the british schoolboy, considered in a genial light by those who have made him their special study, has not been found to be either observant or imaginative. or, rather, it would be well to say that his powers of observation, having been highly specialised within a certain limited tract of thought and experience (bounded mainly by cricket and football), are but faint without these bounds; while it is one of the chiefest works of the system to kill, destroy, smash and bring to nothing any powers of imagination he may have originally possessed. for if this were not done thoroughly, neither a conservative nor a liberal administration would be possible, the house of commons itself would cease to exist, the episcopus (var. anglicanus) would go the way of the great bustard; a “muddling through somehow” (which must have been the brightest jewel in the british crown, wrung from king john by the barons) would become a lost art. and, since all these consequences would be clearly intolerable, the great public schools have perfected a very thorough system of destroying the imaginative toxin, and few cases of failure have been so far reported.
still, there are facts which not even the densest dullards, the most complete boobies, can help seeing; and a good many of the boys found themselves wondering “what was the matter with meyrick” when they saw him at chapel on the sunday morning. the news of his astounding violences both of act and word on the night before had not yet circulated generally. bates was attending to that department, but hadn’t had time to do much so far; and the replies of pelly and rawson to enquiries after black eyes and a potato-like nose were surly and misleading. afterwards, when the tale was told, when bates, having enlarged the incidents to folk-lore size, showed pelly lying in a pool of his own blood, rawson screaming as with the torments of the lost and meyrick rolling out oaths — all original and all terrible — for the space of a quarter of an hour, then indeed the school was satisfied; it was no wonder if meyrick did look a bit queer after the achievement of such an adventure. the funk of aforetime had found courage; the air of rapture was easily understood. it is probable that if, in the nature of things, it had been possible for an english schoolboy to meet st. francis of assisi, the boy would have concluded that the saint must have just made 200 not out in first-class cricket.
but ambrose walked in a strange light; he had been admitted into worlds undreamed of, and from the first brightness of the sun, when he awoke in the morning in his room at the grange, it was the material world about him, the walls of stone and brick, the solid earth, the sky itself, and the people who talked and moved and seemed alive — these were things of vision, unsubstantial shapes, odd and broken illusions of the mind. at half-past seven old toby, the man-of-all-work at the old grange banged at his door and let his clean boots fall with a crash on the boards after the usual fashion. he awoke, sat up in bed, staring about him. but what was this? the four walls covered with a foolish speckled paper, pale blue and pale brown, the white ceiling, the bare boards with the strip of carpet by the bedside: he knew nothing of all this. he was not horrified, because he knew that it was all non-existent, some plastic fantasy that happened to be presented for the moment to his brain. even the big black wooden chest that held his books (parker, despised by horbury, among them) failed to appeal to him with any sense of reality; and the bird’s-eye washstand and chest of drawers, the white water-jug with the blue band, were all frankly phantasmal. it reminded him of a trick he had sometimes played: one chose one’s position carefully, shut an eye and, behold, a mean shed could be made to obscure the view of a mountain! so these walls and appurtenances made an illusory sort of intrusion into the true vision on which he gazed. that yellow washstand rising out of the shining wells of the undying, the speckled walls in the place of the great mysteries, a chest of drawers in the magic garden of roses — it had the air of a queer joke, and he laughed aloud to himself as he realized that he alone knew, that everybody else would say, “that is a white jug with a blue band,” while he, and he only, saw the marvel and glory of the holy cup with its glowing metals, its interlacing myriad lines, its wonderful images, and its hues of the mountain and the stars, of the green wood and the faery sea where, in a sure haven, anchor the ships that are bound for avalon.
for he had a certain faith that he had found the earthly presentation and sacrament of the eternal heavenly mystery.
