THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL
§ 1

From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s life. Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?” and then with a deepening disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing. She was just letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor woman,” and biding her time. She wrote every now and then to Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done. He answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone. Religion comes later.” Oswald had never returned to England. He had been in Uganda now for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down. She was beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and Peter. He had had blackwater fever again. Perhaps he would never come home any more.

Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel case. She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of 143people marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that prominent socialist. In these she made various definite statements which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist teaching. She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot, of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate children” had evoked no gratitude. Her efforts to have him “thoroughly cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury. All men, she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other. She left the court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier charges. And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.

A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction. She had had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before, had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!” in her hearing. She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed on in England—until there were oysters on the table. Lady Charlotte Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a still less refined craving for Dublin stout. It was an odd secret weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small circle of intimate friends.

“I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte used to say.

“I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady. They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest. “It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to venture.”

“Mm.”

“And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of 144good Guinness, m’lady. It’s a tonic. Run down as you are.”

Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered stout a proper drink for a lady. And indeed it was not a proper drink for Lady Charlotte. A very little stout sufficed to derange her naturally delicate internal chemistry. Upon the internal chemistry of Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended. There is wrath in stout....

Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s Collected Papers of a Stitchwoman (Second Series) and her little precious volume Carmen Naturæ before his client’s notice.

These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte. She had never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s novels More Leaves, Good Words, and The Quiver.

“’With what measure ye mete,’” she read, “’so shall it be meted unto you again,’ and the Standard that Man has fixed for woman recoils now upon his head. Which standard is it to be,—His or Hers? No longer can we fight under two flags. Wild oats, or the Immaculate Banner? Question to be answered shrewdly, and according to whether we deem it is Experience or Escape we live for, now that we are out of Eden footing it among the sturdy, exhilarating thistles. What will ye, my masters?—pallid man unstained, or seasoned woman? Judgment hesitates. Judgment may indeed hesitate. I, who sit here stitching, mark her hesitation, myself—observant. Is it too bold a speculation that presently golden lassies as well as golden lads will sow their wild oats bravely on the slopes of life? Is it too much to dream of that grave mother of a greater world, the Woman of the 145Future, glancing back from the glowing harvest of her life to some tall premonition by the wayside?—her One Wild Oat! the crown and seal of her education!”

“Either she means nothing by that,” said Lady Charlotte, “or she means just sheer depravity. Wild Oat, indeed! Really! To call it that! With Joan on her hands already!”

And here again is a little poem from Carmen Naturæ, which also impressed Lady Charlotte very unfavourably:
THE MATERIALIST SINGS
Put by your tangled Trinities
And let the atoms swing,
The merry magic atoms
That trace out everything.
These ancient gods are fantasies,
Mere Metaphors and Names;
But I can feel the Vortex Ring
Go singing through my veins.
No casket of a pallid ghost,
But all compact of thrills,
My body beats and throbs and lives,
My Mighty Atom wills.

“I don’t know what the world is coming to,” said Lady Charlotte. “In other times a woman who ventured to write such blasphemy would have been Struck Dead....”

“Thrills again!” said Lady Charlotte, turning over the offending pages. “In a book that any one may read. Exposing her thrills to any Bagman who chooses to put down three and sixpence for the pleasure. Imagine it, Unwin!”

Unwin did her best, assuming an earnest expression....

Other contributory influences upon Lady Charlotte’s state of mind were her secret anxiety for the moral welfare of the realm now that Queen Victoria had given place to the notoriously lax Edward VII., and the renascence of sectarian controversies in connexion with Mr. Balfour’s Education Act. Anglicanism was rousing itself for a new struggle to keep hold of the nation’s children, the Cecils and Lord Halifax were ranging wide and free with the educational dragnet, and Lady Charlotte was a part of the great system of 146Anglicanism. The gale that blows the ships home, lifts the leaves.... But far more powerful than any of these causes was the death of a certain Mr. Pybus, who was Unwin’s brother-in-law; he died through an operation undertaken by a plucky rather than highly educated general practitioner, to remove a neglected tumour. This left Unwin’s sister in want of subsidies, and while Unwin lay in bed one night puzzling over this family problem, it occurred to her that if her sister could get some little girl to mind——...
§ 2

Mr. Grimes was very helpful and sympathetic when Lady Charlotte consulted him. He repeated the advice he had given five years ago, that Lady Charlotte should not litigate but act, and so thrust upon the other parties the onus of litigation. She should obtain possession of the two children, put them into suitable schools—“I don’t see how we can put that By-blow into a school,” Lady Charlotte interpolated—and refuse to let the aunts know where they were until they consented to reasonable terms, to the proper religious education of the children, to their proper clothing, and to their separation. “Directly we have the engagement of the Misses Stubland not to disturb the new arrangement,” said Mr. Grimes, “we shall have gained our point. I see no harm in letting the children rejoin their aunts for their holidays.”

“That woman may corrupt them at any time,” said Lady Charlotte.

“On that point we can watch and enquire. Of course, the boy might stay at the school for the holiday times. There is a class of school which caters for that sort of thing. That we can see to later.”...

Mr. Grimes arranged all the details of the abduction of Joan and Peter with much tact and imagination. As a preliminary step he made Lady Charlotte write to Aunt Phœbe expressing her opinion that the time was now ripe to put the education of the children upon a rational footing. They were no longer little children, and it was no longer possible for them to go on as they were going. Peter was born an 147English gentleman, and he ought to go to a good preparatory school for boys forthwith; Joan’s destinies in life were different, but they were certainly destinies for which play-acting, running about with bare feet, and dressing like a little savage could be no sort of training. Lady Charlotte (Mr. Grimes made her say) had been hoping against hope that some suggestion for a change would come from the Misses Stubland. She could not hope against hope for ever. She must therefore request a conference, at which Mr. Grimes could be present, for a discussion of the new arrangements that were now urgently necessary. To this the Misses Stubland replied evasively and carelessly. In their reply Mr. Grimes, without resentment, detected the hand of Mr. Sycamore. They were willing to take part in a conference as soon as Mr. Oswald Sydenham returned. They had reason to believe he was on his way to England now.

