in one field-day while I was investigating behind the enemy's lines. What an ideal country for fighting this is, with all the pine-trees and the long stretch of Laffan's Plain and Cæsar's Camp. I wish that Radchester could be burnt down and rebuilt somewhere on these Surrey hills. Every evening I used to tramp over to the Aldershot baths from Farnborough, tired as I was, and then back to join the riotous "sing-songs." I find that one gets through a good deal of money at the canteens. I always want to eat like a pig and drink like a fish at the finish of each day's manœuvres. I have never been so bronzed as I am this year: my face is almost black with the sun and the dust. We had some excellent fights during the ten days, not always as on the programme. We had a first-class row with the Melton corps. They "swank" as if they owned the whole camp, so we let all their tents down one night. There was a battle royal and an inquiry the next day, when about eight Generals all gave tongue and talked about the honour of the Army. You can't suddenly pretend that a schoolboy ceases to be a schoolboybecause you dress him up in khaki. He will have his "rags," whatever Guardsmen say.
There was, too, the usual smoking row. As a matter of fact, the great majority of fellows don't smoke in camp: they can afford to wait till the holidays begin. It is an education in itself to meet all the people from the other schools, to see how those with the great names take it for granted that they are cock-of-the-walk and "hold up" the canteens, while members of less well-known schools have to wait.
As a matter of fact, the officers' mess is the place to learn things. I dined there one night as a guest. I had no idea that Oxford and Cambridge were, or could be responsible for, such bounders as I met on that one evening. Good-hearted fellows for the most part, but it was ludicrous to see them in the same mess with thesepukkaofficers of the Grenadiers and Coldstreams. They are keen on their job, too, but without the ghost of an idea how to behave, or how to speak the King's English. They are indescribably funny to watch as they sidle up to the Colonels and Generals and try to adopt a sort of Army attitude to life. There are heaps of men here whom I used to know at Oxford; most of them, however, are in the regulars and not O.T.C. men at all.
One of the "stunts" is for the boys to get the General or some big "nut" to go to tea in their tents. They provide a palatial meal and the wretched old man has to gorge himself nearly sick in order to please these fifteen-year-olds, who would be tremendously upset if he didn't eat all that was offered to him. But the man we all stand in dread of is the Brigade Sergeant-Major, who has a voice of thunder,and puts the fear of God into every one who comes near him, officer and man alike. He seems to be a walking encyclopædia; there is nothing he doesn't know and he requires absolute perfection every time. I must say ten days of this life make our puny efforts at school to be smart look pretty cheap. Here we really get the hang of things: at school somehow we nearly always fail. It's partly competition and the ever-present fact that we have a reputation to keep up.
August 15, 1911
I have just had four days in town as an aftermath. The comparison between London and camp is extraordinary. I'd no idea my love for London was so deep-rooted. There hangs over London an ever-present air of success, of money-making and money-spending. The shops tempt you, the hotels tempt you, the theatres tempt you, everything tempts you. I fed well and met all sorts of interesting people, among them Chichester. He lives at Hampton Court and I had one great afternoon on the river with his sisters, himself and his mother. They appear to be very wealthy and at dinner, to which I stayed, there was such a variety of wines that I got nervous as to which wine to put in which glass. I believe I got them all wrong, except the liqueurs, but I don't think they noticed. How Chichester can bear the bleak savagery of Radchester after the rich comforts of his own home, I can't conceive.
Some day I am to go back and stay with him. He appears to spend his holidays boating, motoring, riding, playing billiards, going to theatres, reading and writing. I never met people who put one soquickly at one's ease. Although they are rich they don't seem to worry about Society: they do none of therightthings, for which Heaven be praised. They just enjoy life to the full and take each blessing as it comes. They have less of the snob in them than any people I have ever met. They appear to be unduly grateful to me for what I have done for Tony. My hat! The boot's on the other foot: what has Tony not done for me?
August 23, 1911
After a glorious week with my uncle in Dawlish, during which time I bathed and walked a good deal, I am back in town again. I love Devon: the coast scenery fills me with ecstatic delight and I thank God every minute that I am alive and strong to enjoy the good things of life.
I got into conversation with heaps of strangers of both sexes, and heard views of life that I am sure never enter the heads of my colleagues: when I am asked, as I frequently am, what I do in life, they always think I am lying when I say I am a schoolmaster, and laugh good-humouredly as if I had said something supremely funny when I mention that Oxford was once my University: apparently all young men claim to be "college boys": it's part of the game. Their whole conversation is one vast lie. But it does no one any harm and gives them a sense of romance: they get right away from the humdrum existence of the shop-counter and the office, and for a fortnight imagine themselves to be dukes and duchesses. But they miss half the joy that Devon provides by not scouring the country. Their programme is to rise late, dress with lavish care in the most glaring and tasteless colours,and slowly promenade up and down the Front. It is all very pretty and harmless and would delight the heart of O. Henry. They miss entirely the thousands of joyous little creeks with which the coast is studded: they never try to discover the secret charm of the moor. They prefer listening to the comic songs of the coons to the birds on the hillside, and the band on the Promenade to the rush of wind in the ears as one stands on the cliffs.
