IV
The Studley masters were not a particularly gregarious body. The Head lived in secluded state with his wife and four daughters in his official residence on the north side of the Close, emerging periodically to overawe the Sixth, preach in Chapel, or discharge a thunderbolt in Big School. The Housemasters dwelt severally in their own strongholds, thanking Heaven that their Houses were not as other Houses were; and the Junior Staff lived roundabout, in cottages and chummeries and snuggeries, throughout Studley Village.
But once a week the whole hierarchy foregathered in the Masters' Common Room and dined together. Usually the Head presided in person; and from the soup to the savoury every soul present talked shop.
Schoolmasters appear to be quite unique in this respect. For three months on end they live in everlasting contact with boys. Sleepy boys confront them in those grisly hours of school which occur before breakfast. Restless and inattentive boys occupy their undivided attention from breakfast until luncheon. In the afternoon they play games with, or watch games played by, energetic and overheated boys. From four o'clock till six they stimulate the flagging energies of boys who are comfortably tired and inclined to be drowsy. In their spare time they lavish individual pains upon backward boys, or castigate sinful boys, or fraternise with friendly boys, or comfort unhappy boys. At the very end of the day they pray with and for all the boys together.
A man who has never been a schoolmaster might be excused for supposing that when this overdriven band desisted from their labours and sat down to their evening meal, they would turn with a sigh of relief to some extraneous and irrelevant topic—politics; literature; sport; scandal, even. But no—they never talk of anything but boys—boys' work, boys' games, boys' pranks, boys' crimes, boys' prospects. They bore one another intensely, these excellent men; for just as no young mother ever desires to hear of or talk about the achievements of any other baby than her own, so no keen cricketing coach will listen with anything but impatience to glowing accounts of his next-door neighbour's protégés. But they never desist. The shop varies, but boy is the only theme.
This weakness is not confined to schoolmasters, of course. All bodies of men of the same calling herded together for protracted periods of time are inclined to the habit, but most of them take elaborate precautions to eradicate it. In military and naval circles, for instance, certain subjects are tabu. Even undergraduates mulct one another in pots of beer if the line be crossed. But schoolmasters are incorrigible. They talk boy and nothing else. The explanation is simple. Boys are the most interesting things in the world.
Studley Senior Common Room was no exception. At the top of the table the Head and his senior colleagues discussed high-school politics—scholarships, roseola, and the latest eccentricity of the Governing Body. About the middle of the table, where housemasters and form-masters were intermingled, a housemaster would explain to a form-master, with studious moderation and paternal solemnity, that owing to the incompetence, prejudice, and spite of the form-master a certain godly and virtuous youth named Jinks tertius was making no progress in his studies, and was, moreover, acutely depressed by the injustice with which he was being borne down. In reply to this the form-master would point out in the most courteous and conciliatory tones, that the said Jinks was an idle young scoundrel, and that until the housemaster abandoned his present short-sighted and officious policy of habitually intervening between Jinks and his deserts,—to wit, the rod,—no further progress could possibly be expected. Why couldn't housemasters back form-masters up a bit? And so on. Lower down the table, three single-minded partisans were hotly disputing as to whether, upon a given date last summer, in a given junior inter-form cricket match, one Maggs (of the Lower Remove) did or did not feloniously give one Baggs (of the Upper Fourth) out leg-before-wicket at the instigation of a muscular bowler named Craggs. The only two persons at the table who were not talking boy were Mr. Chigley and Mr. Cleeve. Mr. Chigley, between mouthfuls, complained bitterly and unceasingly of the food; while Mr. Cleeve remorselessly conducted an inattentive audience, hole by hole, step by step, stroke by stroke, through the intricacies of a battle fought by himself against apparently incredible odds that afternoon—and of a victory snatched away on the last green, seemingly by the sudden and officious intervention of Providence, after what must have been one of the worst and most uninteresting exhibitions of golf ever seen.
Dinner ended, the company dispersed abruptly, summoned back from refreshment to the neverending labours of the schoolmaster, by House-prayers, scholarship coaching, or the necessity of administering justice. Mr. Brett and two other housemasters were invited by the Head to a rubber of bridge.
"By the way," observed the great man as they cut for partners, "you fellows must really see that your boys wear greatcoats on their way up to and down from football. Last Saturday I noticed four or five young idiots, in a most overheated condition, standing about on Big Side watching the Fifteen without so much as a sweater among them. It nearly gave me pneumonia to look at them. You and I, I think, Brett. We have choice of seats."
"I think I will sit away from the fire," said Mr. Brett. "My deal, I think. Will you cut to me, Haydock? Personally, I never permit any boy in my House to go up to the playing-fields without his greatcoat. Hearts!"