Young Phillip Maddison (47 page)

*

Hetty wondered how Phillip, with his inability to learn Latin, would have fared at his school in the reign of Elizabeth, when the scholars in the upper forms had to speak to one another, and to the ushers, in Latin only. From Mr. Graham’s book she learned that the school hours then were from seven o’clock in the spring and summer, and an hour later in the winter, to four o’clock in the afternoon, with an hour and a half for dinner and
play. There were Praepostors appointed weekly to report misdemeanours both in and out of school, and neither masters nor boys were allowed to wear
long
curl’d,
frizzled,
powdered
or
ruffin-
like
hair,
but
shall
cut
their
Hair
and
wear
it
in
such
sort
and
manner
that
both
the
beauty
of
their
Foreheads
may
be
seen.
They were not to
use
any
clamorous
cries
nor
casting
stones
nor
fighting,
nor
use
any
rude
or
uncivil
word
or
cries,
nor
to
be
whitlers
or
gravers
of
names
in
about
the
windows
or
other
places.
They were not to indulge in
unlawful
or
hurtful
pastimes
as
footballe,
dice
or
cards
or
any
game
for
money,
nor
to
swim
or
wash
in
the
river
without
leave.

Boys, she thought, were very much the same in those days, as now. The Elizabethan scholars were allowed
shooting
with
long
bows,
stool-ball,
running,
wrestling,
leaping,
and
other
inoffensive
exercises.
As for holidays, there were three weeks at Christmas, and a fortnight at Easter and Whitsuntide, with Shrove Monday and Tuesday.

Elbows on the plush table-cover, Hetty looked up from the book.

“You ought to read this, dear, I am sure you would find it most interesting, how arithmetic was taught at your school, all that while ago—think of it, more than three hundred years!”

“Oh Mother, why must you talk about that mouldy book! Can’t you see I’m busy? Anyhow, we have enough of that sort of muck at school. What’s the good of it all? Anyway, I bet I’ve failed in my matriculation. The results will be out any day now. Oh lor’. Well, if you
must,
show me.”

Under protest, he glanced at the book.

“Just read that piece, dear, and see how the scholar replied to his master in those days.
I
think it is rather funny!”

“Oh, very well.”

Phillip gabbled, in mock of the Magister, as the Headmaster was called.

“‘Foure men gette a bootye or prise in tyme of warre’—why the bloke can’t even spell!—‘The prise is in valewe of mony 8190 £, and bicause the men be not of like degree’—that’s me and Cranmer, after pinching the impedimenta of the Fordesmill Troop under old Purley-Prout—‘therfore their shares may not be equall, but the chieffest person will haue of the bootye the third parte, and the tenth part ouer: the second will haue a quarter and the tenth part ouer’—half a mo’!”

Phillip decided to read it like a parson. He parted his black hair in the middle, and pressed each side on his head, like a
jackdaw’s wings. Then he folded a sheet of paper, for a “dog-collar,” and continued in a droning voice,

“‘The second will haue a quarter and the tenthe parte ouer; the third will haue the syxt part: and so there is left for the fourth man a very small portion, but such is his lot (whether he be pleased or wroth)—’—and I bet he was using ‘clamorous cries’, Henrietta!—to continue, my dear friends—‘he must be content with one XX part of the pray—’ yea, verily, I bet afterwards he drank all of the XXX barrel as well, dear brethren—‘Now I demaunde of you, what shall euery manne haue to his share?’” He flung down the book.

“Jumping Jehosophat, what a
frightful
sum!”

Doris was laughing so much that she almost fell from her chair. Thus encouraged, Phillip picked up the book again, and continued in a high, falsetto voice,

“
Scholar
. ‘You must be fayne to answere to your owne question, Magister, els it is not lyke to be answered at this tyme’. Strike me pink, it must have been a bit of Merry England in those days, if boys could really give answers like that! ‘I don’t know; ask me’, that’s what ‘Scholar’ says, in effect! Fancy answering like that to Flib! Phew!! Ten cuts with the cane, while studying the pattern of his study carpet!”

