Читать книгу The Dream - H. G. Wells - Страница 11

“And how was this casually begotten infant prepared for the business of life?” asked Radiant. “Was he sent away to a Garden?”

“There were no Children’s Gardens such as we know them, in that world,” said Sarnac. “There was a place of assembly called an elementary school. Thither I was taken, twice daily, by my sister Prudence, after I was six years old.

“And here again I find it hard to convey to you what the reality was like. Our histories tell you of the beginning of general education in that distant time and of the bitter jealousy felt by the old priest-hoods and privileged people for the new sort of teachers, but they give you no real picture of the ill-equipped and understaffed schoolhouses and of the gallant work of the underpaid and ill-trained men and women who did the first rough popular teaching. There was in particular a gaunt dark man with a cough who took the older boys, and a little freckled woman of thirty or so who fought with the lower children, and, I see now, they were holy saints. His name I forget, but the little woman was called Miss Merrick. They had to handle enormous classes, and they did most of their teaching by voice and gesture and chalk upon a blackboard. Their equipment was miserable. The only materials of which there was enough to go round were a stock of dirty reading-books, bibles, hymn-books, and a lot of slabs of slate in frames on which we wrote with slate pencils to economise paper. Drawing materials we had practically none; most of us never learnt to draw. Yes. Lots of sane adults in that old world never learnt to draw even a box. There was nothing to count with in that school and no geometrical models. There were hardly any pictures except a shiny one of Queen Victoria and a sheet of animals, and there were very yellow wall-maps of Europe and Asia twenty years out of date. We learnt the elements of mathematics by recitation. We used to stand in rows, chanting a wonderful chant called our Tables:—

“‘Twi-swun-two.

Twi-stewer four.

Twi-sfree’r six.

Twi-sfour’rate.’

“We used to sing—in unison—religious hymns for the most part. The school had a second-hand piano to guide our howlings. There had been a great fuss in Cliffstone and Cherry Gardens when this piano was bought. They called it a luxury, and pampering the working classes.”

“Pampering the working-classes!” Firefly repeated. “I suppose it’s all right. But I’m rather at sea.”

“I can’t explain everything,” said Sarnac. “The fact remains that England grudged its own children the shabbiest education, and so for the matter of fact did every other country. They saw things differently in those days. They were still in the competitive cave. America, which was a much richer country than England, as wealth went then, had if possible meaner and shabbier schools for her common people...My dear! it was so. I’m telling you a story, not explaining the universe...And naturally, in spite of the strenuous efforts of such valiant souls as Miss Merrick, we children learnt little and we learnt it very badly. Most of my memories of school are memories of boredom. We sat on wooden forms at long, worn, wooden desks, rows and rows of us—I can see again all the little heads in front of me—and far away was Miss Merrick with a pointer trying to interest us in the Rivers of England:—

“Ty. Wear. Teasumber.”

“Is that what they used to call swearing?” asked Willow.

“No. Only Jogriphy. And History was:—

“Wi-yum the Conqueror. Tessisstysiss.

Wi-yum Ruefiss. Ten eighty-seven.”

“What did it mean?”

“To us children? Very much what it means to you—gibberish. The hours, those interminable hours of childhood in school! How they dragged I Did I say I lived a life in my dream? In school I lived eternities. Naturally we sought such amusement as was possible. One thing was to give your next-door neighbour a pinch or a punch and say, ‘Pass it on.’ And we played furtive games with marbles. It is rather amusing to recall that I learnt to count, to add and subtract and so forth, by playing marbles in despite of discipline.”

“But was that the best your Miss Merrick and your saint with the cough could do?” asked Radiant.

“Oh! they couldn’t help themselves. They were in a machine, and there were periodic Inspectors and examinations to see that they kept in it.”

“But,” said Sunray, “that Incantation about ‘Wi-yum the Conqueror’ and the rest of it. It meant something? At the back of it, lost to sight perhaps, there was some rational or semi-rational idea?”

“Perhaps,” reflected Sarnac. “But I never detected it.”

“They called it history,” said Firefly helpfully.

“They did,” Sarnac admitted. “Yes, I think they were trying to interest the children of the land in the doings of the Kings and Queens of England, probably as dull a string of monarchs as the world has ever seen. If they rose to interest at times it was through a certain violence; there was one delightful Henry VIII with such a craving for love and such a tender conscience about the sanctity of marriage that he always murdered one wife before he took another. And there was one Alfred who burnt some cakes—I never knew why. In some way it embarrassed the Danes, his enemies.”

“But was that all the history they taught you?” cried Sunray.

“Queen Elizabeth of England wore a ruff and James the First of England and Scotland kissed his men favourites.”

“But history!”

Sarnac laughed. “It is odd. I see that—now that I am awake again. But indeed that was all they taught us.”

“Did they tell you nothing of the beginnings of life and the ends of life, of its endless delights and possibilities?”

Sarnac shook his head.

“Not at school,” said Starlight, who evidently knew her books; “they did that at church. Sarnac forgets the churches. It was, you must remember, an age of intense religious activity. There were places of worship everywhere. One whole day in every seven was given up to the Destinies of Man and the study of God’s Purpose. The worker ceased from his toil. From end to end of the land the air was full of the sound of church bells and of congregations singing. Wasn’t there a certain beauty in that, Sarnac?”

Sarnac reflected and smiled. “It wasn’t quite like that,” he said. “Our histories, in that matter, need a little revision.”

“But one sees the churches and chapels in the old photographs and cinema pictures. And we still have many of their cathedrals. And some of those are quite beautiful.”

“And they have all had to be shored up and underpinned and tied together with steel,” said Sunray, “because they were either so carelessly or so faithlessly built. And anyhow, these were not built in Sarnac’s time.”

“Mortimer Smith’s time,” Sarnac corrected.

“They were built hundreds of years earlier than that.”