He led the way along some whitewashed passages, and across a gravel yard, to a long, low building, from which came the well-known humming hum of many voices, among which a kind of chorus could be distinguished, and from time to time the sharp striking of a cane upon a desk, followed by a penetrating “Hush! hush!”
As the master opened the door, a hot puff of stuffy, unpleasantly close air came out, and the noise ceased as if by magic, though there were about three hundred boys in the long, open-roofed room.
The doctor cast his eye round and saw a crowd of heads, the schoolmaster, and besides these—whitewash. The walls, the ceiling, the beams were all whitewashed. The floor was hearth-stoned, but it seemed to be whitewashed, and even the boys’ faces appeared to have been touched over with a thin solution laid on with the whitewash brush.
Every eye was turned upon the visitor, and the doctor frowned as he looked round at the pallid, wan-looking, inanimate countenances which offered themselves to his view. The boys were not badly fed; they were clean; they were warmly clad; but they looked as if the food they ate did them no good, and was not enjoyed; as if they were too clean; and as if their clothes were not comfortable. Every face seemed to have been squeezed into the same mould, to grow it into one particular make, which was inexpressive, inanimate, and dull, while they all wore the look of being on the high-road to old-manism without having been allowed to stop and play on the way, and be boys.
“Hush! hush!” came from the schoolmaster, and a pin might have been heard to fall.
The boys devoured the doctor with their eyes. He was a stranger. It was something to see, and it was a break in the horrible monotony of their existence. Had they known the object of the visit, a tremendous yell would have arisen, and it would have been formed of two words—“Take me.”
It was considered a model workhouse school, too, one of which the guardians were proud. There was no tyranny, no brutality, but there was endless drill and discipline, and not a scrap of that for which every boy’s heart naturally yearns;—“Home, sweet home.”
No amount of management can make that and deck it with a mother’s love; and it must have been the absence of these elements which made the Coleby boys look like three hundred white-faced small old men.
“Now, let me see, sir,” said the master; “of course the matter will have to be laid before the Board in the usual form, but you will make your selection now. Good light, sir, to choose.”
Mr Hippetts did not mean it unkindly; but he too spoke as if he were busy over some goods he had to sell.