I wish I could write a novel. But I lack every faculty necessary for it. I can't observe properly: I can't describe the effect that scenery has on me. I am too nervous to probe into the inner history of sad-eyed women and dour-faced men. That they have their passionate loves and hates, of course I know, but these every man keeps in the secret places of the heart. Your Devonian is not the sort of man to wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. I came back to London two nights ago, with my uncle, and he took me to several plays. When I am in town I'm never satisfied unless I can put in two theatres a day. I am just as excited at the rise of a curtain or the tuning up of the orchestra to-day as I used to be when I was a small kid. To be able to see in the flesh all these great actors, of whom we only hear dimly in our fastness of Radchester, is a delight not less than, if very different from, the sight of the red loam of Devon, or a great stag breaking from cover with the hounds close upon his heels.
September 26, 1911
I spent a week with the Chichesters at Hampton and had a joyful time in company with Tony. Afterleaving them I went home because my mother suddenly developed rheumatic fever and was seriously ill. I read aloud to her for about three hours every day from Ford Madox Hueffer's "Ladies Whose Bright Eyes" and W. L. Courtney's "In Search of Egeria."
I have heard from the Head Master that Anstruther is to have Marshall's house. Anstruther! Ye Gods! He is two terms junior to me. I hear that the Begum of Bhopal wants me to coach her son in Constantinople. That would be fun. Think of the experience! I wanted to clinch with the offer at once, but my mother made me promise not to. Heaven knows what it would have led to. I should have seen the world, met all the best people, and perhaps found a good job at the end of it.
October 13, 1911
Backagain at Radchester. As usual there are a few rows on. Two of the parson members of the staff are quarrelling because Tomson (the High Church one) will call the Communion "Eucharist," and will talk about the "Catholic" instead of the Protestant Church. Mathews on the other hand calls the altar the communion-table. A battle royal is in progress. I believe Tomson will have to go. This is a very Low Church school and any one who crosses himself or indulges in any ritualistic practices is looked upon as inclined to papistry.
It seems a strange thing to make such a fuss about. Both Mathews and Tomson are good, conscientious workers, and the school will be the poorer if either of them leaves. Another row concerns me. It is commonly thought by some members of my form that Chichester has been "sneaking" to me about their methods of work, a pretty laughable idea when one thinks how little Chichester cares about any one in the school, much less in his form. We never talk about school matters at all. We talk books and philosophy. Anyway, I have lately been boycotted by my form, by Montague and Haye and most of the school.
I'm reading Stevenson's and Meredith's Letters.I've got rather a passion for letter-writers. The Paston Letters, Dorothy Osborne's, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's, Horace Walpole's, Gray's, Lamb's and Cowper's all gave me lasting pleasure. One feels at last as if one really was beginning to see the inner workings of the minds of great geniuses when you close a volume of their intimate correspondence—but I prefer Stevenson's and Meredith's to all the others. They show such wonderful cheeriness in the face of adversity, such love for their friends and wives, such an interest in literature and in life. They are so splendidly natural and speak from the heart. We hear the very voice of the man we have learnt to love in public talking intimately in his own home.
We have just had an amazing masters' meeting in which the following motions were carried:
(i) Masters are forbidden to see more of one boy than another!
(ii) Masters are forbidden to have any boys in their room except for "turned" work.
(iii) Masters are forbidden to hear "turned" work in their rooms except between 9 and 1.
(iv) Lower School boys are not to be allowed in any House other than their own without a written leave from their House-masters.
(v) Boys must never be given the run of a master's rooms.
(vi) In future every one will stand all through the offertory in the Communion service.
There were heaps more, but these were the funniest. Anything more priceless than the solemn conclave of old dears passing these resolutions one by one, with here and there an amendment (always rejected without discussion) I never saw. If they think that all thistomfoolery will prevent me from seeing all I want to of Tony, they are mistaken. It wasn't altogether aimed at me. Apparently quite a number of the younger masters make friends with the boys. For the life of me I can't see why they shouldn't. Anyway these "rules" aren't going to make any difference to me. All through this ridiculous meeting I found myself repeating Edith Sichel's priceless aphorism: "There is nothing that cannot be imagined by people of no imagination." It ought to be inscribed over the mantelpiece of every Common Room.
December 19, 1911
We have had some good field-days lately, notably one where I was in command of a small force, which was told off to harass a large advancing troop by repeated ambushes. I nearly ran my people off their feet, but it was rare fun. We just appeared in the most unlikely places, forced the enemy to waste time by deploying, let them get quite close and then scattered and met again farther back along the line and repeated the manœuvre. The whole business was overwhelmingly successful for we delayed their advance until it ceased to be of any effect. I prefer this sort of tactical scheme to the usual one of merely putting out outposts or an advanced guard. The only way to interest boys in the Corps is to give them some one to fight against every time. I found this out when I started the night scouts. I have been allowed twenty minutes nightly in which to practise my specialist scouts in getting used to working in the dark. It was futile merely getting them accustomed to using their night eyes; unless we opposed oneanother and tried to track each other down, the whole business failed of its object.
As soon as we had sides they all became ten times more enthusiastic: both their sight and hearing became more acute: there were some titanic struggles and much good resulted from these tactics. It is an eerie business, searching on a pitch-black night inch by inch, over a ploughed field, for an enemy that you expect to pounce upon you from behind if he gets the chance. Of course Hallows and Co. did their best to prevent my having these boys out, on the ground that they would catch cold—and then that they might get into mischief. For once I carried my point and had my own way.
