Aunt Phyllis decided to write to Mr. Sycamore.
§ 9
Mr. Mainwearing was the proprietor of a private school for young gentlemen, not by choice but by reason of the weaknesses of his character. It was card-playing more than anything else that had made him an educator. And it was vanity and the want of any sense of proportion that had led to the card-playing.
Mr. Mainwearing’s father had been a severe parent, severe to the pitch of hostility. He had lost his wife early, and he had taken a grudge against his only son, whose looks he did not like. He had sent him to Cambridge with a bitter assurance that he would do no good there; had kept him too short of money to be comfortable, spent most of his property—he was a retired tea-broker—in disappointing and embittering jaunts into vice, and died suddenly, leaving—unwillingly, but he had to leave it—about three thousand pounds to his heir. Young Mainwearing had always been short of pocket-money, and for a time he regarded this legacy as limitless wealth; he flashed from dingy obscurity into splendour, got himself coloured shirts and remarkable ties, sought the acquaintance of horses, slipped down to London for music-halls and “life.” When it dawned upon him that even three thousand pounds was not a limitless ocean of money, he attempted to maintain its level by winning more from his fellow undergraduates. Nap and poker were the particular forms of sport he affected. He reckoned that he was, in a quiet way, rather cleverer than most fellows, and that he would win. But he was out in his reckoning. He left Cambridge with a Junior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and a residuum of about seven hundred pounds. He was a careful cricketer, and he had liked football at school in his concluding years when he was big enough to barge into the other chaps. Surveying the prospect before him, he decided that a school was the best place for him, he advertised himself as “of gentlemanly appearance” and “good at games,” and he found his billet in a preparatory school at Brighton. Thence he went to a big grammar school, and thence came to the High Cross School to remain first as assistant, then as son-in-law and partner, and now as sole proprietor. Mrs. Mainwearing was not very useful as a helpmeet, as she was slightly but not offensively defective in her mind; still one must take life as one finds it. She was, at any rate, regular in her habits, and did not interfere with the housekeeper, a worthy, confidence-creating woman, much tipped by the tenderer sort of parent.
Of course Mr. Mainwearing had no special training as a teacher. He had no ideas about education at all. He had no social philosophy. He had never asked why he was alive or what he was up to. Instinct, perhaps, warned him that the answer might be disagreeable. Much less did he inquire what his boys were likely to be up to. And it did not occur to him, it did not occur to any one in those days, to consider that these deficiencies barred him in any way from the preparation of the genteel young for life. He taught as he had been taught; his teachers had done the same; he was the last link of a long chain of tradition that had perhaps in the beginning had some element of intention in it as to what was to be made of the pupil. Schools, like religions, tend perpetually to forget what they are for. High Cross School, like numberless schools in Great Britain in those days, had forgotten completely; it was a mysterious fated routine; the underlying idea seemed to be that boys must go to school as puppies have the mange. Certain school books existed, God alone knew why, and the classes were taken through them. It was like reading prayers. Certain examination boards checked this process in a way that Mr. Mainwearing felt reflected upon his honour, and like all fundamentally dishonest people he was inclined to be touchy about his honour. But parents wanted examination results and he had to give in. Preparation for examinations dominated the school; no work was done in the school that did not lead towards an examination paper; if there had been no examinations, no work would have been done at all. But these examinations might have been worse than they were. The examiners were experienced teachers and considerate for their kind. They respected the great routine. The examiners in classics had, at best, Babu Latin and less Greek, and so they knew quite well how to set a paper that would enable the intelligent candidate to conceal an entire incapacity for reading, writing, or speaking a classical language; the examiners in mathematics knew nothing of practical calculations, and treated the subject as a sort of Patience game; the foreign language examiners stuck loyally to the grammar; in drawing the examiners asked you to copy “copies,” they did not, at any rate, require you to draw things; and altogether the “curse of examinations” might have pressed on Mr. Mainwearing harder than it did. Suppose the language papers had been just long passages to translate into and out of English, and that the mathematical test had been all problems, and the drawing test had been a test of drawing anything! What school could have stood the strain?
