§ 7
But here Justice demands an interlude.
Before we go on to tell of how Joan and Peter grew up to adolescence in these schools that Oswald—assisted by Aunt Phyllis in the case of Joan—found for them, Mr. Mackinder must have his say, and make the Apology of the Schoolmaster. He made it to Oswald when first Oswald visited him and chose his school out of all the other preparatory schools, to be Peter’s. He appeared as a little brown man with a hedgehog’s nose and much of the hedgehog’s indignant note in his voice. He came, shy and hostile, into the drawing-room in which Oswald awaited him. It was, by the by, the most drawing-room-like drawing-room that Oswald had ever been in; it was as if some one had said to a furniture dealer, “People expect me to have a drawing-room. Please let me have exactly the sort of drawing-room that people expect.” It displayed a grand piano towards the French window, a large standard lamp with an enormous shade, a pale silk sofa, an Ottoman, a big fern in an ornate pot, and water-colours of Venetian lagoons. In the midst of it all stood Mr. Mackinder, in a highly contracted state, mutely radiating an interrogative “Well?”
“I’m looking for a school for my nephew,” said Oswald.
“You want him here?”
“Well— Do you mind if first of all I see something of the school?”
“We’re always open to investigation,” said Mr. Mackinder, bitterly.
“I want to do the very best I can for this boy. I feel very strongly that it’s my duty to him and the country to turn him out—as well as a boy can be turned out.”
Mr. Mackinder nodded his head and continued to listen.
This was something new in private schoolmasters. For the most part they had opened themselves out to Oswald, like sunflowers, like the receptive throats of nestlings. They had embraced and silenced him by the wealth of their assurances.
“I have two little wards,” he said. “A boy and a girl. I want to make all I can of them. They ought to belong to the Elite. The strength of a country—of an empire—depends ultimately almost entirely on its Elite. This empire isn’t overwhelmed with intelligence and most of the talk we hear about the tradition of statesmanship——”
Mr. Mackinder made a short snorting noise through his nose that seemed to indicate his opinion of contemporary statesmanship.
“You see I take this schooling business very solemnly. These upper-class schools, I say, these schools for the sons of prosperous people and scholarship winners, are really Elite-making machines. They really make—or fail to make—the Empire. That makes me go about asking schoolmasters a string of questions. Some of them don’t like my questions. Perhaps they are too elementary. I ask: what is this education of yours up to? What is the design of the whole? What is this preparation of yours for? This is called a Preparatory School. You lay the foundations. What is the design of the building for which these foundations are laid?”
He paused, determined to make Mr. Mackinder say something before he discoursed further.
“It isn’t so simple as that,” was wrung from Mr. Mackinder. “Suppose we just walk round the school. Suppose we just see the sort of place it is and what we are doing here. Then perhaps you’ll be able to see better what we contribute—in the way of making a citizen.”
The inspection was an unusually satisfactory one. White Court was one of the few private schools Oswald had seen that had been built expressly for its purpose. Its class rooms were well lit and well arranged, its little science museum seemed good and well arranged and well provided with diagrams; its gymnasium was businesslike; its wall blackboards unusually abundant and generously used, and everything was tidy. Nevertheless the Catechism for Schoolmasters was not spared. “Now,” said Oswald, “now for the curriculum?”
“We live in the same world with most other English schools,” Mr. Mackinder sulked. “This is a preparatory school.”
“What are called English subjects?”
“Yes.”
“How do you teach geography?”
“With books and maps.”
Oswald spoke of lantern slides and museum visits. The cinema had yet to become an educational possibility.
“I do what I can,” said Mr. Mackinder; “I’m not a millionaire.”
“Do you do classics?”
“We do Latin. Clever boys do a little Greek. In preparation for the public schools.”
“Grammar of course?...”
“What else?...”
“French, German, Latin, Greek, bits of mathematics, botany, geography, bits of history, book-keeping, music lessons, some water-colour painting; it’s very mixed,” said Oswald.
“It’s miscellaneous.”
Mr. Mackinder roused himself to a word of defence: “The boys don’t specialize.”
“But this is a diet of scraps,” said Oswald, reviving one of the most controversial topics of the catechism. “Nothing can be done thoroughly.”
“We are necessarily elementary.”
“It’s rather like the White Knight in Alice in Wonderland packing his luggage for nowhere.”
“We have to teach what is required of us,” said Mr. Mackinder.
“But what is education up to?” asked Oswald.