he smiled again, with the quaint smile of an angel in an old italian picture, as he realized more fully the strangeness of the whole position and the odd humours which would relieve to play a wonderful game of make-believe; the speckled walls, for instance, were not really there, but he was to behave just as if they were solid realities. he would presently rise and go through an odd pantomine of washing and dressing, putting on brilliant boots, and going down to various mumbo-jumbo ceremonies called breakfast, chapel and dinner, in the company of appearances to whom he would accord all the honours due to veritable beings. and this delicious phantasmagoria would go on and on day after day, he alone having the secret; and what a delight it would be to “play up” at rocker! it seemed to him that the solid-seeming earth, the dear old school and rocker itself had all been made to minister to the acuteness of his pleasure; they were the darkness that made the light visible, the matter through which form was manifested. for the moment he enclosed in the most secret place of his soul the true world into which he had been guided; and as he dressed he hummed the favourite school song, “never mind!”
“if the umpire calls ‘out’ at your poor second over,
if none of your hits ever turns out a ‘rover,’
if you fumble your fives and ‘go rot’ over sticker,
if every hound is a little bit quicker;
if you can’t tackle rocker at all, not at all,
and kick at the moon when you try for the ball,
never mind, never mind, never mind — if you fall,
dick falls before rising, tom’s short ere he’s tall,
never mind!
don’t be one of the weakest who go to the wall:
never mind!”
ambrose could not understand how columbus could have blundered so grossly. somehow or other he should have contrived to rid himself of his crew; he should have returned alone, with a dismal tale of failure, and passed the rest of his days as that sad and sorry charlatan who had misled the world with his mad whimsies of a continent beyond the waters of the atlantic. if he had been given wisdom to do this, how great — how wonderful would his joys have been! they would have pointed at him as he paced the streets in his shabby cloak; the boys would have sung songs about him and his madness; the great people would have laughed contemptuously as he went by. and he would have seen in his heart all that vast far world of the west, the rich islands barred by roaring surf, a whole hemisphere of strange regions and strange people; he would have known that he alone possessed the secret of it. but, after all, ambrose knew that his was a greater joy even than this; for the world that he had discovered was not far across the seas, but within him.
pelly stared straight before him in savage silence all through breakfast; he was convinced that mere hazard had guided that crushing blow, and he was meditating schemes of complete and exemplary vengeance. he noticed nothing strange about meyrick, nor would he have cared if he had seen the images of the fairies in his eyes. rawson, on the other hand, was full of genial civility and good fellowship; it was “old chap” and “old fellow” every other word. but he was far from unintelligent, and, as he slyly watched meyrick, he saw that there was something altogether unaccustomed and incomprehensible. unknown lights burned and shone in the eyes, reflections of one knew not what; the expression was altered in some queer way that he could not understand. meyrick had always been a rather ugly, dogged-looking fellow; his black hair and something that was not usual in the set of his features gave him an exotic, almost an oriental appearance; hence a story of rawson’s to the effect that meyrick’s mother was a nigger woman in poor circumstances and of indifferent morality had struck the school as plausible enough.
but now the grimness of the rugged features seemed abolished; the face shone, as it were, with the light of a flame — but a flame of what fire? rawson, who would not have put his observations into such terms, drew his own conclusions readily enough and imparted them to pelly after chapel.
“look here, old chap,” he said, “did you notice young meyrick at breakfast?”
pelly simply blasted meyrick and announced his intention of giving him the worst thrashing he had ever had at an early date.
“don’t you try it on,” said rawson. “i had my eye on him all the time. he didn’t see i was spotting him. he’s cracked; he’s dangerous. i shouldn’t wonder if he were in a strait waistcoat in the county lunatic asylum in a week’s time. my governor had a lot to do with lunatics, and he always says he can tell by the eyes. i’ll swear meyrick is raging mad.”
“oh, rot!” said pelly. “what do you know about it?”
“well, look out, old chap, and don’t say i didn’t give you the tip. of course, you know a maniac is stronger than three ordinary men? the only thing is to get them down and crack their ribs. but you want at least half a dozen men before you can do it.”