To assist him in the work of his school Mr. Mainwearing had gathered about him a staff of three. He had found a young man rather of his own social quality, but very timid, a B.A. Cantab. by way of the botanical special; then there was Noakley, a rather older, sly creature, with a large overbalancing nose, who had failed to qualify years ago as an elementary assistant schoolmaster and so had strayed into the uncharted and uncertificated ways of a private school; and finally there was Kahn, an Alsatian, who taught languages and the piano. With these three and the active assistance of Mrs. Rich, the housekeeper, the school maintained its sluggish routines.
The boys slept in two long rooms that had been made by knocking through partitions in the two upper floors, and converted into dormitories by the simple expedient of crowding them with iron bedsteads and small chests of drawers. It was the business of Noakley—who had a separate room on the top floor—to arouse the boys at seven with cries and violence for the business of the day. But there was a tacit understanding between him and the boys not to molest each other until about twenty minutes past.
It was a rule, established by Mr. Mainwearing in a phase of hygienic enthusiasm some years before, that on fine mornings throughout the year the boys should go for a sharp run before breakfast. It was a modern and impressive thing to do and it cost him nothing. It was Noakley’s duty to accompany them on this run. He was unable to imagine any more loathsome duty. So that he had invented a method of supplementing the rains of heaven by means of a private watering-pot. His room was directly above Mr. Mainwearing’s, and Mr. Mainwearing slept with his window shut and his blinds down, and about seven-fifteen or so every morning the curious passer-by might have seen a lean, sly man with an enormous nose, his mouth wide open and his tongue out with effort, leaning far out of an upper bedroom of High Cross School and industriously and carefully watering the window and window-sill of the room two storeys below him. Later, perhaps, a patient observer might have been rewarded by the raising of Mr. Mainwearing’s blind and a glimpse of Mr. Mainwearing, unshaven and in a white cotton nightgown, glancing out at the weather....
So generally the morning began with a tedious, sticky, still sleepy hour called Early Prep. in the schoolroom on the ground floor. It was only during Kahn’s alternate week of morning duty that the run ever occurred. Then it wasn’t a run. It began as a run and settled down as soon as it was out of sight of the school to a sulky walk and a muttered monologue by Kahn in German—he never spoke any language but German before breakfast—about his “magen.”
Noakley’s method in early prep. was to sit as near to the fire as possible in the winter and at the high desk in summer, and to leave the boys alone so long as they left him alone. They conversed in undertones, made and threw paper darts at one another, read forbidden fiction, and so forth. Breakfast at half-past eight released them, and there was a spell of playground before morning school at half-past nine. At half-past nine Mr. Mainwearing and Mr. Smithers, the botanical Cantab, appeared in the world, gowned and a little irritable, and prayers and scripture inaugurated the official day. Mr. Mainwearing’s connexion was a sound Church connexion, and he opened the day with an abbreviated Matins and the collect and lessons for the day. Then the junior half of the school went upstairs to the second class-room with Mr. Smithers, while Mr. Mainwearing dealt tediously with Chronicles or Kings. Meanwhile Kahn and Noakley corrected exercise-books in the third class-room, and waited their time to take up their part in the great task of building up the British imperial mind. By eleven o’clock each of the four class-rooms was thoroughly stuffy and the school was in full swing; Mr. Mainwearing, who could not have translated a new satire by Juvenal to save his life, was “teaching” Greek or Latin or history, Mr. Smithers was setting or explaining exercises on the way to quadratic equations or Euclid Book II., which were the culminating points of High Cross mathematics; Kahn, hoarse with loud anger, was making a personal quarrel of the French class; and Noakley was gently setting the feet of the younger boys astray in geography or arithmetic or parsing. This was the high-water mark of the day’s effort.