Flib was the nickname of the Magister, from his initials.

“There’s another page, dear,” said Hetty, “which tells how the Founder of your School was put in prison, for standing up for the Earl of Essex, after he had been beheaded. It is very, very sad, but then that is life. Do read it to us, won’t you?”

“‘Standing up for the Earl of Essex after he had been beheaded’! Mother, I ask you! Surely the poor devil would be lying down, after losing his boko? You call that history! Seriously, Mum, do you know where my jar of preserving compound is? I want to skin that plover I found dead on the Seven Fields yesterday tonight—whatever are you laughing at?”

Hetty laughed till the tears came. Weakly she pointed a finger at Phillip. “Plover—found dead yesterday tonight——” she managed to say.

*

When Phillip was interested in a subject he would work, if he set his mind to it. During the recent examinations he had found the Arithmetic paper easy, despite preceding mental strain and flurry.

The ironic thing about his paper was that he was sharply suspect by the Magister for the very excellence of an unexpected performance, in connection with a disturbing letter received from the University people, which drew the Magister’s attention to the paper of another boy who had, said the letter, presumably sat next to Maddison, since his surname also began with the letter M.

Before the scene that followed one January morning in the Magister’s study, it is necessary first to describe the scholastic achievements of the Headmaster of Phillip’s school.

He was, racially speaking, of Viking stock. Phillip, like Hetty, was a Celt. The Magister felt keen delight in problems of mathematics, which in the higher regions, as he thought of them, approached the poetry of universal truth. Mankind, in his belief, was finally perfectible; but only by transmuting the brute forces of the material universe into truths of the Spirit which ruled the cosmos mathematically. Beethoven, and Goethe, in this way of thinking, had expressed the same truths in music and poetry which were explicit in thought demonstrated by pure
mathematikos.

The Magister was a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Science of London University. He had a twin brother, who resembled him in every particular. Between them in their University Arts course they had obtained the first and second places in the honours’ list for English History, Language, and Literature; their M.A. degrees were obtained by examination in Logic, Philosophy and Economics; and again they took first and second places in their year.

The Magister had in addition taken a research course in Psychology for Ph.D. at Freiburg, under Professor Munsterberg, who had later gone to Harvard University, but did not qualify for the degree by residence. Before coming to his present post, he had been headmaster of a northern school which numbered amongst it
alumni
Laurence Sterne and Sir Robert Peel. Like his twin brother—who had gone to Colham Grammar School in the West Country—the Magister was also Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Member of the British Psychological Society.

He had come to the school when it had been enlarged, just after the Great Winter of 1895, when Phillip had been born. The school’s number had been under one hundred; in scarcely more than a dozen years, it had increased to just short of three
hundred. That was at the beginning of what was called the Renaissance of National Education. Under the Board established in 1901, the “Age of the Secondary School” had begun.

Because of ambition, because of his restless energy which was devoted to the mental well-being of nearly three hundred boys, the Magister was, intellectually speaking, the antithesis of Mr. Graham, the bachelor Old Boy with the unrolled umbrella, gentle smile, and soft voice.

And while the Second Master, the Housemasters, and the form masters of Heath School also strove, instilled, corrected, and punished, yet they were impersonal, and by that very impersonality were, paradoxically, human personalities. The Magister was personal in his aspiration, exhortation, and occasional anger—until the ultimate occasion of caning, when it became a ritual of catharsis, for the good of the caned alone. He loomed, big and terrifying, just and righteous, ever keen and dynamic, over the acquiescent and often evasive spirits of the youths who were submissive to his mental power, to his exhortatory will.

The Magister’s ideal was, in effect, to put an old head on young shoulders.

The Magister expected his pupils to have an adult sense of honour, a perspective of maturity beyond the torments and desires of the growing flesh.

