Chapter V: Part 5

But all this would not gain a boy many marks in a modern examination, and we live or die by results in examinations. English papers seem to me to be the worst set of all. What can it profit a man to know the context of obscure passages in Shakespeare if he has not got the spirit of the play in him actively shaping his own life? If a boy does not feel the Hamlet or the Richard II within him shouting for utterance when he reads a Shakespeare play, he is doing himself no good at all. The whole argument brings one back to beauty and imagination. I want to see every boy's study crammed with copies of the "World's Classics," the "Everyman" and the "Home University Library." There is no excuse for anybody not having read standard works at this time of day.

I try to instil a love of books into my forms by telling them of men like George Gissing, with whom it became a question of breakfast or a precious volume acquired in a second-hand shop: a book must cost you something before you can expect really to value it at its true worth. As Ruskin says, we despise books simply because they are accessible. I've always had this book-fever on me. I remember even as a small boy suffering unduly from the pangs of hunger, going from fruiterer to book-shop and from book-shop to fruiterer, wondering which I really wanted more, the romance or the pound of cherries. I know that I always hated myself when I succumbed to the latter temptation, for the cherries were soon eaten but the delights of the book were perennial.

_July 4, 1911_

The joys of the Coronation were not for us. Some of the Corps went down to London to line the streets, but the rest of us went into camp and had a gorgeous time. We spent the time bathing and washing up, and celebrating Coronation festivities in all the villages near by. We made speeches and helped to feed myriads of children: we led processions and drank vast quantities of liquid at other people's cost. Money seemed to be poured out in honour of George V.

All the same I was lonely because most of the boys I require by me to complete my happiness were in London lining the streets. However, we were not parted long and we are now just back from the Windsor Review. That is the most impressive ceremony in which I have ever taken part. All the Public Schools and Universities paraded before the King in Windsor Great Park. It was a sweltering hot day and we were as tired as could be after our long journey and the fatigue of camp, but no one fell out or fainted except some of the Oxford and Cambridge contingents. Good for the schools! It was wonderful to get down south again, if only for one day, to see real trees, civilized people, pretty girls, the Thames, respectable houses built for comfort, culture and leisure. We spent all the long hours in the train in rushing up and down the corridors "debagging" people, "scrumming" forty or fifty unfortunates into one carriage and then leaping on the top of them. No wonder we were tired. How any windows remained unbroken is a miracle to me.

We have had a good term with regard to the Corps--about four of the best field-days I can remember. The best was in Wensleydale amid peerless scenery: about ten big schools took part, and I, as usual, was engaged in scouting most of the time. It is rare fun stalking the enemy on these lonely moors far from your own people. With a little imagination you can picture the reality ... and in any case it's a rotten game to be captured by some other school. I don't know why, but after you've left the school about ten minutes you feel as if you'd been soldiering all your life and lived only for food and sleep. No meals are more acceptable than field-day lunches, usually eaten by the side of a dusty road in the full glare of a hot sun, but it's hunger that makes the meal, and marching is the best appetizer I know: the only thing I object to about these sham fights is the powwow afterwards and the stupidity of the umpires. Every one knows that umpires can't be everywhere at once and human nature doesn't admit of one's giving oneself up unless real force is used; consequently the most ridiculous decisions are given, for the conditions have always altered by the time any umpire turns up; the weaker side which has been ambushed becomes reinforced by a body ten times as big as the ambushing party, and so turns the tables, and the clever strategist who really brought off a good coup finds himself a prisoner and harangued by his O.C. Field-days are very unfair, but they are amusing. It's rare fun chasing an enemy into a farm-house and forcing an entrance into every room in pursuit of him: it's good to see a motor-bicycle belonging to some officer lying by the roadside and to ride away on it. It's worth any amount of powwow to sit under a hedge within sight of a bridge on which you have chalked "This bridge is blown up," and watch the enemy debate whether or no they have a right to advance across it: it's very like the real thing to be told off to act as guerillas and to keep on irritating an advancing force by appearing at inconvenient times and unexpected places, and holding up their plans and then trying to escape and repeat the experiment farther along the line. Close order drill, ceremonial and inspection are distinctly boring, but field-days are red-letter days.

For twelve hours one gets right away, away from work, away from Common Room, away from games, and it does every one a world of good. We lose our petty animosities: we become more broad-minded and regain our ordinary sense of camaraderie: we sing ribald songs, we fill our lungs with good air, we discuss philosophy or any mortal thing with our next-door neighbour on the march, not caring whether he listens or not; we silently form good resolutions about our work, we think upon great days long past, of famous runs with the beagles, childhood's days on the moor, tramps across country as undergraduates--all the best things of life come back to one on the march. It isn't that we take soldiering very seriously: none of us does that. I hate shooting on the range; rifle-firing frightens me; I should be a damned fool at _pukka_ fighting, but this make-believe is good sport and I suppose it teaches us something. At any rate it's amusing.