Lady Charlotte, still guided by Mr. Grimes, then assumed a more peremptory tone. She declared that in the interests of both children it was impossible for things to go on any longer as they had been going. Already the boy was ten. The plea that nothing could be done until Mr. Sydenham returned was a mere delaying device. The boy ought to go to school forthwith. Lady Charlotte was extremely sorry that the Misses Stubland would not come to any agreement upon this urgent matter. She could not rest content with things in this state, and she would be obliged to consider what her course of action—for the time had come for her to take action—must be.

With the way thus cleared, Mr. Grimes set his forces in motion. “Leave it to me, Lady Charlotte,” he said. “Leave it to me.” A polite young man appeared one morning seated in a chariot of fire outside the road gate of the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. He was in one of those strange and novel portents, a “motor-car.” This alone made him interesting and attractive, and it greatly impressed young Winterbaum to discover that the visitor had come about Joan and Peter. Young Winterbaum went out to scrutinize the motor-car and its driver, and see if there was anything wrong about it. But it was difficult to underestimate.

148“It’s a petrol car,” he said. “Belsize.... Those are fine lamps.”

Miss Murgatroyd gathered that the guardians of Joan and Peter found it necessary to interview the children, and had sent the car to fetch them.

“Miss Stubland said nothing of this when I saw her the day before yesterday,” said Miss Murgatroyd. “We do not care for interruptions in the children’s work.”

The young man explained that the case was urgent. “Lady Charlotte has been called away. And she must see the children before she goes out of England.”

There was something very reassuring about the motor-car. They departed cheerfully to the ill-concealed envy and admiration of young Winterbaum.

The young man had red hair, a white, freckled face, and a costly and remarkable made-up necktie of green plush. The expression of his pale blue eyes was apprehensive, and ever and again he blew. His efforts at conversation were fragmentary and unilluminating. “I got to take you for a long ride,” he said, seating himself between Peter and Joan. “A lovely long ride.”

“Where?” said Joan.

“You’ll see in a bit,” said the young man.

“We going to Chastlands?” asked Peter.

“No,” said the young man.

“Then where are we going?” said Peter.

“These here cars’ll do forty—fifty miles an hour,” said the young man, changing the subject.

In a little while they had passed beyond the limits of Peter’s knowledge altogether, and were upon an unknown road. It was astonishing how the car devoured the road. You saw a corner a long way off and then immediately you were turning this corner. The car went as swiftly up the hills as down. It said “honk.” The trees and hedges flew by as if one was in a train, and behind we trailed a marvellous cloud of dust. The driver sat before us with his head sunken between his hunched-up shoulders; he never seemed to move; he was quite different from the swaying, noble coachman with the sun-red face, wearing a top hat with a 149waist and a broad brim, who sat erect and poised his whip and drove Lady Charlotte’s white horse.
§ 3

For a time the road ran undulating between high hedges and tall trees and through villages, and all along to the right of it were the steep, round-headed Downs. Then came a little town, and the automobile turned off into a valley that cut the Downs across and opened out more and more, and then came heathery common and a town, and then lanes and many villages, flat meadows and flatter, poplars, and then another town with a bridge, and then across long levels of green a glimpse of the big tower of Windsor Castle. “This is Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed,” said the young man suddenly. “And that’s Windsor, where the King lives—when he isn’t living somewhere else, as he usually does.... He’s a ’ot un is the King.... See the chap there sailing a boat?”

They went right into Windsor and had a glimpse of the great gates of the Castle and the round tower very near to them, and then they turned down a steep, narrow, paved street and so came into a district of little mean villas in rows and rows. And outside one of these the car stopped.

“Here we are,” said the young man.

“Where are we?” asked Peter.

“Where we get out,” said the young man. “Time we had a feed.”

“Dinnah,” said Joan, with a bright expression, and prepared to descend.

A small, white-faced, anxious woman appeared at the door. She was wearing amiability as one wears a Sabbath garment. Moreover, she had a greyish-black dress that ended in a dingy, stiff buff frilling at the neck and wrists.

“You Mrs. Pybus?” asked the young man.

“I been expecting you a nour,” said Mrs. Pybus, acquiescing in the name. “Is this the young lady and gentleman?”

That again was a question that needed no answer. The group halted awkwardly on the doorstep for a few seconds. “And this is Miss Joan?” said Mrs. Pybus, with a joyless 150smile. “I didn’t expect you to be ’arf yr’ size. And what a short dress they put you in! You must ’ave regular shot up. Makes you what I call leggy....”

This again was poor as a conversational opening.

“’Ow old might you be, dearie?” asked Mrs. Pybus.

“I’m eight,” said Joan. “But I’ll be nine soon.”

The young man for inscrutable reasons found this funny. He guffawed. “She’s eight,” he said to the world at large; “but she’ll be nine soon. That’s good, that is!”

“If you’re spared, you shud say,” said Mrs. Pybus. “You’re a big eight, any’ow. ’Ow old are you, dear?”

Peter was disliking her quietly with his hands in his pockets. He paused for a moment, doubting whether he would answer to the name of “dear.” “Ten,” he said.

“Just ten?” asked the young man as if alert for humour.

Peter nodded, and the young man was thwarted.

“I suppose you’ll be ready for something to eat,” said Mrs. Pybus. “’Adn’t you better come in?”

They went in.

