With the end of the first visit to Contrexéville I will end this chapter, for it was the end of a chapter of life, the happiest and most wonderful chapter of all. New gates were opened; but the gate on the fairyland of childhood was shut, and for ever afterwards one could only look through the bars, but never more be a free and lawful citizen of that enchanted country, where life was like a fairy-tale that seemed almost too good to be true, and yet so endlessly long and so infinitely happy that it seemed as if it must last for ever.
CHAPTER V
SCHOOL
I went to school in September 1884. On the 7th of September John came of age, and we had a large party in the house and a banquet for the tenants in the tennis court, at which I had to stand up on a chair and make a speech returning thanks for the younger members of the family. I travelled up to London with my mother and Mr. Walter Durnford, and was given Frank Fairleigh to read in the train, but it was too grown-up for me, and I only pretended to read it. We stayed a night in Charles Street. I was given a brown leather dispatch case with my name stamped on it and a framed photograph of my father and mother and of Membland, and a good stock of writing-paper, and the next afternoon we started for my school, which was near Ascot. I didn’t cry either on leaving Membland or at any moment on the day I was taken to school.
We arrived about tea-time. The school was a red brick building on the top of the hill, north of Ascot Station, and looking towards the station, situated among pine trees. The building is there now and is a girls’ school. We were shown into a drawing-room where the Headmaster and his wife received us with a dreadful geniality. There was a small aquarium in the room with some goldfish in it. The furniture was covered with black-and-yellow cretonne, and there were some low ebony bookcases and a great many knick-knacks. Another parent was there with a small and pale-looking little boy called Arbuthnot, who was the picture of misery, and well he might look miserable, as I saw at a glance that he was wearing a made-up sailor’s tie. Two days later the machinery inside this tie was a valuable asset in another boy’s collection. Conversation was kept up hectically until tea was over. They talked of a common friend, Lady Sarah Spencer. “What a charming woman she is!” said the Headmaster. How sensible he seemed to charm! How impervious to all amenities he revealed himself to be later! Then my mother said good-bye to him, and we were taken upstairs by the matron to see my cubicle, a little room with pitch-pine walls, partitioned off from the next cubicle by a thin wooden partition that did not reach the ceiling, so that you could talk to the boy in the next cubicle. Boys were not allowed to go into each other’s cubicles. We hung my solitary picture up, and my mother interviewed the matron, Mrs. Otway, in her room and gave her a pound as she went away; then we went out into the garden for a moment. My mother said good-bye to me and left me alone. I wandered about the garden, which was not a garden but grass hill leading down to a cricket-field. Half-way down the hill was a gymnasium, and a high wooden erection with steps. I wondered what it was for. The boys had not yet arrived. Two boys presently appeared on the scene; they looked at me, but took no great notice. Then after a little time one of them approached me, holding in his hand a small pebble surrounded with cotton-wool, and asked me if I would like a cuckoo’s egg. I did not know whether I was supposed to pretend that I thought it was a real egg or not. It was so unmistakably a stone. I smiled and said nothing. Presently a Chinese gong sounded somewhere out of doors. The two boys ran into the house. I followed them. On the ground floor of the house there was a large hall with a table running down it, a fireplace at one end, and at the other end an arch opening on to the staircase draped with red curtains with black fleur-de-lys stamped on them. There were windows on one side of the room and a cupboard with books in on the other. This hall was now full of boys talking and laughing. Nobody took the slightest notice of me. They then trooped through a passage into the dining-room, a large room with tables round three sides of it and a small square table in the middle where the Headmaster, his wife, and one of the other masters sat. We sat down. I was placed nearly at the end of the last table. More boys—those of the first division, who were a race apart—came in from another door. Then the Headmaster entered, rapped on his table with a knife, and said grace. We had tea; large thick slabs of bread and butter, with the butter spread very thinly over them.
Soon after tea we went to bed, and I dreamt I was at Membland, and woke up to find I was in a strange place. The boy in the cubicle next to mine was called Hope. He was in the second division. In another cubicle opposite to mine there was a boy in the first division called Worthington. One could talk to them, and they were both of them friendly.
The next morning after breakfast I was placed in the fourth division for Latin and English, and the fourth set for Mathematics and French, and had my first lesson in Mathematics. The first thing the master did was to take a high three-legged stool from a corner and exhibit it to us. It had a very narrow seat. It was a rickety stool. “This,” he said, “is the stool of penitence. I hope none of you will have to stand on it.” Then some figures were written down on the blackboard, and a sum in short division was set, which I at once got wrong. In fact, I couldn’t do it at all. The master came and sat down by my side, and said: “You’re trembling.” So I was. He corrected the mistakes and went on to something else. He was terrifying to look at, I thought, but perhaps not as frightening as he appeared to be. I was a little bit reassured. Later in the day we had a French lesson. To my surprise I saw he knew but little French, and read out the first page of the elementary accidence, pronouncing the French words as though they were English ones.
After luncheon, we played prisoner’s base, and I at once realised that there is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do not play them to enjoy yourselves. Everyone was given two blue cards, and every time you were taken prisoner you lost a card. If you lost both you were kicked by the captain of the side, who said we were a pack of dummies. The first week seemed endlessly long, and acute homesickness pervaded every moment of it. Waking up in the morning was the worst moment. Every night I used to dream I was back at home, every morning the moment of waking up was a sharp bewildering shock. Our voices were tried, and I was put in the chapel choir. The chapel choir had special privileges, but also long half-hours of choir practice.
The masters laughed at me mercilessly for my pronunciation of English. I don’t know what was wrong with it, except that I said yallow, aint for aren’t, and ant for aunt, but I did my best to get out of this as soon as possible. Apart from idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, my voice seemed to them comic, and they used to imitate me by speaking through their noses whenever I said anything. The boys at first entirely ignored one, simply telling one to shut up if one spoke, but the boys in my own division soon became friendly, especially an American boy called Hamilton Fish the third. He was the first man to be killed in the American-Spanish War in Cuba. There was no bullying. One boy, although he was in the first division, was charming, and treated one like a grown-up person. This was Basil Blackwood. Even then he drew pictures which were the delight of his friends. Another boy who was friendly was Niall Campbell. Dreadful legends were told about Winston Churchill, who had been taken away from the school. His naughtiness appeared to have surpassed anything. He had been flogged for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, he had taken the Headmaster’s sacred straw hat from where it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces. His sojourn at this school had been one long feud with authority. The boys did not seem to sympathise with him. Their point of view was conventional and priggish.