There is no other criterion for a boy's worthiness, or unworthiness, as a member of a house, and the half-bloods consider that a very big responsibility has descended on them. They have to keep the house up to the mark. The big men cannot bother themselves about individuals. But the half-bloods who are, as it were, emissaries between heaven and earth, can investigate closely the behaviour of the coming generation. They can notice who is showing signs of slackness. They individually give themselves enormous airs. They form a sort of improvement society.
I remember that, in the course of one term, our house lost every challenge cup that it had possessed. This was considered a disgrace. And several of us decided that it was for us to reform the house. We did not consider ourselves to stand in any need of improvement. But we used to wander round the studies between tea and hall inquisitioning fags and scholars, asking them what use they thought they were to house or school, and informing them that they would be well advised to make more strenuous efforts. It was, I suppose, a form of bullying; or rather perhaps an aid to vanity. What we really needed was for some one to kick us hard. No one did, however. It seemed to occur to no one else, any more than it did to us, that there were objects of a public school education other than the acquiring of caps and cups. You might as well expect an Indian priest to doubt the omnipotence of Buddha.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] The proofs of this book were corrected in April. Should anything unforeseen change during the cricket season, before its appearance, I can only plead the fallibility of the prophet.
CHAPTER VI THE TRUE ETHICS OF CRIBBING
The boy who thus exhausts in ragging the residue of energy that the football field allows him, has, it follows, to be careful not to burn the candle at both ends. He has to spare himself, and to spare himself he abandons the spasmodic cribbing of his first year's summer examination for sustained, systematic methods. Now the true ethics of this subject are as little understood as those relating to any other sphere of public school life. Cribbing is generally regarded as a dishonest practice to which only the ignoble few have regular resort. The habitual cribber is as morally lost as a thief. For what, after all, is cribbing, say our aunts, but the stealing of marks from your companions. 'When you crib,' they tell us, 'and say that you are not stealing, you argue from the standpoint of the housemaid who would return conscientiously the sixpence you have left on your dressing-table, but would not think twice of filling a medicine bottle with your best brandy and handing it over to her young man.' While we are at our Preparatory Schools we are inclined to agree with this. We ourselves would never think of cribbing. At a Preparatory School it is not done. But at a Public School we learn otherwise. To the public school boy cribbing is not dishonest. It is not wrong, because it is not anti-social. There are no doubt somewhere, if we could discover them, fixed immutable standards of righteousness. But we have not found them yet. In the meantime we are content to frame conventions that alter with each generation to safeguard what we consider to be our comfort. We put a thief in prison because we are anxious to protect our property. His actions are anti-social. They are only anti-social, however, because we happen to value our property. We should not object if he took from us what we did not prize. It is thus indeed that the dustman earns his living. And the public school boy does not usually set much greater value on his marks than the housewife on her egg-shells.
I remember reading several years ago a short story that appeared in The Captain. It was about an American who came to an English Public School. On the result of a certain examination depended the position of head boy in the house, and the American broke into the head master's study and extracted the examination paper. The theft was, however, discovered, and the American summoned to the head master's study for an interview that was the certain prelude to expulsion. This fact was made known to him. 'Waal,' he said, 'I guess that's fair. My father often said to me when a big bluff fails, it's down and out for the guy that misses.' The head master was surprised. He appreciated the difference between a big bluff and a piece of calculated deceit. He saw that the American had, because of the atmosphere of business in which he had been brought up, a standard different from his own. The American had honestly believed himself to be attempting 'a big bluff.'
Now, in the world at large, ignorance of the law is no excuse. If it were, law court procedure would be infinitely complex. At school, however, the intention matters more than the result. The means are set before the end. The head master in the story realised that the American's offence was actually far less serious than it appeared, and the American was not expelled.