The room they entered was, perhaps, the most ordinary sort of room in England at that time, but it struck upon the observant minds of Joan and Peter as being strange and remarkable. They had never been before in an ordinary English living-room. It was a small, oblong room with a faint projection towards the street, as if it had attempted to develop a bow window and had lacked the strength to do so. On one side was a fireplace surmounted by a mantelshelf and an “overmantel,” an affair of walnut-wood with a number of patches of looking-glass and small brackets and niches on which were displayed an array of worthless objects made to suggest ornaments, small sham bronzes, shepherdesses, sham Japanese fans, a disjointed German pipe and the like. In the midst of the mantelshelf stood a black marble clock insisting fixedly that the time was half-past seven, and the mantelshelf itself and the fireplace were “draped” with a very cheap figured muslin that one might well have supposed had never been to the wash except for the fact that its pattern was so manifestly washed out. The walls were papered with a florid pink wallpaper, and all the woodwork was painted a dirty brownish-yellow colour and “grained” 151so as to render the detection of dirt impossible. Small as this room was there had been a strenuous and successful attempt to obliterate such floor space as it contained by an accumulation of useless furniture; there were flimsy things called whatnots in two of its corners, there was a bulky veneered mahogany chiffonier opposite the fireplace, and in the window two ferns and a rubber plant in wool-adorned pots died slowly upon a rickety table of bamboo. The walls had been a basis for much decorative activity, partly it would seem to conceal or minimize a mysterious skin disease that affected the wallpaper, but partly also for a mere perverse impulse towards litter. There were weak fret work brackets stuck up for their own sakes and more or less askew, and stouter brackets entrusted with the support of more “ornaments,” small bowls and a tea-pot that valiantly pretended they were things of beauty; there were crossed palm fans, there was a steel engraving of Queen Victoria giving the Bible to a dusky potentate as the secret of England’s greatness; there was “The Soul’s Awakening,” two portraits of George and May, and a large but faded photograph of the sea front at Scarborough in an Oxford frame. A gas “chandelier” descended into the midst of this apartment, betraying a confused ornate disposition in its lines, and the obliteration of the floor space was completed by a number of black horsehair chairs and a large table, now “laid” with a worn and greyish-white cloth for a meal. Such were the homes that the Victorian age had evolved by the million in England, and to such nests did the common mind of the British resort when it wished to meditate upon the problems of its Imperial destiny. Joan and Peter surveyed it open-mouthed.

The table was laid about a cruet as its central fact, a large, metallic edifice surmounted by a ring and bearing weary mustard, spiritless pepper, faded cayenne pepper, vinegar and mysteries in bottles. Joan and Peter were interested in this strange object and at the same time vaguely aware of something missing. What they missed were flowers; on this table there were no flowers. There was a cold joint, a white jug of beer and a glass jug of water, and pickles. “I got cold meat,” said Mrs. Pybus, “not being sure when you were coming.” She arranged her guests. But she did not 152immediately begin. She had had an idea. She regarded Peter.

“Now, Peter,” she said, “let me ’ear you say Grice.”

Peter wondered.

“Say Grice, dearie.”

“Grice,” said Peter.

The young man with the red hair was convulsed with merriment. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s reely Good. Kids are amusing.”

“But I tole you to say Grice,” said Mrs. Pybus, ruffled.

“I said it.”

The young man’s voice squeaked as he explained. “He doesn’t know ’ow to say Grace,” he said. “Never ’eard of it.”

“Is it a catch?” asked Peter.

The young man caught and restrained a fresh outburst of merriment with the back of his hand, and then explained again to Mrs. Pybus.

“’E’s a perfec’ little ’eathen,” said Mrs. Pybus. “I never did. They’ll teach you to say grice all right, my boy, before you’re very much older. Mark my words.” And with a sort of businesslike reverence Mrs. Pybus gabbled her formula. Then she proceeded to carve. As she carved she pursed her lips and frowned.

The cold meat was not bad, but the children ate fastidiously, and Joan, after her fashion, left all her fat. This attracted the attention of Mrs. Pybus. “Eat it up, dearie,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Wiste not, want not.”

“I don’t eat fat.”

“But you must eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus.

Joan shook her head.

“We’ll ’ave to teach you to eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus with a dangerous gentleness. For the time, however, the teaching was not insisted upon. “Lovely bits! Enough to feed a little dog,” said Mrs. Pybus, as she removed Joan’s plate to make way for apple tart.

The conversation was intermittent. It was as if they waited for some further event. The young man with the red hair spoke of the great world of London and the funeral of Lord Salisbury.

153“’E was a great statesman, say what you like,” said the young man with red hair.

He also spoke of Holbein’s attempt to swim the channel.

“They say ’e oils ’imself all over,” said the young man.

“Lor’!” said Mrs. Pybus.

“It can’t be comfortable,” said the young man; “say what you like.”

Presently the young man broke a silence by saying: “These here Balkans seem to be giving trouble again.”

“Troublesome lot they are,” said Mrs. Pybus.

“Greeks and Macedonians and Turks and Bulgarians and such. It fair makes my head spin, the lot of them. Servians there are too, and Montenegroes. Too many of ’em altogether. Cat and dog.”

“Are them the same Greeks that used to be so clever?” asked Mrs. Pybus.

“Used to be,” said the young man with a kind of dark scorn, and suddenly began to pick his teeth with a pin.

“They can’t even speak their own language now—not properly. Fair rotten,” the young man added.

He fascinated Joan. She had never watched anything like him. But Peter just hated him.
§ 4

Upon this scene there presently appeared a new actor. He was preluded by a knocking at the door, he was ushered in by Mrs. Pybus who was opening and shutting her mouth in a state of breathless respect; he was received with the utmost deference by the young man with red hair. Indeed, from the moment when his knocking was heard without, the manner and bearing of the red-haired young man underwent the most marvellous change. An agitated alacrity appeared in his manner; he stood up and moved nervously; by weak, neck-ward movements of his head he seemed to indicate he now regretted wearing such a bright green tie. The newcomer appeared in the doorway. He was a tall, grey-clad, fair gentleman, with a face that twitched and a hand that dandled in front of him. He grinned his teeth at the 154room. “So thassem,” he said, touching his teeth with his thumbnail.

He nodded confidentially to the red-haired young man without removing his eyes from Joan and Peter. He showed still more of his teeth and rattled his thumbnail along them. Then he waved his hand over the table. “Clear all this away,” he said, and sat down in the young man’s chair. Mrs. Pybus cleared away rapidly, assisted abjectly by the young man.

Mr. Grimes seemed to check off the two children. “You’re Joan,” he said. “I needn’t bother about you. You’re provided for. Peter. Peter’s our business.”

He got out a pocket-book and pencil. “Let’s look at you, Peter. Just come out here, will you?”

Peter obeyed reluctantly and suspiciously.

“No stockings. Don’t they wear stockings at that school of yours?”

“Not when we don’t want them,” said Peter. “No.”

“’Mazes me you wear anything,” said Mr. Grimes. “S’pose it’ll come to that. Let’s see your hat.”

“Haven’t got a hat,” said Peter. “Wouldn’t wear it if I had.”

“Wouldn’t you!” said Mr. Grimes. “H’m!”

“Nice little handful,” said Mr. Grimes, and hummed. He produced a paper from the pocket-book and read it, rubbing his teeth with the point of his pencil.

