He sat with his hands held out supine on the table before him.
“I started my school twenty-seven years ago next Hilary. And it seems like yesterday. When I started it I meant it to be something memorable in schools.... I jumped into it. I thought I should swim about.... It was like jumping into the rapids of Niagara. I was seized, I was rushed along.... Ai! Ai!...”
“Time’s against us all,” said Oswald. “I suppose the next glacial age will overtake us long before we’re ready to fight out our destiny.”
“If you want to feel the generations rushing to waste,” said Mr. Mackinder, “like rapids—like rapids—you must put your heart and life into a private school.”
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
ADOLESCENCE
§ 1
“The generations rushing to waste like rapids—like rapids....”
Ten years later Oswald found himself repeating the words of the little private schoolmaster.
He was in the gravest perplexity. Joan was now nineteen and a half and Peter almost of age, and they had had a violent quarrel. They would not live in the same house together any longer, they declared. Peter had gone back overnight to Cambridge on his motor bicycle; Joan’s was out of order—an embittering addition to her distress—and she had cycled on her push bicycle over the hills that morning to Bishop’s Stortford to catch the Cambridge train. And Oswald was left to think over the situation and all that had led to it.
He sat alone in the May sunshine in the little arbour that overlooked his rose garden at Pelham Ford, trying to grasp all that had happened to these stormy young people since he had so boldly taken the care of their lives into his hands. He found himself trying to retrace the phases of their upbringing, and his thoughts went wide and far over the problem of human training. Suddenly he had discovered his charges adult. Joan had stood before him, amazingly grown up—a woman, young, beautiful, indignant.