I notice that I'm leaving the school buildings far less frequently than I used to do when I first came here. I have very little temptation to go off to Scarborough for a "razzle" at the theatre or the Winter Gardens. About twice a term suffices now. I don't quite know why. Of course I'm reading much more and I sit up taking notes for books that I mean some day to write. I still refuse to play "bridge." I go to the "club" and sing, dance, eat and drink on rare occasions, but normally I don't go out of my rooms much at night.
I don't spend more time in Common Room than I can help. I just play my games, work out my schemes in form on the teaching of English and mathematics, write innumerable letters and try my hand occasionally on original topics for articles.
Of late thePioneerhas taken several sporting sketches of mine, which has put a new heart in me.
December 31, 1911
Last term ended very quietly. I saw a great deal of Tony in spite of all the silly new regulations.
It was grand to be back in London again: I spent five days with the Chichesters at Hampton and we feasted right royally and went to two shows a day. On Christmas Eve I went down to see my father and mother, who were staying in Bath for the waters. After the riotous orgies at the Chichesters I thought I should find Bath boring. I arrived late at night and was struck by the lights twinkling from hills on every side. My people had got "digs" close under the shadow of the Abbey. I was glad to come to a place which had such a wonderful eighteenth-century flavour, and expected to find out many new truths about Jane Austen, Fielding, Sheridan, Doctor Johnson, Beau Nash and all the other celebrities, but no one in Bath seemed to take any notice of the past. The present was gay enough for them.
So many Army men retire to Bath with a progeny of daughters all of marriageable age, but possessed of no dowry, that they almost wait in a queue outside the station to fasten on to any strange young man who appears. It took me some time to fathom this. I found every one exceedingly kind and hospitable. I could wish I were a better dancer. These Assembly Room shows are glorious, but they make me abominably nervous. I feel all the time gauche and awkward in the presence of these resplendent youngsters: they can all dance superbly, and in the first place I am afraid that the cheapness of my clothes militates against me, and then that no girl could possibly really want to dance with me when she could secure one ofthese subalterns or rich young squires. All the same once I got into the swing of the thing it was all right. I always found some partners who fitted my steps exactly: I endured agonies with some tall and unresponsive creatures, who obviously were only giving me a "duty" dance, but with small girls like Ruth Harding I got on famously. To enjoy a dance to the full one ought to know one's partner intimately and dance with her for the entire night. At the last two dances I got Ruth to dance with me most of the evening, which apparently scandalized some of the clique which I am supposed to have joined. There can be no place in the British Isles where tongues wag so unceasingly as in Bath. It is like sitting through a scene in "The School for Scandal" to hear the modern Lady Sneerwell and Mrs. Candour chattering about faithless wives. Not one in a hundred of their stories could possibly be true, or else we are living in a most depraved age. It is the first time in my life that I've heard people openly discuss these things. I can't say that I like it. Ruth is a good little soul. She knows nothing about eighteenth-century history but is quite keen to learn. We have explored Prior Park and Castle Combe, and have searched every street in order to find out where all the greater celebrities lived in the great days. In some ways the place has not changed at all since the age of Jane Austen. At one of the Assembly Room dances I met exact replicas of Catherine Morland, Emma, and Mr. Collins. They almost employed the same phraseology. Quaintly enough, not one of them had ever read a word of Jane Austen.
My father and mother love the life here. We take my mother out in a Bath chair into the gardens andshe gazes at all the smartly dressed passers-by. My father has got to know all the local clergy: sometimes he takes duty at one of the churches. We have a great number of callers and there is never a lack of anything to do. It is a welcome change from the dullness of our village at home. One of the joys of life here for me is beagling. I go out three times a week with the Wick or the Trowbridge Beagles. I doubt whether there are a finer set of people living than the average beaglers.
They are usually poor (they can't afford to ride), they are passionately addicted to open-air life and are hence sound in mind and limb. Although one feels at times after a heavy run as if one would drop dead from fatigue before one got home, yet the sense of exhaustion is soon ousted by a sense of wild exhilaration in the hunt, the scenery, the people you meet, and the physical fitness of your body. It is so splendid just to turn up at some country house and there, among the sherry and the sandwiches, get into conversation with some flapper or schoolboy or old colonel, all of whom are full of tales of past historic runs and anticipations of the day's sport.
One day we ran from Trowbridge right on to Salisbury Plain, and lost the hounds in the dark by Edington Church—and had to scour the lonely hills for them until eight o'clock. This was on a night when I had promised to take Ruth and two other girls to hear the D'Oyley Carte Company. I got to the theatre at a quarter to ten.
January 19, 1912
I spent most of my days with Ruth for the rest of the holidays, doing all the correct things, having teatête-à-têteat Fortt's, going to the theatre on Friday nights (the fashionable night in Bath), walking over Lansdown and down the Avon valley, beagling together (that was best of all: she is a superb athlete) and dancing together whenever possible. Her parents and mine have become firm friends and we are as thick as thieves. I am not in love with her, but she's about the best pal I ever had, which is saying a good deal.
I hear that Bath has been waiting anxiously to hear the announcement of our engagement. What a place! Why on earth can't a man have a girl friend without eternally being suspected of marriage? Ruth and I have never kissed or done anything except treat each other as bosom friends, which we certainly are and probably always shall be.
In spite of the insidious temptations of Bath, to crawl round looking at the shops all day, or to explore the highways and by-ways of Somerset, I have both read and written a good deal.