One of the quaintest things about this term has been my friendship with Chichester. He is a new boy in my form who speaks but seldom, not because he is nervous (he is one of the most self-assured people I ever met) but because he doesn't want to. He writes already bizarre but quite original verse. He goes his own way in everything. He somehow became attracted by me, and now we spend all our spare time together. It's a queer friendship. He's a largish boy for fifteen, with curly light hair and penetrating blue eyes and a delicate pink and white complexion.

We lie on a rug together and watch House matches, eating strawberries and cherries. He borrows all my books and reads them at an astonishing rate. Masefield bowled him over completely. He has written at least four poems based on "The Everlasting Mercy." He is about the cleanest child I have met and yet he employs the foulest metaphors I ever came across. He is an anomaly. He is in for a bad time here: people won't understand him and every one will do his best to ruin him.

He appears to be quite fond of me and calls for me daily to go down to games with him. Common Room is scandalized and I have been warned by most of my colleagues that such things are not done. It is not good for a boy to be taken up and made a favourite of by a master. With that sentiment I entirely agree. I wonder why every one here does it. But I'm not making a favourite of him: he has honoured me with his friendship. I have no fast, firm friend; neither has he. He certainly is not the type of boy to trade upon such a relationship; in form he works like a "navvy," he plays his games adequately: he is quite normal except for his gift for writing English. Surely no one can blame me for fostering that.

At any rate I should prefer to leave rather than break off our relations, so people must just talk and think what they like. Of course the school doesn't like it. They hate any boy having much to do with a master, but Chichester has a will of his own and I rather fancy he will take his own line right through life. Not that he is self-assertive: he is quiet and unassuming, but he always contrives to get his own way. Luckily for me he is in Wade's house, and dear old Wade, who ought to have been a country squire, never denies any one anything; so when the boy goes for leave to come to my rooms he gets it every time without a murmur.

The only blow about camp this year is that Chichester won't be there. His people are taking him abroad for the whole of August.

I have been bothered a good deal lately about a peculiarly silly habit of mine. Sometimes, in mathematics especially, I get violently angry at intervals because I realize that my sets are not working hard enough. I so rarely punish that of course there is a temptation for boys to slack in present circumstances: when I find that they take advantage of my ideals to practise this trick on me I usually "give tongue" forcibly and "drop on" them as heavily as I can with a quite colossal punishment. This I take down in a book and--after five minutes I've forgotten all about it. The boy always looks contrite at the moment, but I realize that he knows that he won't have to do the punishment at all.

There is a silly system here by which one has to enter the names of all the boys one punishes in a book: I simply can't remember to do it. It's like looking at "roll" lists. I'm always slack about checking the reasons that my boys give for their absence. I always believe what a boy tells me. How can you expect boys to tell the truth if you always verify their statements by outside corroborative evidence? It seems to me to be asking for trouble.

There seems to be everlasting espionage here. The school sergeant is known to be in the "secret service" of the Head Master, and is popularly supposed to wander about with a pair of field-glasses scouring the countryside for miscreants. This seems a quaint conception of education. Wherever and whenever we meet boys we are expected to extract information from them as to their precise occupation.

The only safe place seems to be on the cricket field, and even there you are surrounded by seniors waiting to lash you if you drop a catch or (in their opinion) field badly.

I spend most of my afternoons, when I am not wanted to fill up last place in a Common Room eleven, in coaching the "Rabbits," which is a league composed entirely of those who are unable to play cricket at all, the worst two dozen in the school. It is really amusing: no one could possibly pretend to take it seriously. The only time when it perhaps gets monotonous is when some elderly fag appears and insists on playing, and I find him coercing all the others to field for and bowl to him, while he scores about a hundred and fifty. That only happens when there is no master about. The House matches this term have been frenziedly exciting and Chichester and I have spent most afternoons watching them. It is an Arcadian, simple life in the summer term. Every morning at 6.30 I pull Dearden out of bed and race him down to the sea in pyjamas. We have a hasty bathe and arrive just in time for chapel at 7, unshaven. We there (pernicious custom) have to take a "roll" of our form. We look down chapel to see the faces of friends and at some intimate verses in the hymn or psalms we smile as at some hidden secret between ourselves. 7.25 sees us running to first school. We run everywhere at Radchester. I hate these dreary lessons before breakfast: 8 o'clock seems an interminable distance ahead. There is supposed to be cocoa in Common Room between 7.20 and 7.25, but no one ever has time to drink it, unless he cares to risk being late for form, which is not a vice masters here are prone to. At 8 o'clock on two days of the week two of us have to deny ourselves breakfast until the whole school has finished, for we have to say grace in hall, collect the names of all absentees, walk round to see that no one cuts the cloth or indulges in undue ribaldry, and then when all is over we dismiss them. Only then (at 8.30) do we get our own breakfast. By this time all the best of the food is gone. Feversham will probably be helping himself to his fourth egg and sausage and fifth piece of toast, the morning papers will all have been seized and we shall be thoroughly irritable.

