Chapter Thirteen.
Pray remember the fifth of November—Rumours of wars—Preceded by scholastic elocution, and succeeded by a cold dinner, darkness, and determination.
I shall now draw the dolorous recital of what I have termed my epoch of despondency to a close. The fifth of November was approaching; I had been at school nearly two years, and had learned little but the hard lesson “to bear,” and that I had well studied. I had, as yet, made no friends. Boys are very tyrannical and very generous by fits. They will bully and oppress the outcast of a school, because it is the fashion to bully and oppress him—but they will equally magnify their hero, and are sensitively alive to admiration of feats of daring and wild exploit. With them, bravery is the first virtue, generosity the second. They crouch under the strong for protection, and they court the lavish from self-interest. In all this they differ from men in nothing but that they act more undisguisedly. Well, the fifth of November was fast approaching, on which I was to commence the enthusiastic epoch of my schoolboy existence. I was now twelve years of age. Almost insensible to bodily pain by frequent magisterial and social thrashings, tall, strong of my age, reckless, and fearless. The scene of my first exploit was to be amidst the excitement of a “barring out,” but of such a “barring out” that the memory of it remains in the vicinity in which it took place to this day.
I have before said that the school contained never less than two hundred and fifty pupils—sometimes it amounted to nearly three hundred. At the time of which I am about to speak, it was very full, containing, among others, many young men. The times are no more when persons of nineteen and twenty suffered themselves to be horsed, and took their one and two dozen with edification and humility. At this age we now cultivate moustaches, talk of our Joe Mantons, send a friend to demand an explanation, and all that sort of thing. Oh! times are much improved! However, at that period, the birch was no visionary terror. Infliction or expulsion was the alternative! and as the form of government was a despotism—like all despotisms—it was subject, at intervals, to great convulsions. I am going to describe the greatest under the reign of Root the First.
Mr Root was capricious. Sometimes he wore his own handsome head well powdered; at others, curled without powder; at others, straight, without powder or curls. He was churchwarden; and then, when his head was full of his office, it was also full of flour, and full of ideas of his own consequence and infallibility. On a concert night, and in the ball-room, it was curled, and then it was full of amatory conquests; and, as he was captain in the Cavalry Volunteers, on field days his hair was straight and lank—martial ardour gave him no time to attend to the fripperies of the coxcomb. These are but small particulars, but such are very important in the character of a great man. With his hair curled, he was jocular, even playful; with it lank, he was a great disciplinarian—had military subordination strong in respect—and the birch gyrated freely; but when he was full blown in powder, he was unbearable,—there was then combined all the severity of the soldier and the dogmatism of the pedagogue, with the self-sufficiency and domineering nature of the coxcomb and churchwarden.
On the memorable fifth of November, Mr Root appeared in the school-room, with his hair elaborately powdered.
The little boys trembled. Lads by fifteens and twenties wanted to go out under various pretences. The big boys looked very serious and very resolved. It was twelve o’clock, and some thirty or forty—myself always included—were duly flogged, it being “his custom at the hour of noon.” When the periodical operation was over, at which there was much spargefication of powder from his whitened head, he commanded silence. Even the flagellated boys contrived to hush up their sobs, the shuffling of feet ceased, those who had colds refrained from blowing their noses; and, after one boy was flogged for coughing, he thus delivered himself:—
“Young gentlemen, it has been customary—customary it has been, I say—for you to have permission to make a bonfire in the lower field, and display your fireworks, on this anniversary of the fifth of November. Little boys, take your dictionaries, and look out for the word ‘anniversary.’”
A bustle for the books, while Mr Root plumes himself, and struts up and down. Two boys fight for the same dictionary; one of them gets a plunge on the nose, which makes him cry out—he is immediately horsed, and flogged for speaking; and, rod in hand, Mr Root continues:—
“Young gentlemen, you know my method—my method is well known to you, I say,—to join amusement with instruction. Now, young gentlemen, the great conflagration—tenth, ninth, and eighth forms, look out the word ‘conflagration’—the great conflagration, I say, made by this pyrotechnic display—seventh, sixth, and fifth forms, turn up the word ‘pyrotechnic.’ Mr Reynolds (the head classical master,) you will particularly oblige me by not taking snuff in that violent way whilst I am speaking, the sniffling is abominable.”
