Читать книгу Housemaster - Major General John Hay Beith - Страница 8

Table of Contents

MARBLEDOWN is not what is technically known as a Lord’s School. That is to say, when it plays its annual cricket match against its hated rival Eaglescliffe, the contest takes place not in St. John’s Wood, but at Eaglescliffe and Marbledown alternately. Note, however, that when the Lord’s Schools play The Rest at Lord’s in the first week in August, Marbledown and Eaglescliffe are usually well represented.

In other words, Marbledown is a good solid foundation of the old-fashioned type. Two hundred years ago it was, and had been from time immemorial, the ancient Grammar School of a small market town—a single building in the Market Square, wherein a dusty old gentleman in knee-breeches and a wig imparted knowledge and chastisement in about equal proportion to the sturdy and pachydermatous youth of the district.

The years rolled on. Old gentlemen in knee-breeches were succeeded by other gentlemen in nankeen trousers (assisted now by numerous starveling ushers), and still the School prospered. By the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign it had hopelessly outgrown its accommodation. A move further afield was essential, but the School’s endowment was too slight to bear the strain. However, a public-spirited landowner of the district, named Magsworth, head of a leather business in London, who had acquired a vast fortune by supplying boots to Her Majesty’s Forces during the Crimean War—boots locally suspected of having largely been composed of brown paper—suddenly came to the rescue. He presented the School Trustees with a fair tract of land beside the River Marble—one of the lesser known tributaries of the Thames, but a considerable stream for all that—erected the necessary buildings, and threw in one hundred thousand pounds as an endowment fund. Having by this gesture stifled unworthy suspicions regarding the boots (or at any rate salved his own conscience), he departed this life, and the old School building in the Market Square was turned into a public Reading Room and called The Magsworth Institute. That is all about Magsworth.

The School achieved its present shape and constitution in the early seventies, that period of educational awakening and reform all round.

The teaching arrangements had been crying for help for several decades. The Sixth and Fifth had their own classrooms, but the Middle and Lower Schools, comprising no less than four forms of some forty boys each, were all herded together in School Hall, the amount of learning imparted to each pupil being in direct proportion to the lung-power of his instructor. Now a block of modern classrooms was erected, and School Hall was reserved for ceremonial gatherings, such as Speech Day and concerts. A chapel and sanatorium had been in existence for some time; to these were added a Science Block, a gymnasium, and a swimming-bath. Later came a miniature rifle-range, one of the first in England, the gift of an old boy, a Mutiny veteran.

The Schoolhouse was supplemented by four new boarding-houses, which in course of time grew to eight. Other inevitabilities followed with the years, such as a Modern Side and compulsory games. The indeterminate and sanguinary mud-fight for the possession of an inflated pigskin which had occupied the leisure hours of the School during the winter months crystallised into orthodox Rugby, and rowing was added to cricket in the summer. In the late nineties Marbledown School achieved its first Rowing Blue, a sturdy Cambridge freshman named Charles Donkin.

To-day the School covers half a square mile of ground, sloping gently towards the south. School Hall itself stands roughly in the centre, with the classroom blocks grouped round it. The boarding-houses are scattered about the slope, snug amid trees and flower-beds. The old chapel is now a library; the School outgrew it long ago. The new chapel stands high on the topmost edge, a memorial to the Marbledown boys—and most of them were only boys—who fell in the Great War. Fourteen hundred and thirty-five of them joined up. The names of two hundred and seventy-three of these are now recorded, for all time, upon the Roll of Honour in the chapel porch.

On the flat ground at the foot of the slope lie the playing-fields, and beyond them the placid waters of the River Marble, over which you cross by an ancient stone bridge into the little town of Marbledown itself.

To-day no boy may use that bridge without written leave. Access to the town used to be free and open to all, but Mr. Ovington soon attended to that. It was one of the first things he put up a notice about.

And that brings us to Mr. Ovington himself.

He was at this time just thirty-one, a clergyman, bachelor, and ex-University don. He lived in the Schoolhouse with his sister Miss Janet Ovington, called by the School, for the simplest of reasons, The Spoon, because her brother was called The Egg. A nickname being a necessity for every Headmaster, Mr. Ovington had originally been christened ‘Ovaltine.’ This was obviously too unwieldy a sobriquet, and presently some classically minded person, realising the derivation of the term, condensed it, with general acceptance, to its present form. It suited its owner in more ways than one, for he was prematurely bald and cranially of the ovoid type.

