Читать книгу While I Remember - Stephen McKenna - Страница 4

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On the last Sunday of July, in the year 1906, Little Dean's Yard filled slowly with sixty or seventy boys in evening dress. All but about ten wore the black gown, which is one mark of the Westminster Scholar, and, over the gown, a white surplice open or buttoned according to the seniority of the wearer. It was not yet ten o'clock in the morning; but on Election Sunday all King's Scholars and Major Candidates appear in evening clothes, the Major Candidates distinguished by carnations of the prized Westminster pink which has been worn since the day, nearly a hundred years ago, when the school rowed against Eton and settled that colour question by trial of strength: the victors were to have pink, the vanquished blue; and the deeper pink of Leander derives from the Westminster founders of the club.

These were the last few flying moments of the last scene. Six years ago the seniors in the swelling group, escaping from the thunder of traffic in Victoria Street and Broad Sanctuary, had entered the silent backwater of Little Dean's Yard as Minor Candidates; their parents or the masters of their preparatory schools led them under the arch and past the fives' courts; they turned shyly wondering eyes at Home Boarders, Rigaud's, Grant's, College and Ashburnham, at the Bursary and the head master's house; then they were shepherded through the Inigo Jones doorway and up the steps into School. It was the first day of the Challenge, wherein the candidates of other days met all-comers in a disputation—lasting a week or more—on the elements of learning and those who outlasted their opponents were elected to scholarships. Now, after six years, they were competing for the close scholarships and exhibitions at Christ Church and at Trinity, Cambridge. The written work was over; on Election Monday would come the viva voce, then the annual cricket match between the King's Scholars and the Town Boys on Vincent Square, then Election dinner in College Hall enlivened by the Greek, Latin and English epigrams which Westminster subsidises; then on Election Tuesday, still in evening dress, they would attend the school service in Abbey for the last time and for the last time answer "Adsum" at roll-call; the results of Election would be read out, the prizes distributed, the office-holders would divest themselves of office and they would walk down School for the last time, into their houses, out of them again and into the world.

The Captain of the King's Scholars came out of College; the Head Town Boy joined him at the entrance to the cloisters; next to them were the other two School Monitors. The involuntary began; and the procession passed through the nave and under the organ loft: first the choir, then the Abbey clergy and the Dean of Westminster; the Dean of Christ Church and the Master of Trinity; the examiners from Oxford and Cambridge; the Head Master of Westminster; the assistant masters in gowns and hoods; the King's Scholars in surplices, gowns and evening dress, those of them who were leaving chastened by the thought that, after the Election Tuesday service two days later, they would enter the Abbey as members of the public only.

Westminster is so much the embodiment and shrine of English history that even the alien and the iconoclast cannot spend six years in the shadow of the Abbey without becoming steeped in the spirit and associations of the place. It is the influence of such foundations that makes of English life its present compromise between the rational and the traditional. From their places in the stalls could be seen the arches of the triforium which are filled at coronations by the Westminster Scholars: no king, they assert, can be duly crowned unless he is acclaimed by their triple shout of "Vivat Rex". It is their privilege to be present in Palace Yard when the soveran opens Parliament; Scholars and Town Boys walk, of unchallenged right, into the gallery of the House of Commons, Scholars—in cap and gown—into the gallery of the House of Lords and, on Sundays, on to the Terrace; when the Courts of Justice were at Westminster, they could wander unchecked into Westminster Hall. Their daily service takes place in the Poets' Corner; they are present at State funerals, their confirmation is held in Henry VII's chapel; and the whole Abbey is their heritage. Is not the school descended lineally from that group of lay scholars whom the monks of Westminster taught? Is not the monks' dormitory their Great School? Among the documents discovered of late years in the Abbey Muniment Room is a record, under the year 1284, of expensæ, being provision for the teaching of scholars, and a further record, under the year 1339, of payments for "Westminster School." Already old when Winchester and Eton were founded, with its roots struck deep in the Abbey's earliest history and with its life immemorially intertwined with the life of the Abbey, the two have remained side by side until Westminster is the last of the London schools to resist the pressure which has already urged younger rivals from their seats. Changing slowly with the slow unfolding of English history, the school was refounded by Queen Elizabeth on a secular footing; and the monitor of the week, kneeling with his back to Busby's birch-table[1] and facing the school, returns thanks "pro fundatrice nostra Regina Elizabetha" on the spot where Robert South prayed "pro rege Carolo" on the 30th of January, 1649. It retains, by the Act of Uniformity, its "almost unique privilege of using Latin in religious offices", though—as a concession to the Reformers—the monkish pronunciation was abandoned for that which was the universal English form until misguided empiricists set up confusion where none existed before by introducing a "modern" method.

Since that new Tower of Babel was erected, Westminster has watched other foundations arguing and striving to discover the correct pronunciation of classical Latin. Despite the periodical rebukes of its rivals, it has held stubbornly to its course, knowing that there is no sure means of recreating the speech of Cicero and that Westminster at least is too deeply bedded in the past to bend before each new breeze of educational fashion. A hundred customs are preserved to teach new generations that progress need not be divorced from the historic sense: when the bell rings for prayers at the end of afternoon school, a Second Election knocks with his cap at the doors of the form-rooms adjoining school and calls out, "Instat quinta", or, on "plays" (half-holidays), "Instat sesquiduodecima", although the actual hour is now nearly one o'clock; a Second Election has knocked thus since the time was told from a single clock and shouted through the school by a junior; before prayers begin, the doors are locked, and, when they are opened, one of the School Monitors[2] mounts guard outside to repel a chance raid by the "sci's"[3] of the neighbourhood who in less orderly days carried on a town-and-gown warfare against the school. At the lowest, such customs are a picturesque survival, like the Latin play acted in College Dormitory, the Pancake Greeze on Shrove Tuesday, the countless phrases and customs which only a Westminster understands and which all Westminsters love; perhaps, too, they foster, in the alien and the iconoclast, a sense of the past. Abbey and School are a monument to continuity and ordered progress; in 1906, they were a monument at which the leaving seniors had been involuntarily staring for half a dozen years.