This seems to me the Golden Age of the novel. There are about thirty or forty people writing really great stuff, full of a philosophy of life, candid, human, extraordinarily real and interesting: their books do not sell in great numbers, but they occupy a place on one's bookshelf that one wants to refer to almost daily. All the other thousand or so novelists don't count at all. I hate the unreality and false glamour of these popular writers: they are like the halfpenny papers which cater for a low and vicious, ignoranttaste, only to be compared with the shoddier melodramas that we see on the cinema.
I often wonder how these old ladies get on who crowd daily into Smith's Library in Milsom Street and ask the girl behind the counter for an interesting book. She must have her work cut out to remember the million or so different connotations that the word "interesting" bears to the circulating library subscriber. I wonder how many of them would like to plunge into the inconsequent medley which constitutes my diary. When you see one old lady bearing off under her arm a copy of "The Revelations of a Duchess," Samuel Butler's "Life and Habit," Gertie de S. Wentworth-James's latest narcotic, and some of A. C. Benson's Essays, it almost frights you to think of the aggregate effect of such a mixture. Talk about mixing drinks! The reading habit seems to be ingrained in the British public, but I cannot help wondering how much of the best stuff is ever understood by people who commonly feed on garbage.
I should like to publish a sort of annual guide to be called "The Hundred Best Books of the Year," to be divided up into sections for Parsons, Doctors, Schoolmasters, Socialists, Capitalists, Politicians, Flappers, Nursemaids, Factory Hands, Maiden Aunts, Subalterns, and Young Matrons. I wonder how many would overlap. Not many, I fancy.
I don't think criticisms of books make any appreciable difference to their sale. I have seen heaps of novels, damned by all the papers, go into five or six large editions and others that have been acclaimed as sheer genius die at birth. I wonder, for instance, how many copies of E. C. Booth's "Cliff End" were sold during the first year after its appearance, yetI can't remember any novel which made so deep an impression on me at the time. Yet on every bookstall you see copies of "Paul the Pauper," which every sane man would condemn as simply silly. It has sold over 200,000 copies in two years. It seems incredible: there isn't a single human character in the book, not a single natural sentence: everything is untrue to life in every respect. The passions are laid on with a trowel. There are Grandisonian heroes and double-dyed villains: coincidences of a kind which violate every natural law occur on every other page. The only thing that I can compare to this amazing book is a Lyceum tragedy and the wit of a music-hall comedian. I wonder if England will ever become educated.
From what I have seen of girls in Bath I should say that the system of education in girls' schools is no better than that of boys: they certainly know a little more about English literature, because their mistresses read aloud to them passages out of the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray. They also devote more time to poetry than we do, but they forget it all as soon as they leave school. They don't see that these books taken altogether form a complete introduction to life. The average girl I have danced with lately seems to have read nothing at all. Her conversation invariably runs on the same lines. Have I been in London lately? Don't I just adore Du Maurier and Martin Harvey? Do I rink? Do I hunt? Do I punish my boys very severely? Am I sorry that I am not in the Army? Do I like dancing? Do I like girls? Am I an outrageous flirt? Would I like to sit out somewhere more secluded than this rather open spot?Am I certain that I had enough supper? Isn't the way Jim Dainton and Sophie Harrington are behaving "perfectly disgusting"? Don't I love Irene Fairhaven? Isn't Joyce, or Corelli Windyatt, or Moritz, or Stanislaus Würm, or whoever is playing on this particular evening, divine, topping, ducky, dinky, perfectly sweet, ripping—or whatever the word of the moment is? Shall I be at the Morrisons' on Tuesday or the Dohertys' on Thursday?
I get most infernally tired of all this claptrap. No one ever says anything that he or she means: it is all superficial. The girls think of nothing but their frocks and the effect they are making on their partners. I want to talk sense and instead have to rattle on with sheer nonsense. I suppose I am getting prosy and sedate, but I do just love talking about books and different views on life. I seem to have no ready change of small-talk. Of course one cannot expect to get to know all the people with whom one dances, but this constant chopping and changing is rotten. I want to keep to one girl, Ruth for preference, all through the night. Then one doesn't have to think of something polite to say: if we feel like silence we just keep silent, if we want to talk we talk, about anything that comes into our heads, serious or gay. We understand each other's moods without having to go through a long rigmarole of introductory icebreaking. One great advantage of Bath is the number of clubs and places where one can browse among the reviews and periodicals of all sorts. How I manage to keep abreast of any modern work in a hole like Radchester, I can't think. Without theTimes Literary Supplementand the book reviews in theTelegraphandMorning PostI should be entirely atsea. And yet with all these incentives to read, the ignorance of these townspeople is extraordinary. They nearly all rely on their bookseller for everything they read. They leave the choice always to him.
February 23, 1912
Itwas appalling to have to leave the comforts of Bath for the wilds of Radchester. It has been the worst Easter term so far within the remembrance of man. We were snowed right up from the beginning and House-fights of snowballing soon ceased to amuse. We are simply shivering in our rooms. The whole place is one medley of germs. Every conceivable sort of contagious disease is raging. It is useless trying to teach anybody anything except individually, for there is no continuity, one boy drops one day, another the next, six more the day after.
