'You have nothing against my son,' he will say. 'During the four years he has been at school he has never been in any serious trouble. He has worked hard and he has played hard. I have always regarded prefectship as the crown of a public school education. I sent my son to you rather than to some other educational establishment because I wished him to have the invaluable experience of being a prefect in a Public School. And now, at the end, when he has reached this position, you say, without giving any reason, that he is not a fit person to occupy it. It is scandalous.'
And even were the head master to endorse his subaltern's verdict, were he to say: 'That is all very true, Mr Evans, but a house master is the best judge of the type of boy that he wants to have as a prefect. I am very sorry, but we must abide by his decision,' the reputation of the school would suffer.
Old boys would discuss the verdict in their clubs.
'That's no school for my son,' they would say. 'Prefectship depends on the caprice of a house master. And, if by the time one gets high in the house, one's told one's got to go—why, if that had happened in my case I know I'd never have become captain of the Eleven. My house master would have got rid of me long before I had got my colours.'
Gray heads would shake seriously over the port; the numbers of the school would sink. Seniority may, now and again, bring most unsuitable persons to authority, but it is a far more satisfactory system than any that would be based on the choice and dislike of one person.
Certainly many unlikely people reach the high-backed chair of the Sixth Form table. And a house master must often wonder how will taste the strange stew that is simmering—a compound of so many unknown ingredients. In spite of experience, he is always guessing. But the changes are less considerable than might be expected, or it would be truer to say, perhaps, that the changes follow a more or less ordinary course.
A boy's attitude on reaching office is ordered by what he has read and by example. The ragster usually becomes a martinet. He has read of the reformation of Prince Hal; the epigram about Kildare ruling all Ireland is the one piece of Elizabethan history that his memory has retained. How nice he feels it will be to surprise every one. What a shock it will be to his old companions. Every one must have said of him: 'Oh, Park'll be all right. He's such a ragster himself, he's sure to go pretty easy!' In his first week, therefore, he canes a quite senior boy for playing the piano too loudly in the changing room. He becomes in a short while extremely unpopular and a general terror. If on the start of the school year one were asked to tell which of the new prefects one would be best advised to avoid, one would almost certainly place one's finger on the boy who had been most frequently in trouble during the previous term.
There is no sign, however, by which we can detect the officious type of prefect who speaks solemnly of his responsibilities and makes life extremely unpleasant for his house and for his old companions. It is impossible to tell on whom this germ is going to settle. It need not be the reformed rake: perhaps because rakes reform so seldom. It is not necessarily the religious boy, or the intellectual boy. But on some one that germ is sure to settle, and it is of all the germs the most annoying.
There is nothing more exasperating than the officious prefect. On the third evening of the term he walks into the study of a former associate, looks confoundedly uncomfortable, seats himself on the table, and then, after a moment's embarrassed silence, permits his features to assume an expression of austere dignity, and says:—
'Jones, you confided in me two terms ago a little secret, you'll remember what it was. Well, I feel that it is my unpleasant duty, now that I am a prefect, to report this matter to the head of the house. He will take what action he thinks fit.'