§ 2
Joan was rehearsing a special dance in costume and Peter was word-perfect as the White Knight long before Oswald had found even a hopeful school for either of them. He clung for some time to the delusion that there must exist somewhere a school that would exactly meet Peter’s natural and reasonable demand for an establishment where one would learn about “guns and animals, mountains, machines and foreign people,” that would give lessons about “the insides of animals” and “how engines work” and “all that sort of thing.” The man wanted a school kept by Leonardo da Vinci. When he found a curriculum singularly bare of these vital matters, he began to ask questions.
His questions presently developed into a very tiresome and trying Catechism for Schoolmasters. He did not allow for the fact that most private schoolmasters in England were rather overworked and rather under-exercised men with considerable financial worries. Indeed, he made allowances for no one. He wanted to get on with the education of Joan and Peter—and more particularly of Peter.
His Catechism varied considerably in detail, but always it ran upon the lines of the following questions.
“What sort of boy are you trying to make?”
“How will he differ from an uneducated boy?”
“I don’t mean in manners, I mean how will he differ in imagination?”
“Yes—I said—imagination.”
“Don’t you know that education is building up an imagination? I thought everybody knew that.”
“Then what is education doing?”
Here usually the Catechized would become troublesome and the Catechist short and rude. The Catechism would be not so much continued as resumed after incivilities and a silence.
“What sort of curriculum is my ward to go through?”
“Why is he to do Latin?”
“Why is he to do Greek?”
“Is he going to read or write or speak these languages?”
“Then what is the strange and peculiar benefit of them?”
“What will my ward know about Africa when you have done with him?”
“What will he know about India? Are there any Indian boys here?”
“What will he know about Garibaldi and Italy? About engineering? About Darwin?”
“Will he be able to write good English?”
“Do your boys do much German? Russian? Spanish or Hindustani?”
“Will he know anything about the way the Royal Exchange affects the Empire? But why shouldn’t he understand the elementary facts of finance and currency? Why shouldn’t every citizen understand what a pound sterling really means? All our everyday life depends on that. What do you teach about Socialism? Nothing! Did you say Nothing? But he may be a member of Parliament some day. Anyhow he’ll be a voter.”
“But if you can’t teach him everything why not leave out these damned classics of yours?”...
The record of an irritable man seeking the impossible is not to be dwelt upon too closely. During his search for the boys’ school that has yet to exist, Oswald gave way to some unhappy impulses; he made himself distressing and exasperating to quite a number of people. From the first his attitude to scholastic agents was hostile and uncharitable. His appearance made them nervous and defensive from the outset, more particularly the fierce cocking of his hat and the red intensity of his eye. He came in like an accusation rather than an application.
“And tell me, are these all the schools there are?” he would ask, sitting with various printed and copygraphed papers in his hand.
“All we can recommend,” the genteel young man in charge would say.
“All you are paid to recommend?” Oswald would ask.
“They are the best schools available,” the genteel young man would fence.
“Bah!” Oswald would say.
A bad opening....
From the ruffled scholastic agents Oswald would go on in a mood that was bound to ruffle the hopeful school proprietor. Indeed some of these interviews became heated so soon and so extravagantly that there was a complete failure to state even the most elementary facts of the case. Lurid misunderstandings blazed. Uganda got perplexingly into the dispute. From one admirable establishment in Eastbourne Oswald retreated with its principal calling after him from his dignified portico, “I wouldn’t take the little nigger at any price.”
When his doctor saw him after this last encounter he told him; “You are not getting on as well as you ought to do. You are running about too much. You ought to be resting completely.”
So Oswald took a week’s rest from school visiting before he tried again.