One of the things that makes me loathe the Common Room system is this herding together for breakfast, a meal that ought to be eaten in communion with the morning paper and no living soul to interrupt.

From 9 to 9.45 we punish, we practise fielding, we correct work. From 9.45 to 1.15 we rush from subject to subject, from class to class, attempting to drive some rudiments of mathematics and English into the heads of boys who don't want to know anything. If only they were born poor and knew that they had to depend on their wits for their livelihood, it would be infinitely easier for us. Occasionally one gets an hour off in the morning (I get three in the week) and this is spent either in writing letters, taking the illustrated weeklies from the House Room, or in going for a lonely walk or bathe. Sometimes I lie on the sand-dunes and eat and read, or try to write a few words more of an article. At 1.20 we all assemble in hall again, this time taking our food with the boys. I like this meal; the food is not good but the conversation is. I love all the clique that sits at my end of the table. Jimmy Haye, who sits on my right hand, is an argumentative soul who frequently sulks and refuses to speak to me when he thinks that I am doing the wrong thing, such as going about with Chichester, speaking against the classics at a debate, or advocating educational reform. Jimmy is a boy I should much like to know intimately, but he rarely comes up to my rooms: he doesn't care to mix with the riff-raff he finds there. I have occasionally persuaded him to come for a walk; he spends most of his life in "ragging" in the house and in being bullied by Naylor, the senior maths. tutor, who is endeavouring to raise him to the standard required for University scholarship. On my left sits Montague, Jimmy's greatest friend. He is easy-going, clever, very good at games, quite wild and irresponsible in the house, with a temper like a fiend. He has Spanish blood in him and has travelled all over the world. He treats me as I like to be treated--as a boon companion: although he doesn't take advantage of my standing invitation to use my rooms as an hotel he always comes to me for advice when he is implicated in a row. He likes to take me for walks on Sundays and pour out his many grievances against life. Sometimes neither he nor Haye talk to me at all for a month, then they suddenly relent, become their old gay selves again and chatter away, to my endless enjoyment.

It is at lunch-time that I generally hear the scandal of the day. In the afternoon immediately after lunch there is punishment drill--some twenty to fifty miscreants have to run or march round the square under direction of the drill-sergeant for half an hour, while other people are changing, going out to nets or playing tennis.

We bowl at nets till 3.30. Not many days pass without an accident. It's a wonder to me that boys aren't killed at this exercise: all the nets are very close together and hardly protected at all. Once the House matches start, of course, nets are "dropped" and we simply lie on rugs and applaud or groan according to the fortunes of the game. Most of the masters sit on an elevated mound, Olympians on their dung-hill, near which sacred spot no boy may approach.

At 3.45 we get a scrappy tea in our own rooms: the old witch of a bedmaker is supposed to put out the tea-things and the kettle, and produce the roll and butter provided by the school. She frequently forgets, just as she forgets to dust the room or wash up the dirty things. Usually I have to write orders for chocolate, walnut cakes, and fruit and jams or bananas and cream, and dispatch fags to the tuck-shop. There are never less than half a dozen urchins clamouring for tea: at 4.15 the bell rings for afternoon school.

Shall I ever forget in the years to come this hellish bell? It rings not less than fifty times a day, usually for five minutes at a time: nothing is so calculated to get on a new-comer's nerves as its incessant tolling, day and night, calling us to some fresh duty.

At 6 o'clock the school goes into hall for tea. If one is on duty that means more "calling of rolls" and counting of absentees; if not we have a blessed half-hour in which to prepare for Common Room dinner at 6.30. At 7 we hurry off to take prep. The senior men get half a crown a night for taking prep. in Big School, we poor juniors have to hustle along to supervise one of the other innumerable preps. for no reward. I hate this invigilation. It means that one tries to correct work, but has to interrupt oneself all the time in order to help boys over ridiculous points about cisterns and pipes, quadratic graphs or a line in Homer. Of course one can refuse all aid: most men do lest they should be found ignorant of some department of school study. At 8.45 we again rush to chapel and at 9 another prep. starts, in studies this time, and juniors start to turn on baths as a sign of bed. At 10 o'clock work for the day is over except for masters and the Sixth Form. Shouts and screams come from all the dormitories, and twenty minutes later we go round to see that every one is in bed.

By eleven most of the buildings are in darkness. Bridge-parties and conversations over whisky are kept up till twelve or one, but it isn't every night that we have time to indulge in these practices. Such is our normal day, but it's the unusual that finds its chronicling most frequently in this diary.