“oh, shut up!”
so rawson said no more, remaining quite sure that he had diagnosed ambrose’s symptoms correctly. he waited for the catastrophe with a dreadful joy, wondering whether meyrick would begin by cutting old horbury’s throat with his own razor, or whether he would rather steal into pelly’s room at night and tear him limb from limb, a feat which, as a madman, he could, of course, accomplish with perfect ease. as a matter of fact, neither of these events happened. pelly, a boy of the bulldog breed, smacked ambrose’s face a day or two later before a huge crowd of boys, and received in return such a terrific blow under the left ear that a formal fight in the tom brown manner was out of the question.
pelly reached the ground and stayed there in an unconscious state for some while; and the other boys determined that it would be as well to leave meyrick to himself. he might be cracked but he was undoubtedly a hard hitter. as for pelly, like the sensible fellow that he was, he simply concluded that meyrick was too good for him. he did not quite understand it; he dimly suspected the intrusion of some strange forces, but with such things he had nothing to do. it was a fair knock-out, and there was an end of it.
bates had glanced up as ambrose came into the dining-room on the sunday morning. he saw the shining face, the rapturous eyes, and had silently wondered, recognising the presence of elements which transcended all his calculations.
meanwhile the lupton sunday went on after its customary fashion. at eleven o’clock the chapel was full of boys. there were nearly six hundred of them there, the big ones in frock-coats, with high, pointed collars, which made them look like youthful gladstones. the younger boys wore broad, turn-down collars and had short, square jackets made somewhat in the basque fashion. young and old had their hair cut close to the scalp, and this gave them all a brisk but bullety appearance. the masters, in cassock, gown and hood, occupied the choir stalls. mr. horbury, the high usher, clothed in a flowing surplice, was taking morning prayer, and the head occupied a kind of throne by the altar.
the chapel was not an inspiring building. it was the fourteenth century, certainly, but the fourteenth century translated by 1840, and, it is to be feared, sadly betrayed by the translators. the tracery of the windows was poor and shallow; the mouldings of the piers and arches faulty to a degree; the chancel was absurdly out of proportion, and the pitch-pine benches and stalls had a sticky look. there was a stained-glass window in memory of the old luptonians who fell in the crimea. one wondered what the woman of samaria by the well had to do either with lupton or the crimea. and the colouring was like that used in very common, cheap sweets.
the service went with a rush. the prayers, versicles and responses, and psalms were said, the officiant and the congregation rather pressing than pausing — often, indeed, coming so swiftly to cues that two or three words at the end of one verse or two or three at the beginning of the next would be lost in a confused noise of contending voices. but venite and te deum and benedictus were rattled off to frisky anglicans with great spirit; sometimes the organ tooted, sometimes it bleated gently, like a flock of sheep; now one might have sworn that the music of penny whistles stole on the ear, and again, as the organist coupled up the full organ, using suddenly all the battery of his stops, a gas explosion and a salvation army band seemed to strive against one another. a well-known nobleman who had been to chapel at lupton was heard to say, with reference to this experience: “i am no ritualist, heaven knows — but i confess i like a hearty service.”
but it was, above all, the sermon that has made the chapel a place of many memories. the old boys say — and one supposes that they are in earnest — that the tall, dignified figure of the doctor, standing high above them all, his scarlet hood making a brilliant splash of colour against the dingy, bilious paint of the pale green walls, has been an inspiration to them in all quarters of the globe, in all manner of difficulties and temptations.
one man writes that in the midst of a complicated and dangerous deal on the stock exchange he remembered a sermon of dr. chesson’s called in the printed volume, “fighting the good fight.”
“you have a phrase amongst you which i often hear,” said the head. “that phrase is ‘play the game,’ and i wish to say that, though you know it not; though, it may be, the words are often spoken half in jest; still, they are but your modern, boyish rendering of the old, stirring message which i have just read to you.
“fight the good fight.’ ‘play the game.’ remember the words in the storm and struggle, the anxiety and stress that may be — nay, must be — before you — etc., etc., etc.”
“after the crisis was over,” wrote the stock exchange man, “i was thankful that i had remembered those words.”
“that voice sounding like a trumpet on the battle-field, bidding us all remember that success was the prize of effort and endurance ——” so writes a well-known journalist.