“Turn up the word ‘sniffling,’” cries a voice from the lower end of the school. A great confusion—the culprit remains undiscovered, and some forty, at two suspected desks, are fined three-halfpence apiece. Mr Root continues, with a good deal of indignation:— “I sha’n’t allow the bonfire no more—no, not at all; nor the fireworks neither—no, nothing of no kind of the sort.” All this in his natural voice: then, swelling in dignity and in diction, “but, for the accumulated pile of combustibles, I say—for the combustible pile that you have accumulated, that you may not be deprived of the merit of doing a good action, the materials of which it is composed, that is to say, the logs of wood, and the bavins of furze, with the pole and tar-barrel, shall be sold, and the money put in the poor-box next Sunday, which I, as one of the churchwardens shall hold at the church-porch; for a charity sermon will, on that day, be preached by the Reverend Father in God, the Lord Bishop of Bristol. It is our duty, as Christians, to give eleemosynary aid to the poor;—let all classes but the first and second look out the word ‘eleemosynary.’ I say, to the poor eleemosynary aid should be given. You will also give up all the fire-works that you may have in your play-boxes, for the same laudable purpose. The servant will go round and collect them after dinner. I say, by the servant after dinner they shall all be collected. Moreover, young gentlemen, I have to tell you, that the churchwardens, and the authorities in the town, are determined to put down Guy Faux, and he shall be put down accordingly. So now, young gentlemen, you’d better take your amusements before dinner, for you will have no holiday in the afternoon, and I shall not suffer anyone to go out after tea, for fear of mischief.” Having thus spoken, he dismissed the school, and strode forth majestically.
Oh, reader! can you conceive the dismay, the indignation, and the rage that the Court of Aldermen would display, if, when sitting down hungrily to a civic feast, they were informed that all the eatables and potatories were carried off by a party headed by Mr Scales? Can you conceive the fury that would burn in the countenances of a whole family of lordly sinecurists, at being informed, upon official authority, that henceforth their salaries would be equal to their services? No, all this you cannot conceive; nor turtle-desiring aldermen, nor cate-fed sinecurists, could, under these their supposed tribulations, have approached, in fury and hate, the meekest-spirited boys of Mr Root’s school, when they became fully aware of the extent of the tyrannous robbery about to be perpetrated. Had they not been led on by hope? Had they not trustingly eschewed Banbury-cakes—sidled by longingly the pastrycook’s—and piously withstood the temptation of hard-bake, in order that they might save up their pocket-money for this one grand occasion? and even after this, their hopes and their exertions to end in smoke? Would that it were even that; but it was decided that there should be neither fire nor smoke. Infatuated pedagogue! Unhappy decision!
The boys did not make use of the permission to go out to play. They gathered together unanimously, in earnest knots—rebellion stalked on tip-toe from party to party: the little boys looked big, and the big boys looked bigger, and the young men looked magnificent. The half-boarders whispered their fears to the ushers, the ushers spoke under their breaths to the under-masters, the under-masters had cautious conversation with the head Latin, French, and mathematical tutors, and these poured their misgivings into the ears of the awful Dominus himself; but he only shook his powdered head in derision and disdain.
On that cold, foggy fifth of November, we all sat down to a dinner as cold as the day, and with looks as dark as the atmosphere. Amidst the clatter of knives and forks, the rumour already ran from table to table that a horse and cart was just going to remove the enormous pile of combustibles collected for the bonfire. We had good spirits amongst us. There was an air of calm defiance on a great many. The reason was soon explained, for, before we rose from our repast, huge volumes of red flame rose from the field,—the pile had been fired in twenty places at once, and, at this sight, a simultaneous and irrepressible shout shook the walls of the school-room. The maid-servants who were attending the table, shrieking, each in her peculiar musical note, hurried out in confusion and fear; and there was a rush towards the door by the scholars, and some few got downstairs. However, the masters soon closed the door, and those who had escaped were brought back. The shutters of the windows that looked out upon the fire, were closed; and thus, in the middle of the day, we were reduced to a state almost of twilight.
Every moment expecting actual collision with their pupils, the masters and ushers, about sixteen in number, congregated at the lower end of the room near the door, for the double purpose of supporting each other, and of making a timely escape. The half-suppressed hubbub among three hundred boys, confined in partial darkness, grew stronger each moment; it was like the rumbling beneath the earth, that precedes the earthquake. No one spoke as yet louder than the other—the master-voice had not yet risen. That dulled noise seemed like a far-off humming, and had it not been so intense, and so very human, it might have been compared to the wrath of a myriad of bees confined in the darkness of their hives, with the queen lying dead amongst them.