As Mr. Mackinder offered no answer to that riddle, Oswald went on. “What is Education in England up to, anyhow? In Uganda we knew what we were doing. There was an idea in it. The old native tradition was breaking up. We taught them to count and reckon English fashion, to read and write, we gave them books and the Christian elements, so that they could join on to our civilization and play a part in the great world that was breaking up their little world. We didn’t teach them anything that didn’t serve mind or soul or body. We saw the end of what we were doing. But half this school teaching of yours is like teaching in a dream. You don’t teach the boy what he wants to know and needs to know. You spend half his time on calculations he has no use for, mere formal calculations, and on this dead language stuff——! It’s like trying to graft mummy steak on living flesh. It’s like boiling fossils for soup.”
Mr. Mackinder said nothing.
“And damn it!” said Oswald petulantly; “your school is about as good a school as I’ve seen or am likely to see....
“I had an idea,” he went on, “of just getting the very best out of those two youngsters—the boy especially—of making every hour of his school work a gift of so much power or skill or subtlety, of opening the world to him like a magic book.... The boy’s tugging at the magic covers....”
He stopped short.
“There are no such schools,” said Mr. Mackinder compactly. “This is as good a school as you will find.”
And there he left the matter for the time. But in the evening he dined with Oswald at his hotel, and it may be that iced champagne had something to do with a certain relaxation from his afternoon restraint. Oswald had already arranged about Peter, but he wanted the little man to talk more. So he set him an example. He talked of his own life. He represented it as a life of disappointment and futility. “I envy you your life of steadfast usefulness.” He spoke of his truncated naval career and his disfigurement. Of the years of uncertainty that had followed. He talked of the ambitions and achievements of other men, of the large hopes and ambitions of youth.
“I too,” said Mr. Mackinder, warming for a moment, and then left his sentence unfinished. Oswald continued to generalize....
“All life, I suppose, is disappointment—is anyhow largely disappointment,” said Mr. Mackinder presently.
“We get something done.”
“Five per cent., ten per cent., of what we meant to do.”
The schoolmaster reflected. Oswald refilled his glass for him.
“To begin with I thought, none of these other fellows really know how to run a school. I will, I said, make a nest of Young Paragons. I will take a bunch of boys and get the best out of them, the best possible; watch them, study them, foster them, make a sort of boy so that the White Court brand shall be looked for and recognized....”
He sipped his faintly seething wine and put down the glass.
“Five per cent.,” he said; “ten per cent., perhaps.” He touched his lips with his dinner-napkin. “I have turned out some creditable boys.”
“Did you make any experiments in the subjects you taught?”
“At first. But one of the things we discover in life as we grow past the first flush of beginning, is just how severely we are conditioned. We are conditioned. We seem to be free. And we are in a net. You have criticized my curriculum today pretty severely, Mr. Sydenham. Much that you say is absolutely right. It is wasteful, discursive, ineffective. Yes.... But in my place I doubt if you could have made it much other than it is....
“One or two things I do. Latin grammar here is taught on lines strictly parallel with the English and French and German—that is to say, we teach languages comparatively. It was troublesome to arrange, but it makes a difference mentally. And I take a class in Formal Logic; English teaching is imperfect, expression is slovenly, without that. The boys write English verse. The mathematical teaching too, is as modern as the examining boards will let it be. Small things, perhaps. But you do not know the obstacles.
“Mr. Sydenham, your talk today has reminded me of all the magnificent things I set out to do at White Court, when I sank my capital in building White Court six and twenty years ago. When I found that I couldn’t control the choice of subjects, when I found that in that matter I was ruled by the sort of schools and colleges the boys had to go on to and by the preposterous examinations they would have to pass, then I told myself, ’at least I can cultivate their characters and develop something like a soul in them, instead of crushing out individuality and imagination as most schools do....’
“Well, I think I have a house of clean-minded and cheerful and willing boys, and I think they all tell the truth....”
“I don’t know what I’m to do with the religious teaching of these two youngsters of mine,” said Oswald abruptly. “Practically, they’re Godless.”
Mr. Mackinder did not speak for a little while. Then he said, “It is almost unavoidable, under existing conditions, that the religious teaching in a school should be—formal and orthodox.
“For my own part—I’m liberal,” said Mr. Mackinder, and added, “very liberal. Let me tell you, Mr. Sydenham, exactly how I see things.”
He paused for a moment as if he collected his views.
“If a little boy has grown up in a home, in the sort of home which one might describe as God-fearing, if he has not only heard of God but seen God as a living influence upon the people about him, then—then, I admit, you have something real. He will believe in God. He will know God. God—simply because of the faith about him—will be a knowable reality. God is a faith. In men. Such a boy’s world will fall into shape about the idea of God. He will take God as a matter of course. Such a boy can be religious from childhood—yes.... But there are very few such homes.”