I have three in one of my sets where I'm supposed to have twenty-six. I've spent every spare moment in my rooms writing to Ruth, reading and trying my hand at poetry. Thank Heaven, Tony is still immune. He waits for me every night after chapel and we stagger across the snow-bound square with the wind blowing the filthy stuff into our eyes and down our necks and almost into our skins. One misses games in a place like this. I hate letting a day go by without taking violent exercise. I suppose if I were in the City I should be content with Saturday afternoons, but as a schoolmaster I feel that I can't teach and keep healthy unless I need a hot bath in the afternoon. The cold bath in the morning makes me yell withagony these days, but I always keep it up. I suppose it is good for me. At any rate it is refreshing.
Masefield had a new poem in the February number of theEnglish Reviewcalled "The Widow in the Bye-Street." All my boys immediately proceeded to copy it. He is certainly virile and unlike anybody else. He makes an irresistible appeal to youth. Of course the outspokenness of his diction accounts for this, at least partially.
Of late I have been sleeping rottenly. I always like to keep my blind up, so that I can hear the waves more clearly and see the sea from my bed. I notice that when the moon is up I get appalling nightmares and wake to find it full on my face. I wonder if I am liable to moonstroke!
We have cleared the snow off some of the ponds and had some really good skating. The most ridiculous rules have been made about it, because two boys were once drowned, a hundred or so years ago. Each House has to take a ladder and a rope with it, and not more than twenty boys are allowed on the same pond at the same time. Considering that none of the ponds is more than two feet deep or ten yards across, such precautions seem rather unnecessary, but nothing can be done at Radchester without rules being framed by the dozen to meet all contingencies. Curiously enough, a tragedyhasoccurred. The head waiter in Common Room has drowned himself. We spent half of one bitter moonless night searching for his body. He leaves a widow and six children. I wonder why he did it. Was the conversation of the masters altogether too deadly for him? Was he underpaid? or was it just the depressing conditions? I never saw a place which so invited suicidal thoughts. The gloomof this coast at this time of the year is indescribable. All the bungalows down the beach are deserted and so are the little tea-houses which look so jolly in the summer-time. The Head Master has played a low-down, dirty trick on a man called Turner, who only joined us last term. He was quite young, brilliantly clever, popular and successful with the boys: he had to rent a cottage about a quarter of a mile away because he was married and had one baby. His wife was pretty and did a good deal to make the place habitable. One remembered sometimes even the way to take one's hat off. Well, he has had to go. His sin was—being married. The Head Master told him that he had come under false pretences, that the school could not afford to keep men who did not "live in," and that a wife caused a man to neglect his work.
March 23, 1912
During the last month or so I have been seized with a panic lest I should die of appendicitis or some such quick and hidden complaint. I can't sleep at all and I lie awake with a curious numb sort of pain and think of death. I am all right in the daytime for the most part. At any rate I am playing hockey and footer with all my old vigour and I never feel bad in form. It's just at night; unfortunately it's every night that I get seized with a real horror lest I should die uncared for, unhonoured and unwept. I should have liked a little taste of love and laughter, of civilized comfort—I should have liked to have written some sort of book which would have helped mankind along the rough road of life. I should like to have had a wife, an heir ... but as it is Tony must be myheir. I have transmitted to him my passionate love of literature, my keenness for beauty, my longing for a revolution in educational practice and theory.
I have worked off my spleen on a long centenary paper on Dickens for theRadcastrian, which will excite and annoy the lovers of that novelist a good deal.
I made all the boys in my form write centenary appreciations of Dickens, too. I got some queer stuff. He is not half as well known as he ought to be in spite of his great name. But I do wish he had resisted his tendency to caricature.
There have been the usual rows. By far the most disconcerting was the expulsion of Mather, who was a school prefect and a scholar of Magdalen, for stealing. It seems impossible to believe. It appears that he was in a House where most of the boys have far too much pocket-money: the very fags own to having "fivers." Poor old Mather was one of eight sons of a penniless country parson: he never had a sou and consequently starved when all the rest of the House were revelling in delicacies.
More masters have been poisoning the boys' minds against me. Tony's House-master has been lecturing him about my pernicious influence. I wish I knew what was behind this dark conspiracy. I wish they would give me some facts to go on, and say that just here or just there I was doing harm, but all their accusations are nebulous. Whenever I go up to a man's rooms and beard him in his den, he nearly always denies that he ever said any of the things which were reported of him. It's very difficult to know what to do.
I've discovered another wheeze which I use to get original work out of my form. I give out a list offorty or fifty words, ostensibly for spelling, and by the side of these they write a list of synonyms, and then during their next prep. they weave a story round the words I have given them. I have had wonderful results from this simple device. Incidentally the boys love doing it. It stimulates them, especially when they have to read their own efforts aloud.
Now that the sports are looming ahead, I get up in the very early mornings and take people for training walks. In the afternoon I run with them across country or round the track. Before I came no one worried much about the sports. I have really got them keen this year, much to Hallows' indignation, because as games master he is responsible for the sports, and he thinks I'm taking too much upon myself in training them daily for weeks before the events.
About a dozen of us, Tony and other boys in this House, go off every Sunday to a nook we've found by an inland stream. We call it a training walk: it pans out at twelve miles. By so doing we get right outside the country we know and really begin to get a glimmering of beauty on these glorious warm spring days. It's impossible to imagine now that we were ever snow-bound. It is warm and sunny every day; so much so that "Rugger," and hockey seem indescribably silly games for this time of year. It feels "crickety" weather. I've been writing articles on Hymns and Cross-Country Running for the London Press and had both accepted, which is a bit of luck. Things are looking up. All the same it's a nerve-racking process, waiting to hear one's fate by every post. Editors are as stubborn as mules and without any sense of humanity.