“Lersee whassor outfit we wan’,” said Mr. Grimes. “H’m.... H’m.... H’m....”

He stood up briskly. “Well, young man, we must go out and get you some clothes and things. What’s called a school outfit. We’ll have to go in that motor-car again. Quickest way. Get your hat. But you haven’t got a hat.”

“Me come too,” said Joan.

“No. You can’t come to a tailor’s, and that’s where we’re going. Little girls can’t come to tailors, you know,” said Mr. Grimes.

Peter thought privately that Mr. Grimes was just the sort of beast who would take you to a tailor’s. Well, he would stick it out. This couldn’t go on for ever. He allowed himself to be guided by Mr. Grimes to the door. He 155restrained an impulse to ask to be allowed to sit beside the driver. One doesn’t ask favours of beasts like Grimes.

Joan went to the window to watch the car and Mr. Grimes’ proceedings mistrustfully.

“I got a nice picture-book for you to look at,” said Mrs. Pybus, coming behind her. “Don’t go standing and staring out of the window, dearie. It’s an idle thing to stare out of windows.”

Joan had an unpleasant feeling that she had to comply with this. Under the initiative of Mrs. Pybus she sat up to the table and permitted a large book to be opened in front of her, feigning attention. She kept her eye as much as possible on the window. She was aware of Peter getting into the car with Mr. Grimes. There was a sudden buzzing of machinery, the slam of a door, and the automobile moved and vanished.

She gave a divided attention to the picture-book before her, which was really not properly a picture-book at all but an old bound volume of the Illustrated London News full of wood engravings of royal processions and suchlike desiccated matter. It was a dusty, frowsty volume, damp-stained at the edges. She tried to be amused. But it was very grey and dull, and she felt strangely uneasy. Every few minutes she would look up expecting to see the car back outside, but it did not return....

She heard the red-haired young man in the passage saying he thought he’d have to be getting round to the railway-station, and there was some point explained by Mrs. Pybus at great length and over and over again about the difference between the Great Western and the South Western Railway. The front door slammed after him at last, and Mrs. Pybus was audible returning to her kitchen.

Presently she came and looked at Joan with a thin, unreal smile on her white face.

“Getting on all right with the pretty pictures, dearie?” she asked.

“When’s Peter coming back?” asked Joan.

“Oh, not for a longish bit,” said Mrs. Pybus. “You see, he’s going to school.”

“Can I go to school?”

156“Not ’is school. He’s going to a boy school.”

“Oh!” said Joan, learning for the first time that schools have sexes. “Can I go out in the garden?”

“It isn’t much of a garden,” said Mrs. Pybus. “But what there is you’re welcome.”

It wasn’t much of a garden. Rather it was a yard, into which a lean-to scullery, a coal shed, and a dustbin bit deeply. Along one side was a high fence cutting it off from a similar yard, and against this high fence a few nasturtiums gingered the colour scheme. A clothes-line stretched diagonally across this space and bore a depressed pair of black stockings, and in the corner at the far end a lilac bush was slowly but steadily and successfully wishing itself dead. The opposite corner was devoted to a collection of bottles, the ribs of an umbrella, and a dust-pan that had lost its handle. From beneath this curious rather than pleasing accumulation peeped the skeleton of a “rockery” built of brick clinkers and free from vegetation of any sort. An unseen baby a garden or two away deplored its existence loudly. At intervals a voice that sounded like the voice of an embittered little girl cut across these lamentations:

“Well, you shouldn’t ’ave broke yer bottle,” said the voice, with a note of moral demonstration....

Joan stayed in this garden for exactly three minutes. Then she returned to Mrs. Pybus, who was engaged in some dim operations with a kettle in the kitchen. “Drat this old kitchener!” said Mrs. Pybus, rattling at a damper.

“Want to go ’ome,” Joan said, in a voice that betrayed emotion.

Mrs. Pybus turned her meagre face and surveyed Joan without excessive tenderness.

“This is your ’ome, dearie,” she said.

“I live at Ingle-Nook,” said Joan.

Mrs. Pybus shook her head. “All that’s been done away with,” she said. “Your aunts ’ave give you up, and you’re going to live ’ere for good—’long o’ me.”
§ 5

Meanwhile Mr. Grimes, with a cheerful kindliness that Peter perceived to be assumed, conveyed that young gentleman 157first to an outfitter, where he was subjected to nameless indignities with a tape, and finally sent behind a screen and told to change out of his nice, comfortable old clothes and Heidelberg sandals into a shirt and a collar and a grey flannel suit, and hard black shoes. All of which he did in a mute, helpless rage, because he did not consider himself equal to Mr. Grimes and the outfitter and his staff (with possibly the chauffeur thrown in) in open combat. He was then taken to a hairdresser and severely clipped, which struck him as a more sensible proceeding; the stuff they put on his head was indeed pleasingly aromatic; and then he was bought some foolery of towels and things, and finally a Bible and a prayer-book and a box. With this box he returned to the outfitter’s, and was quite interested in discovering that a pile of things had accumulated on the counter, ties, collars and things, and were to be packed in the box for him forthwith. A junior assistant was doing up his Limpsfield clothes in a separate parcel. So do we put off childish things. That parcel was to go via Mr. Grimes to The Ingle-Nook.

A memory of certain beloved sea stories came into Peter’s head. “This my kit?” he asked Mr. Grimes abruptly.

“You might call it your kit,” said Mr. Grimes.

“Am I going on a battleship?” asked Peter.

Mr. Grimes—and the two outfitting assistants in sympathy—were loudly amused.

“You’re going to High Cross School,” said Mr. Grimes, emerging from his mirth. “Firm treatment. Sound Church training. Unruly boys not objected to.”

“I didn’t know,” said Peter.

They returned to the automobile, and after a mile or so of roads and turnings stopped outside a gaunt brace of drab-coloured semi-detached villas standing back behind a patch of lawn, and having a walled enclosure to the left and an overgrown laurel shrubbery to the right. “Here’s High Cross School,” said Mr. Grimes, a statement that was rendered unnecessary by a conspicuous black and gold board that rose above the walled enclosure. They descended.

“Wonther which ithe houth,” mused Mr. Grimes, consulting his teeth, and then suddenly decided and led Peter towards the right hand of the two associated doors. “This,” 158said Mr. Grimes, as they waited on the doorstep, “is a real school.... No nonsense about it,” said Mr. Grimes.