_August 1, 1911_

To-morrow we go away to Aldershot for the annual camp; another school year is over and I now have two years to look back over. I don't know that my experience has taught me much yet, except a distrust of the old men. I still love boys as much as ever, though not in the mass. I hate them at school lectures when they cough in order to make a nervous lecturer break down, or when they express mock approval by prolonged ironic laughter and stamping of feet. I hate them most of all when they choose to "rag" an unfortunate master who can't keep order in hall or at "roll." I always funk taking both these ceremonies, though I have never had any trouble except in my dreams. If I did I suppose I should half-kill the boy nearest to me and let out with my fists all round.

I like boys best singly in my rooms. Chichester makes up to me for lack of wife or sister or brother. I am never happy when he is out of my sight. He has shown up a prodigious quantity of good verse and some short stories, all of which I store away in the hope that some day I shall have collected enough to publish.

I've got a new idea in English composition with the lower forms. I take in a copy of a really good picture and get them to describe it: as a model for this I read Pater's description of the "Mona Lisa" with a copy staring them in the face as I read. I don't know where I got this idea from, but I find that it brings out a good deal of latent talent from boys who can never express themselves on paper in normal circumstances.

I wish it could be possible to have school without the first and last days of term: they are never-ending. At the beginning one misses all the comforts of civilization and mourns the absence of all society: at the end, after a strenuous turmoil of thirteen weeks there is nothing whatever left to do. Marks are all added up, examination papers corrected, reports written, prize sheets made, clothes packed. Boys besiege one's rooms with requests for photographs, and with a catch in the throat say good-bye. They are going into the firm, going up to the University, going abroad--going to the ends of the earth on their different missions, and Radchester will know them no more. Their office another will take and one gasps at the handful that will be left to carry on the glorious traditions of the House and school. The last day is pitiable.

Most masters are unfeignedly glad to get away. I never am. I sometimes chafe about the eighth or ninth week, but by the thirteenth I have become so used to the life that I hate the thought of any change. I have learnt to do without civilization. I just want my boys by my side always: I want to go on teaching English. I don't mind a holiday from mathematics. I wish I could find the soul of algebra and geometry. It's hard to make a moral lesson out of a circle. I am not Sir Thomas Browne. I shall miss my daily bickerings with Jimmy Haye and Montagu in hall. I shall miss the cricket and the bathing; above all, I shall miss Chichester and the rug. Luckily he is coming to camp this year. Camp lets one down gently. Gradually the longing for society steals over one again and the strenuous ten days' soldiering makes one pine for clean sheets and mufti, ordinary hours and meals at a table, but while it lasts it's just one great picnic.

VIII

_August 10, 1911_

It's been a good camp in every way. I was battalion scout most of the time and had the extraordinary luck to outwit a whole section of Cameronians (regulars) in one field-day while I was investigating behind the enemy's lines. What an ideal country for fighting this is, with all the pine-trees and the long stretch of Laffan's Plain and Cæsar's Camp. I wish that Radchester could be burnt down and rebuilt somewhere on these Surrey hills. Every evening I used to tramp over to the Aldershot baths from Farnborough, tired as I was, and then back to join the riotous "sing-songs." I find that one gets through a good deal of money at the canteens. I always want to eat like a pig and drink like a fish at the finish of each day's manœuvres. I have never been so bronzed as I am this year: my face is almost black with the sun and the dust. We had some excellent fights during the ten days, not always as on the programme. We had a first-class row with the Melton corps. They "swank" as if they owned the whole camp, so we let all their tents down one night. There was a battle royal and an inquiry the next day, when about eight Generals all gave tongue and talked about the honour of the Army. You can't suddenly pretend that a schoolboy ceases to be a schoolboy because you dress him up in khaki. He will have his "rags," whatever Guardsmen say.

There was, too, the usual smoking row. As a matter of fact, the great majority of fellows don't smoke in camp: they can afford to wait till the holidays begin. It is an education in itself to meet all the people from the other schools, to see how those with the great names take it for granted that they are cock-of-the-walk and "hold up" the canteens, while members of less well-known schools have to wait.

As a matter of fact, the officers' mess is the place to learn things. I dined there one night as a guest. I had no idea that Oxford and Cambridge were, or could be responsible for, such bounders as I met on that one evening. Good-hearted fellows for the most part, but it was ludicrous to see them in the same mess with these _pukka_ officers of the Grenadiers and Coldstreams. They are keen on their job, too, but without the ghost of an idea how to behave, or how to speak the King's English. They are indescribably funny to watch as they sidle up to the Colonels and Generals and try to adopt a sort of Army attitude to life. There are heaps of men here whom I used to know at Oxford; most of them, however, are in the regulars and not O.T.C. men at all.

