It must not be imagined, however, that this process of see-saw up involves a complete moral, spiritual, and intellectual reformation; it sometimes does; more usually it means that the schoolboy looks at the same life from a different angle. His standards, his scale of values remain unaltered. He feels that he has not adjusted himself properly to their demands. He has been making an ass of himself: he has been ragging about, he has allowed opportunities to slip past him. 'It won't do,' he tells himself. 'I must stop all this. I must settle down.'
Such a resolution involves, to a certain extent, an appreciation of imminent responsibilities; a boy realises that a series of desperate escapades will prejudice his prospects of prefectship; it often results in the exchange of a positive for a negative manner of life. The Sixth Former, the potential scholar of Balliol, is spurred by such an experience to really hard work. For him a turning-point has been reached. It is different, however, for the second eleven colour who has reached the Lower Fifth after three years of spasmodic cribbing. He has been in the past a free-lance, an irresponsible ragster. He decides that the time has come for him to settle down. If the Lower Fifth is, as it often is, a comfortable backwater, he is content to rest there. He sits on a back bench, and plays an occasional part in the life of the form. While he was a ragster he had to work. A well-prepared lesson was his armour. Now that he no longer rags he need no longer work; he is content to be inoffensive, agreeable, somnolent. He considers that between himself and his form master there is an unwritten pact by which each agrees to leave the other alone. It is as though he said: 'Your time, Mr. Featherbrain, is fully occupied between the ragsters and the industrious. You have to keep a constant watch upon the ragster. You have to teach the industrious. That is a whole-time job. Why worry about me? You need not keep a watch upon me. It is agreed that I shall do no ragging. And why try to teach me anything. Your energies are wasted upon me. I don't want to learn anything. You may lead a horse to the water, you know. Why worry yourself and me! There are all those other fellows who want to learn.' And the master, usually, signs the contract. He is a busy man. The temptation is very great. He excuses himself in the common room by speaking of 'fellows like dear old Thomas; good-natured chaps, but with absolutely no brains. Latin and Greek are flung away on them. But they'll make fine empire builders.' And so the boy who has settled down spends the greater part of his day wool-gathering in vacuous laziness. To nothing that happens between chapel and lunch can he bring the least enthusiasm. His thoughts are fixed on the more thrilling encounters of the football field. His whole life, indeed, is centred on sport, and on the most entertaining methods he can discover for the better employing of his spare time. All his energy, all his enthusiasm, is concentrated into one, or perhaps two, focuses. It is not surprising that he should become tolerably proficient at games and a source of moral anxiety to prefects and house masters.
Is the pursuit of athletic success a sufficiently engrossing occupation for such a boy? That is the question that a house master unconsciously puts to himself. He must put it to himself, but his attitude to this particular type of boy is based on a non-committal answer to this question: the answer—'Perhaps; but it's up to you.' The house master, therefore, does all in his power to persuade the boy that the acquiring of a First Fifteen cap is his immediate object in life. He will not state his case in words; but he will omit the uncomfortable topic of form work in conversations, and discuss at length the prospects of the house in the senior matches. If he does not succeed in directing the entire energy of the boy on games, the results of such a failure may be disastrous. A fellow of seventeen who has nothing particular to do is bound to find himself in mischief. This fact is realised by both parents and house masters, and those boys who are good neither at games nor work usually leave at about this period. It is the falling out of the unsuccessful runner in a long race. It is no good going on. The leaders are too far ahead. The gap between the senior and the junior is thus considerably increased. The stepping-stones have been removed. A boy of eighteen at the start of his last year sees very few of his contemporaries sitting at the Sixth Form table. Of the eight or nine boys who came there with him, only three are left, and the Fifth Form table is filled by fellows two or three years junior to himself, with whom he has but a slight acquaintance. It is always the 'blood' who is asked to stop on that extra year. The insignificant are encouraged by silence to retire.
'Thou shalt not kill, yet needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.'
By the time the boy comes to be a prefect he is able to feel himself supreme, not only because of the system that is at his back.