Philip's orthodox education was not neglected. After a year's attendance as a day-boy at the establishment near St. Albans he was sent to Studley, a great public school in the south of England.
Here many things surprised him.
Having spent most of his life in the company of grown men, he anticipated some difficulty in rubbing along with boys of his own age. Master Philip at this period of his career was surprisingly grownup: in fact he was within a dangerously short distance of becoming a prig. But he went to school in time. In three weeks the latent instincts of boyhood had fully developed, and Philip played Rugby football, indulged in unwholesome and clandestine cookery, rioted noisily when he should have been quiescent, and generally tumbled in and out of scrapes as happily and fortuitously as if he had been born into a vigorous family of ten.
He achieved a respectable position for himself among his fellows, but upon a qualification which would have surprised an older generation. The modern schoolboy is essentially a product of the age he lives in, and the gods he worships are constantly adding to their number. Of what does his Pantheon consist? Foremost, of course, comes the athlete. He is a genuine and permanent deity. His worshippers behold him every day, excelling at football and cricket, lifting incredible weights in the dormitory before going to bed, or running a mile in under five minutes. His qualifications are written on his brow, and up he goes to the pinnacle of Olympus, where he endures from age to age. Second comes the boy whose qualifications are equally good, but have to be accepted to a certain extent upon hearsay—the sportsman. A reputed good shot or straight rider to hounds is admitted to Olympus ex officio, and is greatly in request, in the rôle of Sir Oracle, during those interminable discussions—corresponding to the symposia in which those of riper years indulge in clubs and mess-rooms—which invariably arise when the rank and file of the House are assembled round a common-room fire, in the interval, say, between tea and preparation.
There are other and lesser lights. The wag, for instance. The scholar, as such, has no seat in the sun. His turn comes later in life, when the athletes are licking stamps and running errands.
But the Iron Age in which we live has been responsible for a further addition to the scholastic aristocracy—the motor expert. A boy who can claim to have driven a Rolls-Royce at fifty miles an hour is accorded a place above the salt by popular acclamation. No one with any claim to social distinction can afford to admit ignorance upon such matters as high-tension magnetos and rotary valves. The humblest fag can tell at a glance whether a passing vehicle is a Wolseley or a Delaunay Belleville. Science masters, for years a despised—or at the best a tolerated—race, now achieve a degree of popularity and respect hitherto only attainable by Old Blues, because they understand induced currents and the mysteries of internal combustion. Most curious portent of all, a boy in the Lower School, who cannot be trusted to work out a sum in simple arithmetic without perpetrating several gross errors, and to whom physics and chemistry, as such, are a sealed book entitled "Stinks," will solve in his head, readily and correctly, such problems as relate to petrol-mileage or the ratio of gear-wheels, and remedy quite readily and skilfully the ticklish troubles that arise from faulty timing-wheels and short circuits.
It was upon these qualifications that Philip originally obtained admission to the parliament which perennially fugged and argued around the fire on winter evenings. It was true that he had never been fined for exceeding the speed limit in Hyde Park, like Ashley major, nor been run into in the Ripley Road, like Master Crump; but his technical knowledge was very complete for a boy of his age; and being an admirable draughtsman, he could elucidate with paper and pencil mysteries which both he and his audience realised could not be explained by the English language.
In time, too, he became a fair athlete. Cricket he hated, but he developed into a sturdy though clumsy forward at football; and his boxing showed promise. His speciality was the strength of his wrist and forearm. On gala nights, when the prefects had been entertaining a guest at tea,—an old boy or a junior master,—Philip, then a lusty fag rising sixteen, was frequently summoned before the quality, to give his celebrated exhibition of poker-bending.
Having discovered that the boys at Studley were much more grown-up than he had expected, Philip was not altogether surprised to find that some of the masters were incredibly young—not to say childish. There was Mr. Brett, his Housemaster. Mr. Brett was a typical product of a great system—run to seed. British public schools are very rightly the glory of those who understand them, but they are the despair of those who do not. Generally speaking, they produce a type of man with no special propensities and consequently no special fads. He has been educated on stereotyped and uncommercial lines. He is not a specialist in any branch of knowledge. His critics say that he is unfitted for any profession; that he cannot write a business letter; that he is frequently incapable of expressing himself in decent English. But—public-school tradition has taught him to run straight and speak the truth. The fagging system has taught him to obey an order promptly. The prefectorial system has taught him to frame an order and see that it is carried out. Games have taught him to play for his side and not for himself. The management of games has instilled into him the first principles of organisation and responsibility. Taking him all round, he is the very man we want to run a half-educated empire.
Possibly these truths had been known to Mr. Brett in his early days. But, as already stated, his principles had run to seed. In the vegetable world,—of which schoolmasters are dangerously prone to become distinguished members,—whenever judicious watering and pruning are lacking, time operates in one of two ways. A plant either withers and wilts, or it shoots up into a monstrous and unsightly growth. In Mr. Brett's intellectual arboretum every shrub had wilted save two—Classics and cricket. These twain, admirable in moderation, had grown up like mustard trees, and now overshadowed the whole of Mr. Brett's mental outlook. In his House he devoted his ripe scholarship and untiring care exclusively to boys who were likely to do well in the Sixth: his mathematicians and scientists were left to look after themselves. French and German he openly described as "a sop to the parental Cerberus." His Modern-Side boys forgave the slight freely—in fact, they preferred it; and their heavily supervised classical brethren envied them their freedom. But cricket was a different matter. Mr. Brett had probably begun by regarding Classics as the greatest intellectual, and cricket as the greatest moral, stimulus in the schoolboy world—a common, and, on the whole, perfectly tenable, attitude of mind. But by the time that Philip came under his charge it is greatly to be feared that he regarded both as nothing more than a means to an end—Classics as an avenue to Scholarships and House advertisement, cricket as an admirable instrument wherewith to lacerate the feelings of other Housemasters.