One of the "stunts" is for the boys to get the General or some big "nut" to go to tea in their tents. They provide a palatial meal and the wretched old man has to gorge himself nearly sick in order to please these fifteen-year-olds, who would be tremendously upset if he didn't eat all that was offered to him. But the man we all stand in dread of is the Brigade Sergeant-Major, who has a voice of thunder, and puts the fear of God into every one who comes near him, officer and man alike. He seems to be a walking encyclopædia; there is nothing he doesn't know and he requires absolute perfection every time. I must say ten days of this life make our puny efforts at school to be smart look pretty cheap. Here we really get the hang of things: at school somehow we nearly always fail. It's partly competition and the ever-present fact that we have a reputation to keep up.

_August 15, 1911_

I have just had four days in town as an aftermath. The comparison between London and camp is extraordinary. I'd no idea my love for London was so deep-rooted. There hangs over London an ever-present air of success, of money-making and money-spending. The shops tempt you, the hotels tempt you, the theatres tempt you, everything tempts you. I fed well and met all sorts of interesting people, among them Chichester. He lives at Hampton Court and I had one great afternoon on the river with his sisters, himself and his mother. They appear to be very wealthy and at dinner, to which I stayed, there was such a variety of wines that I got nervous as to which wine to put in which glass. I believe I got them all wrong, except the liqueurs, but I don't think they noticed. How Chichester can bear the bleak savagery of Radchester after the rich comforts of his own home, I can't conceive.

Some day I am to go back and stay with him. He appears to spend his holidays boating, motoring, riding, playing billiards, going to theatres, reading and writing. I never met people who put one so quickly at one's ease. Although they are rich they don't seem to worry about Society: they do none of the _right_ things, for which Heaven be praised. They just enjoy life to the full and take each blessing as it comes. They have less of the snob in them than any people I have ever met. They appear to be unduly grateful to me for what I have done for Tony. My hat! The boot's on the other foot: what has Tony not done for me?

_August 23, 1911_

After a glorious week with my uncle in Dawlish, during which time I bathed and walked a good deal, I am back in town again. I love Devon: the coast scenery fills me with ecstatic delight and I thank God every minute that I am alive and strong to enjoy the good things of life.

I got into conversation with heaps of strangers of both sexes, and heard views of life that I am sure never enter the heads of my colleagues: when I am asked, as I frequently am, what I do in life, they always think I am lying when I say I am a schoolmaster, and laugh good-humouredly as if I had said something supremely funny when I mention that Oxford was once my University: apparently all young men claim to be "college boys": it's part of the game. Their whole conversation is one vast lie. But it does no one any harm and gives them a sense of romance: they get right away from the humdrum existence of the shop-counter and the office, and for a fortnight imagine themselves to be dukes and duchesses. But they miss half the joy that Devon provides by not scouring the country. Their programme is to rise late, dress with lavish care in the most glaring and tasteless colours, and slowly promenade up and down the Front. It is all very pretty and harmless and would delight the heart of O. Henry. They miss entirely the thousands of joyous little creeks with which the coast is studded: they never try to discover the secret charm of the moor. They prefer listening to the comic songs of the coons to the birds on the hillside, and the band on the Promenade to the rush of wind in the ears as one stands on the cliffs.

I wish I could write a novel. But I lack every faculty necessary for it. I can't observe properly: I can't describe the effect that scenery has on me. I am too nervous to probe into the inner history of sad-eyed women and dour-faced men. That they have their passionate loves and hates, of course I know, but these every man keeps in the secret places of the heart. Your Devonian is not the sort of man to wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. I came back to London two nights ago, with my uncle, and he took me to several plays. When I am in town I'm never satisfied unless I can put in two theatres a day. I am just as excited at the rise of a curtain or the tuning up of the orchestra to-day as I used to be when I was a small kid. To be able to see in the flesh all these great actors, of whom we only hear dimly in our fastness of Radchester, is a delight not less than, if very different from, the sight of the red loam of Devon, or a great stag breaking from cover with the hounds close upon his heels.

_September 26, 1911_

I spent a week with the Chichesters at Hampton and had a joyful time in company with Tony. After leaving them I went home because my mother suddenly developed rheumatic fever and was seriously ill. I read aloud to her for about three hours every day from Ford Madox Hueffer's "Ladies Whose Bright Eyes" and W. L. Courtney's "In Search of Egeria."

I have heard from the Head Master that Anstruther is to have Marshall's house. Anstruther! Ye Gods! He is two terms junior to me. I hear that the Begum of Bhopal wants me to coach her son in Constantinople. That would be fun. Think of the experience! I wanted to clinch with the offer at once, but my mother made me promise not to. Heaven knows what it would have led to. I should have seen the world, met all the best people, and perhaps found a good job at the end of it.