Peter nodded with affected intelligence.

They were ushered by a slatternly maid-servant into the presence of a baldish man with a white, puffy face and pale grey eyes, who was wearing a university gown and seemed to be expecting them. He was standing before the fireplace in the front parlour, which had a general air of being a study. There were an untidy desk facing the window and bookshelves in the recess on either side of the fireplace. Over the mantel was a tobacco-jar bearing the arms of some college, and reminders of Mr. Mainwearing’s university achievements in the form of a college shield and Cambridge photographs.

“Well,” said Mr. Grimes, “here’s your young man,” and thrust Peter forward.

“So you’ve come to join us?” said Mr. Mainwearing with a sort of clouded amiability.

“Join what?” said Peter.

Mr. Mainwearing raised his eyebrows. “High Cross School,” he said.

“I’m at the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede,” said Peter. “So how can I?”

“No,” said Mr. Grimes; “you’re joining here now.”

“But I can’t go to two schools.”

“Consequently you’re coming to this one,” said Mr. Grimes.

“It’s very sudden,” said Peter.

“What’s this about the School of Saint What’s-his-name?” asked Mr. Mainwearing of Mr. Grimes.

“It’s just a sort of fad school they’ve been sending him to,” Mr. Grimes explained. “We’re altering all that. It’s a girls’ school, and he’s a growing boy. It’s a school where socialism and play-acting are school subjects, and everybody runs about with next to nothing on. So his proper guardians have decided that’s got to stop. And here we are.”

Mr. Mainwearing regarded Peter heavily while this was going on.

“Done any square root yet?” he asked suddenly.

Peter had not.

159“Know the date of Magna Carta?”

Peter did not. “It was under John,” he said.

“I wanted the date,” said Mr. Mainwearing. “What’s the capital of Bulgaria?”

Peter did not know.

“Know any French irregular verbs?”

Peter said he didn’t.

“Got to begin at the beginning,” said Mr. Mainwearing. “Got your outfit?”

“We’ve just seen to that,” said Mr. Grimes. “There’s one or two things I’d like to say to you—”

He glanced at Peter.

Mr. Mainwearing comprehended. He came and laid one hand on Peter. “Time you saw some of your schoolfellows,” he said.

Under his guiding pressure Peter was impelled along a passage, through an archway, across an empty but frowsty schoolroom in which one solitary small boy sat and sobbed grievously, and so by way of another passage to a kind of glass back-door from which steps went down to a large gravelled space, behind the high wall that carried the black and gold board. In the corner were parallel bars. A group of nine or ten boys were standing round these bars; they were all clad in the same sort of grey flannels that Peter was wearing, and they had all started round at the sound of the opening of the door. One shock-headed boy, perhaps a head taller than any of the rest, had a great red mouth beneath a red nose.

“Boys!” shouted Mr. Mainwearing; “here’s a new chum. See that he learns his way about a bit, Probyn.”

“Yessir!” said the shock-headed boy in a loud adult kind of voice.

Mr. Mainwearing gave Peter a shove that started him down the steps towards the playground, and slammed the door behind him.

Most of these boys were bigger than any boys that Peter had ever known before. They looked enormous. He reckoned some must be fifteen or sixteen—quite. They were as big as the biggest Sheldrick girl. Probyn seemed indeed as big as a man; Peter could see right across the playground 160that he had a black smear of moustache. His neck and wrists and elbows stuck out of his clothes.

Peter with his hands in his new-found pockets walked slowly towards these formidable creatures across the stony playground. They regarded him enigmatically. So explorers must feel, who land on a strange beach in the presence of an unknown race of men.
§ 6

“Come on, fathead!” said Probyn as he drew near.

Peter had expected that tone. He affected indifference.

“What’s your name?” asked Probyn.

“Stubland,” said Peter. “You Probyn?”

“Stubland,” said Probyn. “Stubland. What’s your Christian name?”

“Peter. What’s yours?”

Probyn disregarded this counter question markedly. “Simon Peter, eh! Your father got you out of the Bible, I expect. Know anything of cricket, Simon Peter?”

“Not much,” said Simon Peter.

“Can you swim?”

“No.”

“Can you fight?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your father?”

Peter didn’t answer. Instead, he fixed his attention upon a fair-haired boy of about his own size who was standing at the end of the parallel bars. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The fair boy looked at Probyn.

“Damn it!” said Probyn. “I asked you a question, Mr. Simon Peter.”

Peter continued disregardful. “Hasn’t this school got a flagstaff?” he asked generally.

Probyn came closer to him and gripped him by the shoulder. “I asked you a question, Mr. Simon Peter. What is your father?”

It was a question Peter could not answer because for some obscure reason he could not bring himself to say that his 161father was dead. If ever he said that, he knew his father would be dead. But what else could he say of his father? So he seemed to shrink a little and remained mute. “We’ll have to cross-examine you,” said Probyn, and shook him.

The fair boy came in front of Peter. It was clear he had great confidence in Probyn. He had a fat, smooth, round face that Peter disliked.

“Simon Peter,” he said. “Answer up.”

“What is your father?” said Probyn.

“What’s your father?” repeated the fair boy, and then suddenly flicked Peter under the nose with his finger.

But this did at least enable Peter to change the subject. He smote at the fat-faced boy with great vigour and missed him. The fat-faced boy dodged back quickly.

“Hullo!” said Probyn. “Ginger!”

“That chap’s not going to touch my nose,” said Peter. “Anyhow.”

“Touch it when I like,” said the fat-faced boy.

“You won’t.”

“You want to fight?” asked the fat-faced boy, conscious of popular support.

Peter said he wasn’t going to have his nose flicked anyhow.

“Flick it again, Newton,” said Probyn, “and see.”

“I’ll show you in no time,” said Newton.

“Why!—I’d lick you with one hand,” continued Newton.

Peter said nothing. But he regarded his antagonist very intently.

“Skinny little snipe,” said Newton. “Whaddyou think you’d do to me?”

“Hit him, Newton,” said a cadaverous boy with freckles.

“Hit him, Newton. He’s too cocky,” said another. “Flick his silly nose again and see.”

“I’ll hit him ’f’e wants it,” said Newton, and buttoned up his jacket in a preparatory way.