“Less, probably, than there used to be?”
Mr. Mackinder disavowed an answer by a gesture of hands and shoulders. He went on, frowning slightly as he talked. He wanted to say exactly what he thought. “For all other boys, Mr. Sydenham, God, for all practical purposes, does not exist. Their worlds have been made without him; they do not think in terms of him; and if he is to come into their lives at all he must come in from the outside—a discovery, like a mighty rushing wind. By what is called Conversion. At adolescence. Until that happens you must build the soul on pride, on honour, on the decent instincts. It is all you have. And the less they hear about God the better. They will not understand. It will be a cant to them—a kind of indelicacy. The two greatest things in the world have been the most vulgarized. God and sex.... If I had my own way I would have no religious services for my boys at all.”
“Instead of which?”
Mr. Mackinder paused impressively before replying.
“The local curate is preparing two of my elder boys for Confirmation at the present time.”
He gazed gloomily at the tablecloth. “If one could do as one liked!” he said. “If only one could do as one liked!”
But now Oswald was realizing for the first time the eternal tragedy of the teacher, that sower of unseen harvests, that reaper of thistles and the wind, that serf of custom, that subjugated rebel, that feeble, persistent antagonist of the triumphant things that rule him. And behind that immediate tragedy Oswald was now apprehending for the first time something more universally tragic, an incessantly recurring story of high hopes and a grey ending; the story of boys and girls, clean and sweet-minded, growing up into life, and of the victory of world inertia, of custom drift and the tarnishing years.
Mr. Mackinder spoke of his own youth. Quite early in life had come physical humiliations, the realization that his slender and delicate physique debarred him from most active occupations, and his resolve to be of use in some field where his weak and undersized body would be at no great disadvantage. “I made up my mind that teaching should be my religion,” he said.
He told of the difficulties he had encountered in his attempts to get any pedagogic science or training. “This is the most difficult profession in the world,” he said, “and the most important. Yet it is not studied; it has no established practice; it is not endowed. Buildings are endowed and institutions, but not teachers.” And in Great Britain, in the schools of the classes that will own and rule the country, ninety-nine per cent. of the work was done by unskilled workmen, by low-grade, genteel women and young men. In America the teachers were nearly all women. “How can we expect to raise a nation nearly as good as we might do under such a handicap?” He had read and learnt what he could about teaching; he had served for small salaries in schools that seemed living and efficient; finally he had built his own school with his own money. He had had the direst difficulties in getting a staff together. “What can one expect?” he said. “We pay them hardly better than shop assistants—less than bank clerks. You see the relative importance of things in the British mind.” What hope or pride was there to inspire an assistant schoolmaster to do good work?
“I thought I could make a school different from all other schools, and I found I had to make a school like most other fairly good schools. I had to work for what the parents required of me, and the ideas of the parents had been shaped by their schools. I had never dreamt of the immensity of the resistance these would offer to constructive change. In this world there are incessant changes, but most of them are landslides or epidemics.... I tried to get away from stereotyping examinations. I couldn’t. I tried to get away from formal soul-destroying religion. I couldn’t. I tried to get a staff of real assistants. I couldn’t. I had to take what came. I had to be what was required of me....
“One works against time always. Over against the Parents. It is not only the boys one must educate, but the parents—let alone one’s self. The parents demand impossible things. I have been asked for Greek and for book-keeping by double-entry by the same parent. I had—I had to leave the matter—as if I thought such things were possible. After all, the Parent is master. One can’t run a school without boys.”
“You’d get some boys,” said Oswald.
“Not enough. I’m up against time. The school has to pay.”
“Can’t you hold out for a time? Run the school on a handful of oatmeal?”
“It’s running it on an overdraft I don’t fancy. You’re not a married man, Mr. Sydenham, with sons to consider.”
“No,” said Oswald shortly. “But I have these wards. And, after all, there’s not only today but tomorrow. If the world is going wrong for want of education——. If you don’t give it your sons will suffer.”
“Tomorrow, perhaps. But today comes first. I’m up against time. Oh, I’m up against time.”
He sat with his hands held out supine on the table before him.
“I started my school twenty-seven years ago next Hilary. And it seems like yesterday. When I started it I meant it to be something memorable in schools.... I jumped into it. I thought I should swim about.... It was like jumping into the rapids of Niagara. I was seized, I was rushed along.... Ai! Ai!...”
“Time’s against us all,” said Oswald. “I suppose the next glacial age will overtake us long before we’re ready to fight out our destiny.”
“If you want to feel the generations rushing to waste,” said Mr. Mackinder, “like rapids—like rapids—you must put your heart and life into a private school.”