'There's West, for example,' Peter said, 'he'll never be such a blood again. He hasn't any brains. He couldn't even struggle into the Upper School, but he's a mighty man here. Rather a pity, I think, that life should reach its highest point at nineteen. This ought only to be a beginning.'
That states the case.
CHAPTER XI THE OLD BOY AS SCHOOLMASTER AND PARENT
Fears for the future and regrets for the past are alike forgotten during the last week. There are sad moments, but, as Arnold Lunn remarked, 'there is a world of difference between the pleasant sorrow of sentiment and the more real depression that coincides with an overdraft at the bank.' The last week is passed in a mood that I once heard described as 'happy-sad.' On the last Sunday in chapel the boy who is leaving endeavours to summon the appropriate emotion. He knows how he ought to feel. He has been instructed by so many stories. He is, in a way, an actor in a drama. He knows that the fag on the other side of the aisle is looking at him, is saying to himself: 'This is Jones's last chapel. What is he feeling?' And, like an actor, Jones does not want to disappoint his audience. He feels as he should feel. There is a lump at the back of his throat. But, on the whole, leaving is an exciting experience.
There is the auction of study furniture, when pictures that cost five shillings when they were new, fetch seven and six in their fourth year of service. There are the calls to be paid to masters, the 'good-byes' and 'good lucks.' It is the abdication of office when one is at the height of one's authority. It is a fine gesture that 'immeasurable power, unsated to resign,' to be able to step straight out from the lighted room, before the corroding forces of change have begun to work, and before habit has dulled applause. The exit is made at exactly the right moment. The curtain falls on a dramatic climax. And how rarely that happens.
In a temper of wistful sentimentality and self-satisfaction, arrayed in the colours of the old boys' society, the ex-public school boy leans out of the carriage window, waves good-bye to the friends who are catching a later train, makes and extracts promises to write, and watches as the train moves out of the station the familiar landmarks slip one by one behind him.
A sentimental, that is to say, a superficial emotion passes quickly. And it depends on the kind of life which awaits a boy, whether or not this sentimental regret will be followed by an acute sense of loss.
If he is going up to the university or to some remunerative and interesting employment, it is probable that he will forget school altogether in the fascination of a new life. If, however, he is destined for some dull unromantic post in the city, the thought of school will for a long time wake in him a deep, hopeless nostalgia. He will bring no enthusiasm to his work, and, as he sits at his high desk, balancing ledgers, computing insurance policies, adjusting income-tax returns, he will compare the monotony of his routine with the coloured movement and variety of school. As he walks to his office he will remind himself that at this moment the morning chapel is just ending. The school will be pouring across the courts. If he were there he would be walking arm in arm with some friend of his to the class-room, stopping on the way some intelligent friend to demand the elucidation of certain tiresome theorems. As he returns to the office after lunch he will say to himself: 'If I were there now I should be changing for football. I should have before me the prospect of a hard game and a bath afterwards, and a long, lazy evening in front of the games study fire.' And, at the end of the day, on his return to his home or diggings, he is lonely with the recollection of how often at such a time he has sat in the class-room waiting impatiently for the clock to strike, waiting for the moment of freedom when he can gather his books under his arm and rush back to the house to tea, to the four delightful hours of friendship and discussion that lie in that enchanted period between lock-up and lights out. School life never means so much to a boy as it does during his few months after he has left it. For he sees it transfigured in his imagination; he remembers nothing of the tiresome demands of routine, nothing of the friction between boys and masters, nothing of the long boring hours in form when he watched the patch of sunlight drift across the wall, nothing of the anxieties, the annoyances, the restrictions of a cloistered life. He sees it purged of the accidental, a city of his own fashioning.