“Hit him, Newton,” other voices urged.

“Let him put up his fists,” said Newton.

“Do that when I please,” said Peter rather faintly.

Newton had seemed at first just about Peter’s size. Now he seemed very much larger. All the boys seemed to have grown larger. They were gathering in a vast circle of doom 162round a minute and friendless Peter. Probyn loomed over him like a figure of fate. Peter wondered whether he need have hit at Newton. It seemed now a very unwise thing indeed to have done. Newton was alternately swaying towards him and swaying away from him, and repeating his demand for Peter to put his hands up. He seemed on the verge of flicking again. He was going to flick. Probyn watched them both critically. Then with a rapid movement of the mind Peter realized that Newton’s face was swaying now well within his range; the moment had come, and desperately, with a great effort and a wide and sweeping movement of the arm, he smote hard at Newton’s cheek. Smack. A good blow. Newton recoiled with an expression of astonishment. “You—swine!” he said.

Two other boys came running across the playground, and voices explained, “New boy.... Fight....”

But curiously enough the fight did not go on. Newton at a slightly greater distance continued to loom threateningly, but did no more than loom. His cheek was very red. “I’ll break your jaw, cutting at me like that,” he said. “You swine!” He used foul and novel terms expressive of rage. He looked at Probyn as if for approval, but Probyn offered none. He continued to threaten, but he did not come within arm’s length again.

“Hit him back, Newton,” several voices urged, but with no success.

“Wait till I start on him,” said Newton.

“Buck up, young Newton,” said Probyn suddenly, “and stop jawing. You began it. I’m not going to help you. Make a ring, you chaps. It’s a fair fight.”

Peter found himself facing Newton in the centre of an interested circle.

Newton was walking crab fashion athwart the circle, swaying with his fists and elbows high. He was now acting a dangerous intentness. “Come on,” he said terribly.

“Hit him, Newton,” said the cadaverous boy. “Don’t wait for him.”

“You started it, Newton,” Probyn insisted. “And he’s hit you fair.”

A loud familiar sound, the clamorous ringing of a bell, 163struck across the suspended drama. “That’s tea,” said Newton eagerly, dropping his fists. “It’s no good starting on him now.”

“You’ll have to fight him later,” said Probyn. “Now he’s hit you.”

“It’s up to you, Newton,” said the cadaverous boy, evidently following Probyn’s lead.

“Cavé. It’s Noser,” said a voice.

There was a little pause.

“Toke!” cried Probyn.

“Toke, Simon Peter,” said the cadaverous boy informingly....

Peter found himself no longer in focus. Every one was moving towards the door whence Peter had descended to the playground, and at this door there now stood a middle-aged man with a large nose and a sly expression, surveying the boys.

Impelled by gregarious instincts, Peter followed the crowd.

He did not like these hostile boys. He did not like this shabby-looking place. He was quite ready to believe that presently he would have to go on fighting Newton. He was not particularly afraid of Newton, but he perceived that Probyn stood behind him. He detested Probyn already. He was afraid of Probyn. Probyn was like a golliwog. He knew by instinct that Probyn was full of disagreeable possibilities for him, and that it would be very hard to get away from Probyn. And what did it all mean? Was he never going back to Limpsfield again?

The bell had had exactly the tone of the tea bell at Miss Murgatroyd’s school. It might have been the same bell. And it had made his heart homesick for the colour and brightness of the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede, and for the friendly garden and familiar rooms of Ingle-Nook. For the first time he realized that he had fallen into this school as an animal falls into a trap, that his world had changed, that home was very far away....

And what had they done to Joan?...

Had he to live here always?...

It struck Mr. Noakley, the assistant master with the large nose, as he watched the boys at tea, that the new boy had a 164face like a doll, but really that face with its set, shining, expressionless eyes was only the mask, the very thin mask, that covered a violent disposition to blubber....

Well, no one was going to see Peter blub. No one was going to hear him blub....

Tonight perhaps in bed.

He had still to realize the publicity of a school dormitory....

He knew he couldn’t box, but he had seen something in Newton’s eyes that made him feel that Newton was not invincible. He would grip his fists in a very knobby way and hit Newton as hard as he could in the face. Oh!—frightfully hard....

Peter was not eating very much. “Bags I your slice of Toke,” said the cadaverous boy.

“Take the beastly stuff,” said Peter.

“Little spoilt mammy coddle,” thought old Nosey Noakley. “We aren’t good enough for him.”
§ 7

So it was that Mr. Grimes, acting for Lady Charlotte, set about the rescue of Joan and Peter from, as she put it, “the freaks, faddists and Hill-Top philosophies of the Surrey hills,” and their restoration to the established sobrieties and decorums of English life. Very naturally this sudden action came as an astonishing blow to the two advanced aunts. At nine o’clock that evening Miss Murgatroyd was called down to see Miss Phyllis Stubland, who had ridden over on her bicycle. “Where are the children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.

“You sent for them,” said Miss Murgatroyd.

“Sent for them!”

“Yes. I remember now. The young man said it was Lady Charlotte Sydenham. Didn’t you know? She is going abroad tomorrow or the next day.”

“Sent for them!” Aunt Phyllis repeated....

Two hours later Aunt Phyllis was telling the terrible news to Mary. Aunt Phœbe was in London for the night to see Mr. Tree play Richard II, and there were no means of communicating with her until the morning. The Ingle-Nook was 165much too Pre-Raphaelite to possess a telephone, and Aunt Phœbe was sleeping at the flat of a friend in Church Row, Hampstead. Next morning a telegram found her still in bed.
“Children kidnapped by Lady Charlotte consult Sycamore Phyllis”

said the telegram.

“No!” cried Aunt Phœbe sharply.

Then as the little servant-maid was on the point of closing the door, “Tell Miss Jepson,” Aunt Phœbe commanded....

Miss Jepson found Aunt Phœbe out of bed and dressing with a rapid casualness. It was manifest that some great crisis had happened. “An outrage upon all women,” said Aunt Phœbe. “I have been outraged.”

“My dear!” said Miss Jepson.

“Read that telegram!” cried Aunt Phœbe, pointing to a small ball of pink paper in the corner of the room.

Miss Jepson went over to the corner with a perplexed expression, and smoothed out the telegram and read it.