The Magister was always in tension for duty, duty, Duty towards a new Golden Age beyond the cup of Socratic hemlock.

The Magister was a Victorian.

*

One morning, Milton, sitting near the head of the form in the back row of the classroom, threw a note, twisted up, when the Magister’s back was turned, to Phillip sitting in the front row. Covertly opening the screw of paper, Phillip read the pencilled sentence, and was immediately puzzled.

Phillip looked across to Milton. Milton put his finger to his lips, and pointed to the Magister who was drawing a formula in chalk upon the blackboard. Whatever did Milton mean?

Slowly he tore the note into little pieces, then having chewed
them, rubbed them into pellets between finger and thumb, and hid them in the turn-ups of his trousers.

At eleven o’clock, when there was a five-minute break, the Magister asked Milton and Maddison to follow him into his Study. Seating himself at his bureau before the standing boys, he took up a letter from his desk: then fixing his pale-blue eyes upon Phillip, he said that in the Arithmetic paper of the Oxford Senior Examination Milton had got the correct answers to some of the problems, but with incorrect working-out. Maddison’s paper on the contrary, had the correct answers and the correct working-out. They had sat next to one another. The question was, had there been any communication of results between them, during or after the examination?

“I have already spoken to Milton, Maddison. Now I have called you to stand before me, to hear what you have to say.”

Phillip was amazed. He could not understand it. Had Milton cribbed from him? Milton? It was impossible!

He could not face the Magister’s keen eyes. His voice was knotted in his throat.

“Come, Maddison, I am waiting!”

The Magister’s eyes were on Phillip’s face. A closed face, he was thinking: a secretive face: an evasive face: an untruthful face: a little face: a face of vague ruminations: a face of weak moral fibre: a face without character.

“Come sir, I am waiting!” The voice had a ring of impatience.

Phillip swallowed, and then managed to stammer, “I—I—d-don’t know, sir.”

“Did you speak to Milton at any time before your papers were collected?”

Phillip had his eyes fixed on the Magister’s desk. Drip, drip went the sweat under his armpits.

“Milton, be so good as to repeat what you told me,” the Magister said, in a softer voice.

Milton, with a slightly breathless smile upon his blue-eyed open face, said, as though he had rehearsed the words,

“If you please, sir, just before the papers were collected, I saw in an instant by mental calculation, that some of my answers were incorrect. I had already made my mental calculations, sir, viva voce to myself, so I quickly wrote down the answers I had worked out in my head. I can work better in my head than on paper, sir, for some reason.”

“Yes, Milton, that is reasonable, to a point. Often I find that an abstruse problem will resolve itself suddenly, in my nightly walks upon the Heath. But it does not explain the duplication of your answers with those of Maddison’s paper. Pray continue, Milton.”

Looking the Magister straight in the eye, Milton said with a sort of jerky ease, “Well, sir, I just wrote them down, just before the time limit.”

“And you did not speak to Maddison?”

“No, sir!”

“Did Maddison speak to you?”

Milton made no reply.

“Come, Milton, I am waiting,” said the Magister softly.

“I don’t remember, sir.”

The keen eyes turned to Phillip.

“Well, Maddison?”

Phillip saw, in a kind of remote terror, as he had felt on a dozen or more occasions during the past years, the pink smooth cheeks, the large white moustache, the shiny domed brow, the severe glance immediately before him; and beyond, the mahogany cupboard where the canes were kept. He felt himself to be an icicle dripping away. He could not think; but vaguely he could see fragmentary rushing pictures of himself sitting up in his desk when his Arithmetic paper was finished. How could Milton have copied his answers? Milton’s desk had been quite four feet away. Had his own paper been covered with blotting paper? He could not remember. He was sure he had never spoken to Milton. And yet, had he? With horror, he imagined himself talking to him under the big gas-ring in the centre of Hall. Milton would not tell a lie—Milton was not like himself.