IX

_October 13, 1911_

Back again at Radchester. As usual there are a few rows on. Two of the parson members of the staff are quarrelling because Tomson (the High Church one) will call the Communion "Eucharist," and will talk about the "Catholic" instead of the Protestant Church. Mathews on the other hand calls the altar the communion-table. A battle royal is in progress. I believe Tomson will have to go. This is a very Low Church school and any one who crosses himself or indulges in any ritualistic practices is looked upon as inclined to papistry.

It seems a strange thing to make such a fuss about. Both Mathews and Tomson are good, conscientious workers, and the school will be the poorer if either of them leaves. Another row concerns me. It is commonly thought by some members of my form that Chichester has been "sneaking" to me about their methods of work, a pretty laughable idea when one thinks how little Chichester cares about any one in the school, much less in his form. We never talk about school matters at all. We talk books and philosophy. Anyway, I have lately been boycotted by my form, by Montague and Haye and most of the school.

I'm reading Stevenson's and Meredith's Letters. I've got rather a passion for letter-writers. The Paston Letters, Dorothy Osborne's, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's, Horace Walpole's, Gray's, Lamb's and Cowper's all gave me lasting pleasure. One feels at last as if one really was beginning to see the inner workings of the minds of great geniuses when you close a volume of their intimate correspondence--but I prefer Stevenson's and Meredith's to all the others. They show such wonderful cheeriness in the face of adversity, such love for their friends and wives, such an interest in literature and in life. They are so splendidly natural and speak from the heart. We hear the very voice of the man we have learnt to love in public talking intimately in his own home.

We have just had an amazing masters' meeting in which the following motions were carried:

(i) Masters are forbidden to see more of one boy than another!

(ii) Masters are forbidden to have any boys in their room except for "turned" work.

(iii) Masters are forbidden to hear "turned" work in their rooms except between 9 and 1.

(iv) Lower School boys are not to be allowed in any House other than their own without a written leave from their House-masters.

(v) Boys must never be given the run of a master's rooms.

(vi) In future every one will stand all through the offertory in the Communion service.

There were heaps more, but these were the funniest. Anything more priceless than the solemn conclave of old dears passing these resolutions one by one, with here and there an amendment (always rejected without discussion) I never saw. If they think that all this tomfoolery will prevent me from seeing all I want to of Tony, they are mistaken. It wasn't altogether aimed at me. Apparently quite a number of the younger masters make friends with the boys. For the life of me I can't see why they shouldn't. Anyway these "rules" aren't going to make any difference to me. All through this ridiculous meeting I found myself repeating Edith Sichel's priceless aphorism: "There is nothing that cannot be imagined by people of no imagination." It ought to be inscribed over the mantelpiece of every Common Room.

_December 19, 1911_

We have had some good field-days lately, notably one where I was in command of a small force, which was told off to harass a large advancing troop by repeated ambushes. I nearly ran my people off their feet, but it was rare fun. We just appeared in the most unlikely places, forced the enemy to waste time by deploying, let them get quite close and then scattered and met again farther back along the line and repeated the manœuvre. The whole business was overwhelmingly successful for we delayed their advance until it ceased to be of any effect. I prefer this sort of tactical scheme to the usual one of merely putting out outposts or an advanced guard. The only way to interest boys in the Corps is to give them some one to fight against every time. I found this out when I started the night scouts. I have been allowed twenty minutes nightly in which to practise my specialist scouts in getting used to working in the dark. It was futile merely getting them accustomed to using their night eyes; unless we opposed one another and tried to track each other down, the whole business failed of its object.

As soon as we had sides they all became ten times more enthusiastic: both their sight and hearing became more acute: there were some titanic struggles and much good resulted from these tactics. It is an eerie business, searching on a pitch-black night inch by inch, over a ploughed field, for an enemy that you expect to pounce upon you from behind if he gets the chance. Of course Hallows and Co. did their best to prevent my having these boys out, on the ground that they would catch cold--and then that they might get into mischief. For once I carried my point and had my own way.

I notice that I'm leaving the school buildings far less frequently than I used to do when I first came here. I have very little temptation to go off to Scarborough for a "razzle" at the theatre or the Winter Gardens. About twice a term suffices now. I don't quite know why. Of course I'm reading much more and I sit up taking notes for books that I mean some day to write. I still refuse to play "bridge." I go to the "club" and sing, dance, eat and drink on rare occasions, but normally I don't go out of my rooms much at night.

I don't spend more time in Common Room than I can help. I just play my games, work out my schemes in form on the teaching of English and mathematics, write innumerable letters and try my hand occasionally on original topics for articles.

Of late the _Pioneer_ has taken several sporting sketches of mine, which has put a new heart in me.

_December 31, 1911_

Last term ended very quietly. I saw a great deal of Tony in spite of all the silly new regulations.