“A Bradshaw and a hansom!” Aunt Phœbe was demanding as she moved rapidly about the room from one scattered garment to another. “No breakfast. I can eat nothing. Nothing. I am a tigress. A maddened tigress. Maddened. Beyond endurance. Oh! Can you reach these buttons, dear?”

Miss Jepson hovered about her guest readjusting her costume in accordance with commonplace standards while Aunt Phœbe expressed herself in Sibylline utterances.

“Children dedicated to the future.... Reek of ancient corruptions.... Abomination of desolation.... The nine fifty-three.... Say half an hour.... Remonstrance.... An avenging sword.... The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.”

“Are you going to this Mr. Sycamore?” asked Miss Jepson suddenly.

Aunt Phœbe seemed lost for a time and emerged with, “Good God!—No! This is an occasion when a woman must show she can act as a man. This tries us, Amanda. I will have no man in this. No man at all! Are women to loll in hareems for ever while men act and fight? When little children are assailed?...”

166“Chastlands,” said Aunt Phœbe to the cabman, waving Miss Jepson’s Bradshaw in her hand.

The man looked stupid.

“Oh! Charing Cross,” she cried scornfully. “The rest is beyond you.”

And in the train she startled her sole fellow-traveller and made him get out at the next station by saying suddenly twice over in her loud, clear contralto voice the one word “Action.” She left Miss Jepson’s Bradshaw in the compartment when she got out.

She found Chastlands far gone in packing for Lady Charlotte’s flight abroad. “I demand Lady Charlotte,” she said. She followed up old Cashel as he went to announce her. He heard her coming behind him, but his impression of her was so vivid that he deemed it wiser not to notice this informality. And besides in his dry, thin way he wanted to hear why she demanded Lady Charlotte. He perceived the possibilities of a memorable clash. He was a quiet, contemplative man who hid his humour like a miser’s treasure and lived much upon his memories. Weeks after a thing had happened he would suddenly titter, in bed, or in church, or while he was cleaning his plate. And none were told why he tittered.

For a moment Aunt Phœbe hovered on the landing outside the Chastlands drawing-room.

“I can’t see her,” she heard Lady Charlotte say, with something like a note of terror. “It is impossible.”

“Leave her to me, me Lady,” said a man’s voice.

“Tell her to wait, Cashel,” said Lady Charlotte.

Aunt Phœbe entered, trailing her artistic robes. Before her by the writing-table in the big window stood Lady Charlotte, flounced, bonneted, dressed as if for instant flight. A slender, fair, wincing man in grey stood nearer, his expression agitated but formidable. They had evidently both risen to their feet as Aunt Phœbe entered. Cashel made insincere demonstrations of intervention, but Aunt Phœbe disposed of him with a gesture. A haughty and terrible politeness was in her manner, but she sobbed slightly as she spoke.

“Lady Charlotte,” she said, “where are my wards?”

167“They are my wards,” said Lady Charlotte no less haughtily.

“Excuse me, Lady Charlotte. Permit me,” said Mr. Grimes, with soothing gestures of his lean white hands.

“Please do not intervene,” said Aunt Phœbe.

“Mr. Grimes, madam, is my solicitor,” said Lady Charlotte. “You may go, Cashel.”

Cashel went reluctantly.

Mr. Grimes advanced a step and dandled his hands and smiled ingratiatingly. Italian and Spanish women will stab, he had heard, and fishwives are a violent class. Otherwise he believed all women, however terrible in appearance, to be harmless. This gave him courage.

“Miss Stubland, I believe,” he said. “These young people, young Stubland and his foster-sister to wit, are at present in my charge—under instructions from Lady Charlotte.”

“Where?” asked Aunt Phœbe.

“Our case, Miss Stubland, is that they were not being properly educated in your charge. That is our case. They were receiving no sound moral and religious training, and they were being brought up in—to say the least of it—an eccentric fashion. Our aim in taking them out of your charge is to secure for them a proper ordinary English bringing up.”

“Every word an insult,” panted Aunt Phœbe. “Every word. What have you done with them?”

“Until we are satisfied that you will consent to continue their training on proper lines, Miss Stubland, you can scarcely expect us to put it in your power to annoy these poor children further.”

Mr. Grimes’ face was wincing much more than usual, and these involuntary grimaces affected Aunt Phœbe in her present mood as though they were deliberate insults. He did not allow for this added exasperation.

“Annoy!” cried Aunt Phœbe.

“That is the usual expression. We are perfectly within our rights in refusing you access. Having regard to your manifest determination to upset any proper arrangement.”

“You refuse to let me know where those children are?”

“Unless you can get an order against us.”

168“You mean—go to some old judge?”

Mr. Grimes gesticulated assent. If she chose to phrase it in that way, so much the worse for her application.

“You won’t—— You will go on with this kidnapping?”

“Miss Stubland, we are entirely satisfied with our present course and our present position.”

Lady Charlotte endorsed him with three great nods.

Aunt Phœbe stood aghast.

Mr. Grimes remained quietly triumphant. Lady Charlotte stood quietly triumphant behind him. For a moment it seemed as if Aunt Phœbe had no reply of any sort to make.

Then suddenly she advanced three steps and seized upon Mr. Grimes. One hand gripped his nice grey coat below the collar behind, the other, the looseness of his waistcoat just below the tie. And lifting him up upon his toes Aunt Phœbe shook him.

Mr. Grimes was a lean, spare, ironical man. Aunt Phœbe was a well-developed woman. Yet only by an enormous effort did she break the instinctive barriers that make a man sacred from feminine assault. It was an effort so enormous that when at last it broke down the dam of self-restraint, it came through a boiling flood of physical power. It came through with a sort of instantaneousness. At one moment Mr. Grimes stood before Lady Charlotte’s eyes dominating the scene; at the next he was, as materialists say of the universe, “all vibrations.” He was a rag, he was a scrap of carpet in Aunt Phœbe’s hands. The appetite for shaking seemed to grow in Aunt Phœbe as she shook.

From the moment when Aunt Phœbe gripped him until she had done shaking him nobody except Lady Charlotte made an articulate sound. And all that Lady Charlotte said, before astonishment overcame her, was one loud “Haw!” The face of Mr. Grimes remained set, except for a certain mechanical rattling of the teeth in a wild stare at Aunt Phœbe; Aunt Phœbe’s features bore that earnest calm one may see upon the face of a good woman who washes clothes or kneads bread. Then suddenly it was as if Aunt Phœbe woke up out of a trance.