We have had one great excitement lately. A schooner ran ashore just close to my bedroom window and we had to rush out in the middle of the night and rescue people. Poor devils, they were awfully cold and miserable by the time we got them to bed in the sanatorium, but luckily there were no lives lost, and most of the cargo has been salvaged.
Life at the end of the Easter term is fairly brisk. It's impossible to get hold of boys to do anything in the way of extra work owing to the innumerable House competitions. There is the Junior and Senior Hockey, the Singing Competition, the Boxing, the Gym., the Corps and Certificate "A," the Sports, and Heaven knows what besides—and every man on the staff thinks that his pet job is the only one that matters. The only thing about which we are all agreed is that school work does not matter. No one thinks of that. All the same I think these contests are good things, particularly in the Corps, though I object to the extraordinary number of prizes and pots that are lavished upon individual winners. There's a huge element of selfishness inspired by the very things which we hold to eradicate it. I took two days off by going down to Queen's Club to see the Oxford and Cambridge Sports. It was a rare treat to meet all one's best friends of the Oxford days and watch other people in the last stages of nervous funk as we were so few years ago. I went to the dinner afterwards: I wonder whether one will ever grow out of these orgies. They are very life and blood to me now at any rate. I expect our older guests get a trifle tired with the exuberance of our spirits before the end. It was very tame to have to come back toRadchester and the school sports after that grand struggle at Queen's Club.
April 13, 1912
Here I am back again in my beloved Bath.
The term ended well. Heatherington's won the sports and I was the recipient of a tremendous ovation at the House Supper. I don't think I ever felt so proud before. At the end of term I went down to Hampton Court with Tony until Good Friday, when I went on to see Ruth: we have spent all the rest of the time together.
It was at the Easter Ball that I saw a face which I shall never forget. I was ragging about with Ruth in the vestibule when I saw a girl at the far end of the room talking to young Conyngham, one of the "nuts" of Bath, whom I cordially dislike. They seemed very pleased with one another. I don't know what came over me but Walter Savage Landor's phrase came into my mind, "By Jove, I'm going to marry that girl," and before I knew what I was doing I had left Ruth and raced across to Conyngham and asked him to introduce me to his partner. He was really bored. She was not pleased. Apparently he realized that I meant to stay there till he did introduce me and so he gruffly mumbled, "Oh! This is Mr. Traherne—Miss Tetley," and walked away about two yards. "Don't go away, Philip," she said, in a voice that thrilled me to hear.
"May I——?" I began.
"I'm afraid I've only got number 17 left."
"May I have that—and any extras?"
"If you like—I'm afraid I didn't hear your name."
"Traherne. Patrick Traherne—let me write it for you."
I did and received instant dismissal. Not a promising start, but I was pleased just to get so much out of her. All the evening, as I was gallivanting round with Ruth, I kept on looking at her, but she had no eyes for me. I asked Ruth about her, but she was not interested.
"Which girl? Oh, that one. I don't know her except by sight. Her name's Elspeth Tetley. Rather ugly, don't you think? Her name I mean. No: she's a pretty enough little thing in herself. She seems very fond of Mr. Conyngham."
Yes, she did—confound her. Incidentally, she cut my dance and there were no extras, so I did not see her again that night. I wasn't going to be defeated so easily, so I bowed to her when I passed her in the streets, but she never even saw me. I don't quite know what it is about her that so attracts me; she looks very quiet, she is amazingly sure of herself, extraordinarily pretty, with any amount of humour and energy I should think. I am still speaking without the book, for I know nothing about her, whatever, except that I love the look of her.
Ruth and I have spent all the holidays so far watching "Rugger" matches and picnicking and motoring and dancing. I have had Petre Mais down to stay with me. By a strange chance he knows the Tetleys: he thinks Elspeth, as he calls her (he has known her from childhood), the most adorable girl he has ever met. I have tried to get him to bring her along to see me, but something has always cropped up at the last moment to prevent our meeting.