“i remembered what the doctor said to us once about ‘running the race,’” says a young soldier, recounting a narrow escape from a fierce enemy, “so i stuck to my orders.”
ambrose, on that sunday morning, sat in his place, relishing acutely all the savours of the scene, consumed with inward mirth at the thought that this also professed to be a rite of religion. there was an aimless and flighty merriment about the chant to the te deum that made it difficult for him to control his laughter; and when he joined in the hymn “pleasant are thy courts above,” there was an odd choke in his voice that made the boy next to him shuffle uneasily.
but the sermon!
it will be found on page 125 of the lupton sermons. it dealt with the parable of the talents, and showed the boys in what the sin of the man who concealed his talent really consisted.
“i daresay,” said the head, “that many of the older amongst you have wondered what this man’s sin really was. you may have read your greek testaments carefully, and then have tried to form in your minds some analogy to the circumstances of the parable — and it would not surprise me if you were to tell me that you had failed.
“what manner of man was this? i can imagine your saying one to another. i shall not be astonished if you confess that, for you at least, the question seems unanswerable.
“yes; unanswerable to you. for you are english boys, the sons of english gentlemen, to whom the atmosphere of casuistry, of concealment, of subtlety, is unknown; by whom such an atmosphere would be rejected with scorn. you come from homes where there is no shadow, no dark corner which must not be pried into. your relations and your friends are not of those who hide their gifts from the light of day. some of you, perhaps, have had the privilege of listening to the talk of one or other of the great statesmen who guide the doctrines of this vast empire. you will have observed, i am sure, that in the world of politics there is no vain simulation of modesty, no feigned reluctance to speak of worthy achievement. all of you are members of this great community, of which each one of us is so proud, which we think of as the great inspiration and motive force of our lives. here, you will say, there are no hidden talents, for the note of the english public school (thank god for it!) is openness, frankness, healthy emulation; each endeavouring to do his best for the good of all. in our studies and in our games each desires to excel to carry off the prize. we strive for a corruptible crown, thinking that this, after all, is the surest discipline for the crown that is incorruptible. if a man say that he loveth god whom he hath not seen, and love not his brother whom he hath seen! let your light shine before men. be sure that we shall never win heaven by despising earth.
“yet that man hid his talent in a napkin. what does the story mean? what message has it for us to-day?
“i will tell you.
“some years ago during our summer holidays i was on a walking tour in a mountainous district in the north of england. the sky was of a most brilliant blue, the sun poured, as it were, a gospel of gladness on the earth. towards the close of the day i was entering a peaceful and beautiful valley amongst the hills, when three sullen notes of a bell came down the breeze towards me. there was a pause. again the three strokes, and for a third time this dismal summons struck my ears. i walked on in the direction of the sound, wondering whence it came and what it signified; and soon i saw before me a great pile of buildings, surrounded by a gloomy and lofty wall.
“it was a roman catholic monastery. the bell was ringing the angelus, as it is called.
“i obtained admittance to this place and spoke to some of the unhappy monks. i should astonish you if i mentioned the names of some of the deluded men who had immured themselves in this prison-house. it is sufficient to say that among them were a soldier who had won distinction on the battle-field, an artist, a statesman and a physician of no mean repute.
“now do you understand? ah! a day will come — you know, i think, what that day is called — when these poor men will have to answer the question: ‘where is the talent that was given to you?’
“‘where was your sword in the hour of your country’s danger?’
“‘where was your picture, your consecration of your art to the service of morality and humanity, when the doors of the great exhibition were thrown open?’
“‘where was your silver eloquence, your voice of persuasion, when the strife of party was at its fiercest?’
“‘where was your god-given skill in healing when one of royal blood lay fainting on the bed of dire — almost mortal — sickness?’
“and the answer? ‘i laid it up in a napkin.’ and now, etc., etc.”
then the whole six hundred boys sang “o paradise! o paradise!” with a fervour and sincerity that were irresistible. the organ thundered till the bad glass shivered and rattled, and the service was over.
