An air of supreme boredom and lassitude is evident on every face in the room; the very atmosphere and clothing seem to be pervaded with it and invite it.
Suddenly Haxton, now quite pale and obviously shaking, returns: he writes a note quickly. The recipient begs for permission to be excused for a little; he must go to the sanatorium. After carefully burning a lot of incriminating documents in his study he makes his way to the sick-room and feeling really quite unwell is able to induce the nurse (in the absence of the doctor) to admit him.
Meanwhile the class pursues unruffled the even tenor of its way. A bell rings, it is 8.15; early school is over and the pangs of hunger prevail over all other feelings. Breakfast is supervised by unfortunate junior masters, who are supposed to use their eyes to count the 300 boys and to see that they do not cut their loaves on the cloth. Soon afterwards Second School begins, a classical hour; for this there has been half an hour's special preparation after breakfast—a grammar grind—the man to whom they go now being renowned for his strong arm and often stretched-out hand.
The classroom is much the same (they all are) as the one to which I introduced you before breakfast. The master, younger, square-jawed, not intellectual but grim, rather sour: the face is more remarkable for an absence of any virtue than for any special presence of vice. He gives the boys three minutes in which to make sure of their work: then they are all marched out into the middle of the room, asked questions rapidly on the Greek irregular verbs; a boy goes down a place; another supplants him; the whole system is apparently to keep the body moving so that the brain may perhaps capture some motion and become alert; rather does it seem to any rational, unprejudiced bystander a method to involve wasting a maximum amount of time for a minimum amount of actual good. These boys are most certainly no more alert than they were in early school: they do not crib here, or write notes to each other or read Mr. Nat Gould, they are far too frightened for that; they are terrorized like a rabbit in front of a gigantic snake, fascinated, almost loving, certainly admiring the strength of a man who has such power. He is not inhuman either, this master, he has a stock of jokes, each of which is carefully stowed into a particular compartment of his brain, brought out in a particular order and calling for the same amount of quiet laughter every time.
He is very popular among the boys and in existing conditions perhaps deserves to be. When you are being slave-driven, you at least like your driver to be simple, honest and modelled on a plan you can understand: he has to beat you, he is paid for it; if he can afford to throw you a joke, however old and threadbare, yet like a bone thrown to a pariah dog in the street, you relish it all the more, for you know it is more than your due.
This man achieves very excellent results in all examinations: he is known as the best teacher of grammar in the school. He is the "thorough" man who will make his way and become a leading Head Master in the end. He has no sympathy, no intellectual insight, he has been bred on the same plan that he is now inculcating and thinks it the finest system ever devised for the education of boys: in fact the only system. He knows that several ignorant authors, journalists and politicians occasionally decry the results of his teaching, but he is aloof, superior to all these "common cries of curs"; more aristocratic even than Coriolanus, his downfall in the next decade will be as it was with the aristocrats in the French Revolution, really terrible to witness.
It is with a sigh of relief that the Modern Shell hear the bell that rings the close of this hour. Immediately following on this, the form splits up into sets for mathematics, a subject in which they never make much progress for several reasons.
In the first place the set master is a queer man with ideas; he took a low degree in mathematics himself and never knew much about them, but it worries him to find that no boy ever seems to know when to divide, multiply, add or subtract by pure reason.
All the set seem accustomed to see a type on the top of an exercise or on the blackboard and to copy this type feverishly a hundred times, thereby to gain many marks and think they have accomplished something. For the fetish of marks is what makes Modern Shell do any work at all. They have a perfect passion for gaining them and this master panders to it by giving them thousands a day: consequently the set works at lightning speed, but never achieves anything, for none of its members seems capable of reason. Even though geometry is substituted for Euclid they still contrive to learn propositions as a species of very difficult prose repetition: they still believe in and treat algebra and arithmetic as two vastly different subjects which can have no connexion with each other, the mere presence of an "x" in an arithmetic paper frightens them out of their senses. They dabble in stocks and shares, compound proportion, approximation in decimals, quadratic equations, logarithms and progressions, and yet immediately they get out of form and into the tuck-shop they are unable even to count the change they get out of half a crown without a mistake, they cannot measure the simplest article accurately and have no more power of logical reasoning than they had as babies. Consequently when they come to examination time they fail. Given a type they will work out a hundred examples with scarcely a mistake. Asked for the answer of an original sum and they are nonplussed at once and multiply when they should divide, add when they should subtract and vice versa, entirely without method, principle or reason. Yet these fellows work hard enough, not from fear of the master in this case, he scarcely ever punishes, but in order to gain some of the thousand marks over which he is so generous.