May 3, 1912
I spent the whole of the Easter holidays in Bath, mainly in the company of Ruth. It was good to have Mais with me: we used to sit up to all hours arguing about education: we appear to be both of us bitten with the craze of reform, though we don't agree on points of detail. He is a curious mixture of the very grave and sedate and the irresponsibly gay. He gets on extraordinarily well with my father. While I am disporting myself in company with Ruth, he takes the Gov'nor for long walks and argues about Christian dogma and ethics. I am afraid that Ruth interferes with my reading and writing. Mais seems to get through a great deal and always "twits" me with being a lady-killer: he never seems to want the companionship of the other sex. There is Elspeth Tetley, with whom he might spend days—she is obviously very fond of him—and instead of going about with her he gives her up to Conyngham and buries himself in the Church Institute or the Bath and County Club, getting up notes for some article or book that he is at work upon. He is never happy unless he is working. As he very truly says, "his work is his mistress and he never wants a better." All the same a man needs some relaxation. I find mine in the company of Ruth, who grows more alluring with every passing day. She has taken me to Bradford-on-Avon, to Englishcombe, by motor to Badminton and over Salisbury Plain. I have been to three point-to-point meetings and at each of them caught a fleeting glance of Elspeth Tetley. She was always surrounded by young men, so I couldn't speak to her. I love these country meetings more almostthan any other form of sport. The hazardous steeplechases fill one with excitement: many men were riding whom I knew at Oxford, but they all appeared to belong to sets of the most exclusive kind. There is always a plentiful sprinkling of dukes and duchesses at these shows, as well as all the farmers in the country and the riff-raff of the town. The procession of bicycles and governess-cars and dog-carts and motors and pedestrians miles out in the country is a fine sight. I should like to have enough money to be able to go in for steeplechasing: it must be one of the finest sensations in the world to feel yourself rushing through the air, jumping these brooks and thickset hedges, always risking your neck, while all the youth and beauty of the country watch you, heart in mouth lest you should take a toss, transported beyond belief when you ride past the post a winner. Elspeth Tetley somehow fits a point-to-point meeting exactly. Some girls look the most preposterous idiots all togged up in the serviceable tweeds and brogues that girls wear for these shows, but she looks just as divine at a race meeting as she does in a ballroom. I hope to Heaven I get the chance of meeting her again some day.
June 10, 1912
I hated leaving Bath more than ever this time, partly because it meant leaving Elspeth in the clutches of young Conyngham, partly because of the summer weather and the flowers and the comfort of the south, partly because of parting with Ruth, but mainly because of the horrid contrast. Who, for instance, in Common Room ever rides to hounds, or cares about point-to-point meetings? Not one of mycolleagues ever goes near a dance if he can get out of it. I wonder how they all spend their holidays. As a consequence of my depression it took me longer than usual to settle down this term. I had a bad fit of restlessness, a feeling that I ought to be out in the world, risking something, trying to make money out of rubber in the Malay, or jute in India, experiencing the ups and downs of life in America, Spain, China, Russia, anywhere where men really lived. There is no denying that we do tend to stagnate here. This incessant round of cricket, bathing, maths., English, prep., chapel, and roll isn't fit work for an able-bodied man of active brain and ambition. The ideal schoolmaster has to put away ambition from the start. He can never set the Thames on fire or cause his name to ring out through the ages: it is enough for him if a score of men go through life blessing him for what he taught them, but a boy's memory is very short: he soon forgets his masters when he gets out into the real world and little wonder. I've been going into Scarborough lately and trying to find an interest in watching the trippers, but I hate the north-country people now. Bath has spoilt my taste for them for ever. I hate their raucous laughter, their dirty teeth, their loud ingurgitations over their food, their louder clothes and ghastly sense of independence, though as a Socialist I ought, I suppose, to be thankful for the last.
I have had an offer to sub-edit a rather pleasant monthly called theScrutinator. I nearly accepted it. I don't know what held me back unless it was Tony. I hate the thought of life without him, though of course he will leave just as other good fellows have left and I shall have to find some new friend and confidant.
We have had a wedding here, an unheard-of thing at Radchester. The Bursar is leaving, and so has decided to do what he wouldn't be allowed to do if he remained and that is to take a wife.
We had a really gay time for two days. The bridesmaids had the time of their lives. I wonder that the Head didn't put up a list of rules about them but it was all over before he really discovered anything about it. It was a sight for the gods to see members of Common Room raking up old frock-coats and top hats and white waistcoats for the occasion. The ceremony made me very jealous and I went back to my rooms feeling terribly lonely. Sometimes it seems to me that a man is only half a man until he marries. It would be splendid to have some one to turn to in every mood, some one who would sympathize and always be there ready to console, comfort, and share your joys and griefs. Ah! But who is that some one to be, that perhaps not impossible She?
July 29, 1912
This has been a wonderful summer term from the point of view of weather. All our school matches came off, all our field-days passed without a hitch. The summer term makes an enormous difference to life here. Then the sea at last seems to take on some sort of colour, the country seems less drab, people are more cheerful and human: the long evenings on the shore are a pure joy—and then of course there are the early morning bathes, the lazy afternoons watching the cricket, or reading or trying to concoct an article. Every one seems to be in the best of health, there are fewer rows, and we are less antagonistic in Common Room.
We have started an illegitimate "rag" called theRadchester Ram, which gives me unalloyed pleasure. We got tired of the everlasting succession of accounts of matches in theRadcastrian, and so we have collected all the really original literary stuff we could get and now we bring this new periodical out once a month. There is nothing offensive in it, as there so often is in magazines of this sort. It is simply a medley of verse and sketches, short stories and articles of general interest. On our first number we made about a sovereign profit. It gives many of us something to think about and encourages boys to write. We pay for all the contributions we use.