“You make—you make me forget myself!” said Aunt 169Phœbe with a low sob, and after one last shake relinquished him.

Mr. Grimes gyrated for a moment and came to rest against a massive table. He was still staring at Aunt Phœbe.

For a moment the three people remained breathing heavily and contemplating the outrage. At last Mr. Grimes was able to raise a wavering, pointing finger to gasp, “You have—you have—yes—indeed—forgotten yourself!”

Then, as if he struggled to apprehend the position, “You—you have assaulted me.”

“Let it be—let it be a warning to you,” said Aunt Phœbe.

“That is a threat.”

“Agreed,” panted Aunt Phœbe with spirit, though she had not meant to threaten him at all.

“If you think, madam, that you can assault me with impunity——”

“I shouldn’t have thought it—before I took hold of you. A bag of bones.... Man indeed!” And then very earnestly—“Yes.”

She paused. The pause held all three of them still.

“But why—oh, why!—should I bandy words with such a thing as you?” she asked with a sudden belated recovery of her dignity. “You—”

She sought her word carefully.

“Flibber-gib!”

And forgetting altogether the mission upon which she had come, Aunt Phœbe turned about to make her exit from the scene. It seemed to her, perhaps justly, that it was impossible to continue the parley further. “Legalized scoundrel!” she said over her shoulder, and moved towards the door. In that first tremendous clash of the New Woman and the Terrific Old Lady, it must be admitted that the New Woman carried off, so to speak, the physical honours. Lady Charlotte stood against the fireplace visibly appalled. Only when Aunt Phœbe was already at the door did it occur to Lady Charlotte to ring the bell to have her visitor “shown out.” Her shaking hand could scarcely find the bell handle. For the rest she was ineffective, wasting great opportunities for scorn and dignity. She despised herself for not having a larger, fiercer solicitor. She doubted herself. For the 170first time in her life Lady Charlotte Sydenham doubted herself, and quailed before a new birth of time.

Upon the landing appeared old Cashel, mutely respectful. He showed out Aunt Phœbe in profound silence. He watched her retreating form with affectionate respect, stroking his cheek slowly with two fingers. He closed the door.

He stood as one who seeks to remember. “Flibber-jib,” he said at last very softly, without exultation or disapproval. He simply wanted to have it exactly right. Then he went upstairs to have a long, mild, respectful look at Mr. Grimes, and to ask if he could do anything for him....
§ 8

Aunt Phœbe’s return to The Ingle-Nook blended triumph and perplexity.

“I could never have imagined a man so flimsy,” she said.

“But where are the children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.

“If all men are like him—then masculine ascendancy is an imposture.”

(“Yes, but where are the children?”)

“So a baulked tigress might feel.”

Aunt Phyllis decided to write to Mr. Sycamore.
§ 9

Mr. Mainwearing was the proprietor of a private school for young gentlemen, not by choice but by reason of the weaknesses of his character. It was card-playing more than anything else that had made him an educator. And it was vanity and the want of any sense of proportion that had led to the card-playing.

Mr. Mainwearing’s father had been a severe parent, severe to the pitch of hostility. He had lost his wife early, and he had taken a grudge against his only son, whose looks he did not like. He had sent him to Cambridge with a bitter assurance that he would do no good there; had kept him too short of money to be comfortable, spent most of his property—he was a retired tea-broker—in disappointing and embittering jaunts into vice, and died suddenly, leaving—unwillingly, 171but he had to leave it—about three thousand pounds to his heir. Young Mainwearing had always been short of pocket-money, and for a time he regarded this legacy as limitless wealth; he flashed from dingy obscurity into splendour, got himself coloured shirts and remarkable ties, sought the acquaintance of horses, slipped down to London for music-halls and “life.” When it dawned upon him that even three thousand pounds was not a limitless ocean of money, he attempted to maintain its level by winning more from his fellow undergraduates. Nap and poker were the particular forms of sport he affected. He reckoned that he was, in a quiet way, rather cleverer than most fellows, and that he would win. But he was out in his reckoning. He left Cambridge with a Junior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and a residuum of about seven hundred pounds. He was a careful cricketer, and he had liked football at school in his concluding years when he was big enough to barge into the other chaps. Surveying the prospect before him, he decided that a school was the best place for him, he advertised himself as “of gentlemanly appearance” and “good at games,” and he found his billet in a preparatory school at Brighton. Thence he went to a big grammar school, and thence came to the High Cross School to remain first as assistant, then as son-in-law and partner, and now as sole proprietor. Mrs. Mainwearing was not very useful as a helpmeet, as she was slightly but not offensively defective in her mind; still one must take life as one finds it. She was, at any rate, regular in her habits, and did not interfere with the housekeeper, a worthy, confidence-creating woman, much tipped by the tenderer sort of parent.

Of course Mr. Mainwearing had no special training as a teacher. He had no ideas about education at all. He had no social philosophy. He had never asked why he was alive or what he was up to. Instinct, perhaps, warned him that the answer might be disagreeable. Much less did he inquire what his boys were likely to be up to. And it did not occur to him, it did not occur to any one in those days, to consider that these deficiencies barred him in any way from the preparation of the genteel young for life. He taught as he had been taught; his teachers had done the same; he was 172the last link of a long chain of tradition that had perhaps in the beginning had some element of intention in it as to what was to be made of the pupil. Schools, like religions, tend perpetually to forget what they are for. High Cross School, like numberless schools in Great Britain in those days, had forgotten completely; it was a mysterious fated routine; the underlying idea seemed to be that boys must go to school as puppies have the mange. Certain school books existed, God alone knew why, and the classes were taken through them. It was like reading prayers. Certain examination boards checked this process in a way that Mr. Mainwearing felt reflected upon his honour, and like all fundamentally dishonest people he was inclined to be touchy about his honour. But parents wanted examination results and he had to give in. Preparation for examinations dominated the school; no work was done in the school that did not lead towards an examination paper; if there had been no examinations, no work would have been done at all. But these examinations might have been worse than they were. The examiners were experienced teachers and considerate for their kind. They respected the great routine. The examiners in classics had............