“Mobbs” was next called, and his letter was read to him:
“Mobbs’s stepmother,” said Squeers, “took to her bed on hearing that he wouldn’t eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to know, by an early post, where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with his vittles; and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the cow’s-liver broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it. This was told her in the London newspapers—not by Mr. Squeers, for he is too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody—and it has vexed her so much, Mobbs can’t think. She is sorry to find he is discontented, which is sinful and horrid, and hopes Mr. Squeers will flog him into a happier state of mind; with this view, she has also stopped his halfpenny a week pocket-money, and given a double-bladed knife with a corkscrew in it to the missionaries, which she had bought on purpose for him.”
“A sulky state of feeling,” said Squeers, after a terrible pause, during which he had moistened the palm of his right hand again, “won’t do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me!”
Mobbs moved slowly toward the desk, rubbing his eyes in anticipation of good cause for doing so; and he soon afterward retired by the side door, with as good a cause as a boy need have.
There are still school tyrants who talk with philosophic air of flogging children to make them happier, and others who say with hard tones and clenched hands that “the one thing they will not allow in their schools is a sulky boy or girl,” and they mean, when they say so, that if a boy is sulky they take no steps to find out the cause of his disease or the natural remedy for it, but they apply the universal remedy of the old-fashioned quack trainer and whip the poor boy, who is already suffering from some physical or nervous derangement. Squeers and such teachers are brother tyrants. They practise the Squeers’s doctrine—“A sulky state of feeling won’t do. Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me”—to make children cheerful and contented.
One of the most heart-stirring cases in Dotheboys Hall was that of poor Smike. He had been sent to Squeers when an infant. He was a young man now, but he had been starved so that he wore still around his long neck the frill of the collar that loving hands had placed there when he was a little child. Ill treatment and lack of proper food had made him almost an imbecile, and he was the drudge of the institution. Nicholas was attracted by the anxious, longing looks of the boy, as his eyes followed Squeers from place to place on their arrival from London.
He was lame; and as he feigned to be busy in arranging the table, glanced at the letters with a look so keen, and yet so dispirited and hopeless, that Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him.
“What are you bothering about there, Smike?” cried Mrs. Squeers; “let the things alone, can’t you.”
“Eh!” said Squeers, looking up. “Oh! it’s you, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the youth, pressing his hands together, as though to control, by force, the nervous wandering of his fingers; “is there——”