It was grand to be back in London again: I spent five days with the Chichesters at Hampton and we feasted right royally and went to two shows a day. On Christmas Eve I went down to see my father and mother, who were staying in Bath for the waters. After the riotous orgies at the Chichesters I thought I should find Bath boring. I arrived late at night and was struck by the lights twinkling from hills on every side. My people had got "digs" close under the shadow of the Abbey. I was glad to come to a place which had such a wonderful eighteenth-century flavour, and expected to find out many new truths about Jane Austen, Fielding, Sheridan, Doctor Johnson, Beau Nash and all the other celebrities, but no one in Bath seemed to take any notice of the past. The present was gay enough for them.

So many Army men retire to Bath with a progeny of daughters all of marriageable age, but possessed of no dowry, that they almost wait in a queue outside the station to fasten on to any strange young man who appears. It took me some time to fathom this. I found every one exceedingly kind and hospitable. I could wish I were a better dancer. These Assembly Room shows are glorious, but they make me abominably nervous. I feel all the time gauche and awkward in the presence of these resplendent youngsters: they can all dance superbly, and in the first place I am afraid that the cheapness of my clothes militates against me, and then that no girl could possibly really want to dance with me when she could secure one of these subalterns or rich young squires. All the same once I got into the swing of the thing it was all right. I always found some partners who fitted my steps exactly: I endured agonies with some tall and unresponsive creatures, who obviously were only giving me a "duty" dance, but with small girls like Ruth Harding I got on famously. To enjoy a dance to the full one ought to know one's partner intimately and dance with her for the entire night. At the last two dances I got Ruth to dance with me most of the evening, which apparently scandalized some of the clique which I am supposed to have joined. There can be no place in the British Isles where tongues wag so unceasingly as in Bath. It is like sitting through a scene in "The School for Scandal" to hear the modern Lady Sneerwell and Mrs. Candour chattering about faithless wives. Not one in a hundred of their stories could possibly be true, or else we are living in a most depraved age. It is the first time in my life that I've heard people openly discuss these things. I can't say that I like it. Ruth is a good little soul. She knows nothing about eighteenth-century history but is quite keen to learn. We have explored Prior Park and Castle Combe, and have searched every street in order to find out where all the greater celebrities lived in the great days. In some ways the place has not changed at all since the age of Jane Austen. At one of the Assembly Room dances I met exact replicas of Catherine Morland, Emma, and Mr. Collins. They almost employed the same phraseology. Quaintly enough, not one of them had ever read a word of Jane Austen.

My father and mother love the life here. We take my mother out in a Bath chair into the gardens and she gazes at all the smartly dressed passers-by. My father has got to know all the local clergy: sometimes he takes duty at one of the churches. We have a great number of callers and there is never a lack of anything to do. It is a welcome change from the dullness of our village at home. One of the joys of life here for me is beagling. I go out three times a week with the Wick or the Trowbridge Beagles. I doubt whether there are a finer set of people living than the average beaglers.

They are usually poor (they can't afford to ride), they are passionately addicted to open-air life and are hence sound in mind and limb. Although one feels at times after a heavy run as if one would drop dead from fatigue before one got home, yet the sense of exhaustion is soon ousted by a sense of wild exhilaration in the hunt, the scenery, the people you meet, and the physical fitness of your body. It is so splendid just to turn up at some country house and there, among the sherry and the sandwiches, get into conversation with some flapper or schoolboy or old colonel, all of whom are full of tales of past historic runs and anticipations of the day's sport.

One day we ran from Trowbridge right on to Salisbury Plain, and lost the hounds in the dark by Edington Church--and had to scour the lonely hills for them until eight o'clock. This was on a night when I had promised to take Ruth and two other girls to hear the D'Oyley Carte Company. I got to the theatre at a quarter to ten.

_January 19, 1912_

I spent most of my days with Ruth for the rest of the holidays, doing all the correct things, having tea _tête-à-tête_ at Fortt's, going to the theatre on Friday nights (the fashionable night in Bath), walking over Lansdown and down the Avon valley, beagling together (that was best of all: she is a superb athlete) and dancing together whenever possible. Her parents and mine have become firm friends and we are as thick as thieves. I am not in love with her, but she's about the best pal I ever had, which is saying a good deal.

I hear that Bath has been waiting anxiously to hear the announcement of our engagement. What a place! Why on earth can't a man have a girl friend without eternally being suspected of marriage? Ruth and I have never kissed or done anything except treat each other as bosom friends, which we certainly are and probably always shall be.

In spite of the insidious temptations of Bath, to crawl round looking at the shops all day, or to explore the highways and by-ways of Somerset, I have both read and written a good deal.

This seems to me the Golden Age of the novel. There are about thirty or forty people writing really great stuff, full of a philosophy of life, candid, human, extraordinarily real and interesting: their books do not sell in great numbers, but they occupy a place on one's bookshelf that one wants to refer to almost daily. All the other thousand or so novelists don't count at all. I hate the unreality and false glamour of these popular writers: they are like the halfpenny papers which cater for a low and vicious, ignorant taste, only to be compared with the shoddier melodramas that we see on the cinema.

