It need scarcely be said how flat the rest of the term seems after this great day, so eagerly looked forward to, so long in coming, so quickly over when it does arrive.
I think I derived most of my joy from comparing the garb of my colleagues on this day with their ordinary, every-day habiliments.
I suppose no class of men dresses more shabbily than the schoolmaster; as he is so abominably underpaid that is not to be wondered at. What is a matter for comment is the extraordinary costume he dons on gala occasions.
Grey frock-coats with black trousers and a straw hat, dark morning coat with brown boots and a bowler—there is no end to the grotesqueness of the combination of ill-assorted garments. We look like a lot of master grocers tricked out for an annual convention. After all, clothes are not a very important part of life, but it does somehow emphasize our aloofness from the workaday world to appear clad like Rip Van Winkles once a year. Our gaucherie when we are called upon to talk to our visitors would make even a shop-walker wince. We seem to have lost the art of conversation: our tongues are rusty; we have no commonplaces, we cannot even hand round tea or food without falling over one another. We feel all the time that these parents are laughing at our awkwardness, that the girls have labelled us all as old fossils, bloodless, not unlike harmless lunatics: their brothers will certainly not tend to remove that impression when asked.
Altogether I felt ashamed of my profession for the whole of that day. I would willingly forget it.
I have been wondering lately whether I am not wasting such talents as I have at Radchester. I certainly do not want to stay here for ever with no prospect of ever earning more than £300 a year, and yet there is no denying that on the whole I love the place and that I feel an insidious temptation to take root here. Just by way of experiment I have answered a few advertisements to see if I have any chance of getting anything else.
One man wanted me to act as secretary to a firm of motor manufacturers, but that seems to be tame and dull compared with this.
The Board of Education have offered me a post as Junior Inspector of Board Schools in Essex, but I dislike the smell of board schools and constant travelling up and down the county does not appeal to me at all. The most tempting offer has come from India, to take over the job of Professor of English at a native university. I dallied with that idea for some time, but my people were against it, so I reluctantly refused it. The pay was good and the life would certainly be interesting, besides which I should then be able to gratify my desire to travel. The East is always calling me, ever since I first began to read Conrad. But should I find an Illingworth or a Benbow among the natives? I imagine the contingency to be a remote one. On the other hand, I should broaden my mind and come into contact with men and women with ideas as different as possible from those current here.
One result of my tentative efforts to leave has been a sort of restlessness which has made me buy guidebooks to all sorts of places. Illingworth and I had arranged to spend the summer holidays at Chagford, but now that he is gone I am likely to be at a loose end and I don't know where to go. I've thought of the Highlands, the Lakes, Ireland, Cornwall and Wales: I cannot make up my mind. I find that I want a companion and there is no one in Common Room with whom I should care to go.