He was no physical weakling though, being a powerfully built young man of six feet and over, who enjoyed some reputation in his hours of relaxation as a climber of Alps. Moreover he possessed that rare and peculiar gift known as ‘presence.’ He made a genuinely imposing figure in the pulpit, and when he entered a crowded room, people with their backs to the door knew he was there without looking round.

After sweeping the board at Oxford ten years before—though he failed, ominously, to achieve a Fellowship of All Souls—Edmund Ovington had been offered the post of Classical Lecturer at a Midland University, where he rapidly proved himself a brilliant expositor and born teacher. Two years later, to the general surprise, he threw the Classics overboard and was appointed (on his own request) Warden of the Local Technical College, itself a branch of the same University. The surprise was accentuated by the common knowledge that the Technical College was in a poor way. Its curriculum was out of date, its staff incompetent, and its numbers dwindling. The place, in fact, stood in need of a drastic overhaul.

The overhaul was duly forthcoming. At the end of five years of grim spadework—mainly systematic revision of schedules and ruthless elimination of inefficient instructors—Edmund Ovington had converted an academic lumber-room into one of the best-equipped, best-run, and most popular technical colleges in the country—and himself the most unpopular Warden it had ever possessed. Not that he minded, even if he knew.

Then, with equal suddenness, he resigned, disappeared into the shades of a theological seminary, and emerged in Orders. A year later he applied for the Headmastership of Marbledown School, and got it. The retiring Head, the Rev. Dr. Aloysius Adams, had hung on to his job just a little too long—about ten years too long, to be precise—and the Governing Body decided that what the School wanted now was a little stirring up. So King Log was suffered to depart, with blessings upon his palsied head and the usual marble clock in his trunk, and King Stork reigned in his stead.

Not that the latter had evinced any cannibalistic tendencies thus far: he had not yet completed his first year at Marbledown, and he was still taking stock. Certain somewhat drastic resolutions were already tabled in his mind, but the time for putting them into effect was not yet. But it was approaching.

He sat, this fine summer morning, at his broad desk facing his high study windows, alternately surveying the fair prospect before him and tapping out a few stray thoughts upon his ever-adjacent typewriter. Mr. Ovington did a good deal of his thinking on paper. It seemed to him tidier, and more methodical.

He had just typed the following:—

(a) Physical strain unsuited to growing boys.

(b) Promiscuous intercourse with townspeople on towpath undesirable.

(c) Injury to cricket spirit.

(d) Subsequent saturnalia a definite menace.

Cf. my experience last summer. (Diary.) Obstacles to reform.

(a) Tradition. Henley, etc.

(b) Donkin.

Yes, Donkin. Mr. Ovington’s gaze travelled over the tree-tops till it rested on the roof of Mr. Donkin’s House down on the right, near the foot of the slope. That stronghold would have to be invested—invested and reduced—sooner or later. He started a fresh line of type.

Staff—possible changes—

(1) Donkin.

Then he added—

(2) de Pourville.

(3) Hastings.

(4) Kent.

Yes, Donkin. Donkin would make particular trouble about a certain step upon which Mr. Ovington had just decided. He had better see Donkin before putting up the notice, and tell him firmly that there must be no opposition, covert or overt, this time. If Donkin disliked progress, Donkin had his own remedy in his own hands.

Mr. Ovington took up the telephone at his elbow, and calling the School exchange, announced in the fewest possible words that he wished to speak to the Red House. Presently Donkin’s voice replied, in the studiously polite tones which he reserved for people whom he disliked intensely.

“Good morning, Mr. Ovington.”

“Good morning, Donkin. Can I see you for ten minutes?”

“At once?”

“You are not in School till twelve, I believe.” The Head was reputed to know the respective timetables of the thirty-five members of his staff by heart.

“No, but I have to go and see a boy in the Sanatorium before then.”

“Would it be beyond the bounds of possibility to postpone your visit until this afternoon?”

“Quite, I’m afraid. I have promised, you see. However, I might squeeze in five minutes on my way there. Will that do?”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Ovington coldly, and hung up.

How characteristic! A bilious boy in the Sanatorium. “I have promised.” So much fuss about an individual cog, and so little regard for the machine. Would this reactionary old gentleman never realise that in the science of government the institution must come first, and its separate members after—a long way after? Mr. Ovington’s thoughts slipped back automatically to the first pitched battle between himself and his Senior Housemaster on that particular ground. It was over a boy—a ne’er-do-well, who Mr. Ovington thought should be expelled.