I often wonder how these old ladies get on who crowd daily into Smith's Library in Milsom Street and ask the girl behind the counter for an interesting book. She must have her work cut out to remember the million or so different connotations that the word "interesting" bears to the circulating library subscriber. I wonder how many of them would like to plunge into the inconsequent medley which constitutes my diary. When you see one old lady bearing off under her arm a copy of "The Revelations of a Duchess," Samuel Butler's "Life and Habit," Gertie de S. Wentworth-James's latest narcotic, and some of A. C. Benson's Essays, it almost frights you to think of the aggregate effect of such a mixture. Talk about mixing drinks! The reading habit seems to be ingrained in the British public, but I cannot help wondering how much of the best stuff is ever understood by people who commonly feed on garbage.

I should like to publish a sort of annual guide to be called "The Hundred Best Books of the Year," to be divided up into sections for Parsons, Doctors, Schoolmasters, Socialists, Capitalists, Politicians, Flappers, Nursemaids, Factory Hands, Maiden Aunts, Subalterns, and Young Matrons. I wonder how many would overlap. Not many, I fancy.

I don't think criticisms of books make any appreciable difference to their sale. I have seen heaps of novels, damned by all the papers, go into five or six large editions and others that have been acclaimed as sheer genius die at birth. I wonder, for instance, how many copies of E. C. Booth's "Cliff End" were sold during the first year after its appearance, yet I can't remember any novel which made so deep an impression on me at the time. Yet on every bookstall you see copies of "Paul the Pauper," which every sane man would condemn as simply silly. It has sold over 200,000 copies in two years. It seems incredible: there isn't a single human character in the book, not a single natural sentence: everything is untrue to life in every respect. The passions are laid on with a trowel. There are Grandisonian heroes and double-dyed villains: coincidences of a kind which violate every natural law occur on every other page. The only thing that I can compare to this amazing book is a Lyceum tragedy and the wit of a music-hall comedian. I wonder if England will ever become educated.

From what I have seen of girls in Bath I should say that the system of education in girls' schools is no better than that of boys: they certainly know a little more about English literature, because their mistresses read aloud to them passages out of the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray. They also devote more time to poetry than we do, but they forget it all as soon as they leave school. They don't see that these books taken altogether form a complete introduction to life. The average girl I have danced with lately seems to have read nothing at all. Her conversation invariably runs on the same lines. Have I been in London lately? Don't I just adore Du Maurier and Martin Harvey? Do I rink? Do I hunt? Do I punish my boys very severely? Am I sorry that I am not in the Army? Do I like dancing? Do I like girls? Am I an outrageous flirt? Would I like to sit out somewhere more secluded than this rather open spot? Am I certain that I had enough supper? Isn't the way Jim Dainton and Sophie Harrington are behaving "perfectly disgusting"? Don't I love Irene Fairhaven? Isn't Joyce, or Corelli Windyatt, or Moritz, or Stanislaus Würm, or whoever is playing on this particular evening, divine, topping, ducky, dinky, perfectly sweet, ripping--or whatever the word of the moment is? Shall I be at the Morrisons' on Tuesday or the Dohertys' on Thursday?

I get most infernally tired of all this claptrap. No one ever says anything that he or she means: it is all superficial. The girls think of nothing but their frocks and the effect they are making on their partners. I want to talk sense and instead have to rattle on with sheer nonsense. I suppose I am getting prosy and sedate, but I do just love talking about books and different views on life. I seem to have no ready change of small-talk. Of course one cannot expect to get to know all the people with whom one dances, but this constant chopping and changing is rotten. I want to keep to one girl, Ruth for preference, all through the night. Then one doesn't have to think of something polite to say: if we feel like silence we just keep silent, if we want to talk we talk, about anything that comes into our heads, serious or gay. We understand each other's moods without having to go through a long rigmarole of introductory icebreaking. One great advantage of Bath is the number of clubs and places where one can browse among the reviews and periodicals of all sorts. How I manage to keep abreast of any modern work in a hole like Radchester, I can't think. Without the _Times Literary Supplement_ and the book reviews in the _Telegraph_ and _Morning Post_ I should be entirely at sea. And yet with all these incentives to read, the ignorance of these townspeople is extraordinary. They nearly all rely on their bookseller for everything they read. They leave the choice always to him.

X

_February 23, 1912_

It was appalling to have to leave the comforts of Bath for the wilds of Radchester. It has been the worst Easter term so far within the remembrance of man. We were snowed right up from the beginning and House-fights of snowballing soon ceased to amuse. We are simply shivering in our rooms. The whole place is one medley of germs. Every conceivable sort of contagious disease is raging. It is useless trying to teach anybody anything except individually, for there is no continuity, one boy drops one day, another the next, six more the day after.