We have had two wonderful addresses given us here, one on Speech Day by Lord Dunnithorne, in which he implored the boys to keep up their ardour and energy not only in games, but in every side of life, in keeping an eye while still at school on public affairs, and developing a sense of proportion as to the relative values of the spiritual and the material, the other by a Fellow of All Souls from the pulpit on the hypocrisy that is so rampant in Public Schools. He asked us to think for ourselves, to set ourselves against any tradition, however strong, when and if we felt clear that it was against the principles of Christ and Liberty. He dwelt not on the greatness of the Public Schools, but their failure to produce the big men of the day. He brought out name after name of men who are now leading the world in politics, in science, in religion, in every department of life who owed nothing to the Public Schools. He accounted for this by telling us that we always tried to level up the many and so levelled down the few who really mattered, that our general level was fartoo low and meant a crushing of that Divine spark which alone could help us to do our duty. It was like a breath of inspiration from another world to hear this fine exponent of the best Oxford spirit trying to rouse us to a sense of our shortcomings. The Head was furious about the sermon, as were quite half the members of Common Room. I made it the text of pretty well all my discourses for the rest of term. Most of the boys of course didn't know what he was driving at; those who did were divided into two great camps: the upholders of tradition and those who agreed with him. I am afraid we who agreed with him were in a minority. Montague and Jimmy Haye refused to speak to me for weeks. Poor devils. Probably before very long they will come to understand what the preacher meant and metaphorically sit in sackcloth and ashes because they heeded not his warning. How the old men hate individuality: they fear it as Shakespeare feared and hated the mob.
Individuality, like originality, is dangerous to custom: when people begin to think for themselves there is usually trouble somewhere, but unless people learn to think for themselves they will surround themselves with unimaginable horrors. How often in the train does one come across half-educated louts gesticulating and laying down the law on every conceivable point, their arguments, theories and principles all emanating from the halfpenny press. More harm has been done to the cause of progress and good sense in this country by cheap journalism than by any other agency. It is not drink, but the gutter press that gnaws at the very vitals of the commonwealth. It is an appalling thing to think that as anation we prefer to take all our theories and principles at second hand from the sayings of unscrupulous ink-slingers of Grub Street who have never done an honest day's work in their lives, but have just earned their daily bread by obeying the dictates of some foul capitalist who thinks of nothing but filling his own pockets. Politics may be dirty, but there is nothing quite so foul in this country as journalism. Unless we can make boys rise above the pinchbeck claptrap of the cheaper writers we fail entirely to educate them. To pin one's faith to anything but one's own intellect is to fail to make anything of life. I've tried every means in my power of late to rouse my boys to take an interest in their work, to show them the continuity of history, the reason why we read good literature, the reason for exercising the faculties: we must send them out into the world with the critical spirit fully developed, not ready to be gulled by every shibboleth of party politics or mad cry in the market-place of people with axes to grind. We want them to mould other people's opinions, not to take everything ready made—as a sort of reach-me-down suit that they can wear without question. I want them to probe all difficulties and not to rest until they have planted the new Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land of England.
Of all missionary work, this is the most important, to get people to think for themselves, not to have minds like the rows of suburban villas in which they live, each one an exact replica of its neighbour's; dull, correct, unambitious, cramped and futile, but to launch out in experiments, to probe for some underlying purpose in life, to keep on searching for some Holy Grail, to work for the amelioration of mankind and the progress of humanity, not to sit down quietlyunder abuses but sword in hand to set out to destroy the powers of evil. One gets easily worked up to preach the gospel of the nobility of work to boys: the hard part of the task is to rouse them from the appalling apathy and listlessness which characterize them. They are used to being shouted at and preached to—they don't take the trouble to listen to one quarter of what one says. They can understand punishment, but they have very little use for a mere appeal to their better nature, their reason or their emotion.
Every night at 6.30 I have a voluntary class for Shakespeare lovers. We run through play after play, and those who come on the whole gain a great deal. The difficulty is to get them to come. The great majority of them prefer to go over to the gym. or to laze about in their studies. They don't realize at all that I have to eat my dinner in five instead of thirty minutes in order to give them this time. They look on me as a sort of Shakespeare fanatic and come only when there is nothing else to do. They have no idea that Shakespeare has something very definite to say to them, some principle of life to disclose for their benefit, if only they will do their part. They all think that there is some royal road to learning by which all virtue can be achieved without ardour, energy or suffering. If they could only hear the complaints of Old Boys who come back and discuss over the fireside their wasted opportunities it would do them a world of good. I try every means I can think of to interest my forms. I lecture on a century of English literature and get each boy to select a subject and make it his own by reading up and writing a paper on his favourite author in that century. These papers are read aloud before the rest of the form,who comment favourably or adversely, and debates are held to try the opinion of the House on the different verdicts formed by each member of the class.
I find my system of entertaining boys to tea a very expensive one. I gave a large party to my formen blocat the end of term: it cost me £2 10s. I shouldn't mind if I were earning a living wage, but £40 a year out of my £150 is docked for a pension scheme in which I take no interest, and Oxford bills still come in and I can never meet them. The holidays, too, eat such a hole into one's salary. I am always "broke" and always in debt. I wish I could learn to save. Some men seem to have put by quite a lot for the inevitable rainy day. I have had one good excursion lately. Our team won the Rapid Firing Competition at Bisley and I was sent down with the team to claim the cast of the Winged Victory which it is our good fortune to have won. I have never seen a more motley crew than the different competitors who went up for prizes.
Tony has got into the Shooting VIII, so I had him with me during this tour, which gave me tremendous joy. I managed to read Edith Wharton's wonderful romance of "Ethan Frome" in the train on the way down and "The Innocence of Father Brown" coming back. I have read the latter book to my form since. They simply gloat over it. It makes admirable material for reproduction: another good idea is to read half of one of the stories and make them finish it in their own words—a sort of Edwin Drood idea. Thank God this term is over: the tiredness of my brain can be guessed by the virulent language of my reports. I had to write several of them over again because the Head objected to my candour.