“He is doing the place harm,” he had said, “and he must go.”

“The place is doing him good,” Donkin had replied, “and he must stay!”

And the boy stayed. The defeat still rankled. Still——

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” reflected Mr. Ovington broad-mindedly, and re-applied himself to his notes.

de Pourville—yes. A weak vessel. One heard disturbing rumours. And in these days Science was so important a subject—not so much in itself, but as a counterblast to the aggressive Classicism of ordinary public-school tradition. He would pay a surprise visit to the laboratory one day—perhaps during one of the Practical Chemistry hours. That should be an opportune, and perhaps fruitful moment.

Then Hastings. A brilliant mathematician—and an undoubted disciplinarian, with that blandly ironical tongue of his. That was no reason, though, why he should bring the same tongue to Masters’ Meetings. Moreover, his teaching methods must be a bit on the old-fashioned side by this time. Perhaps, in a few years——

Mr. Ovington put a mark of interrogation against Mr. Hastings’ name, and proceeded to the next, and last.

Kent—ah, yes. The time seemed to be ripening nicely for the abolition of militaristic influences in School life. Public opinion on that subject was veering round in a most satisfactory fashion. Probably the next Government would withdraw the subsidy and all camping facilities. That would mean the end of the O.T.C.—and of Mr. Kent. Well, these ex-Regular soldiers were always a difficulty. Conscientious enough, but utterly rigid in their ideas. They disturbed the atmosphere of the place, too, in some inexplicable way. Not that Kent was a swashbuckler; but his very presence in the School, with his limp and his D.S.O., was a menace.

At this point Mr. Ovington’s reflections were interrupted by the voice of what sounded like a reaping-machine. An ancient car was droning and whining its way up the hill from the main gates. If Mr. Ovington had been one of his own pupils, he would at once have recognised the voice as that of The-Ford-from-the-Station. The-Ford-from-the-George was nearly an octave higher.

The deplorable vehicle rounded a final clump of laurels and drew up, with a tortured shrieking of brakes and much spurting of gravel, at Mr. Ovington’s front door, which stood close to the study windows. Such parts of it as were not occupied by the driver and his fares were piled high with miscellaneous luggage.

The rickety door swung open, and a lady descended—a middle-aged lady of erect carriage and decisive manner. She was followed by a small girl, with large, blue, trustful eyes, and shingled hair which curved right forward in two sleek black whiskers.

The lady was about to ring Mr. Ovington’s front-door bell, when her small companion touched her elbow and directed her attention to the majestic presence visible through the open windows of the study. She therefore diverted her course, and marched with characteristic lack of hesitation straight into the presence itself.

“Where can I find Mr. Donkin?” she asked, as Mr. Ovington, a little taken aback, pushed away his typewriter and rose to his feet.

“In his House, I should imagine.”

“But this is his House. Isn’t this Marbledown School?”

“This is the Schoolhouse, itself part of Marbledown School. It is also called the Blue House, in accordance with a system whereby——”

“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, with that noise going on outside. Child, run and tell that old man to turn that thing off. All I want to know is where I can find Mr. Donkin.”

The racket outside died grudgingly away, and Mr. Ovington replied:—

“He lives in the Red House.”

“Which red house? They are all red!”

“I was not referring to their external colour scheme, but to the fact that each House in this School is referred to, for the sake of convenience, by the name of its House colours. This, for instance, is the Blue House. It is also called the Schoolhouse, because I happen to be——”

“Yes, so you told me. But I’m in rather a hurry. Which is Mr. Donkin’s House?”

Mr. Ovington moved to the window and pointed down the slope.

“You can see it above those tree-tops,” he said.

“But how can I get there, with all that luggage? We can’t go driving through hedges and over flower-beds.”

“There is a path,” said Mr. Ovington, patiently, “leading from the foot of my lawn, past the Fives Courts, direct to Mr. Donkin’s House. You will find it quite a short and pleasant walk. Your chauffeur should be directed to go back to the main gates, and to make a detour of about half a mile by road.”

“Thank you. Cocher!—driver!—this isn’t Mr. Donkin’s House at all. That is it, past the Fives Courts, whatever they may be. I’m going to walk there: you drive back to the main gates, and round by the road. And don’t attempt to charge me for the extra half-mile. Come along, child!”