Chapter I: The Jacobean

M ICHAEL found the Lower Third at St. James’ a jolly class. He
was so particularly young that he was called ‘Baby,’ but with
enough obvious affection to make the dubious nickname a
compliment. To be sure, Mr. Braxted would often cackle jokes in
a raucous voice about his age, and if Michael made a false
quantity he would grumble and say he was paid as a schoolmaster
not as a wet-nurse. However, Mr. Braxted was such a dandy and
wore such very sharply creased and tight trousers and was so
well set up and groomed that the class was proud of his neat
appearance, and would inform the Upper Third that Foxy Braxted
did, at any rate, look a gentleman, a distinction which the
Upper Third could scarcely claim for their own form-master.

Michael liked the greater freedom of a public school. There
were no home-books to be signed by governesses: there was no
longer any taboo upon the revelation of Christian names.
Idiosyncrasies were overlooked in the vaster society of St.
James’. The senior boys paid no attention to the juniors, but
passed them by scornfully as if they were grubs not worth the
trouble of squashing. There was no longer the same zest in the
little scandals and petty spitefulness of a private school.
There was much greater freedom in the choice of one’s friends,
and Michael no longer felt bound to restrict his intimacy to
the twin Macalisters and Norton. Sometimes in the ‘quarter’ (as
the break was now called) Michael would stand on the top of the
steps that led down from the great red building into
the school-ground. From this point he would survey the huge
green field with its archipelago of countless boys. He would
think how few of their names he knew and from what distances
many of them travelled each morning to school. He could wander
among them by himself and not one would turn a curious head.
He was at liberty even to stare at a few great ones whom
athletic prowess had endowed already with legendary divinity,
so that among small boys tales were told of their daring and
their immortality gradually woven into the folk-lore of St.
James’. Sometimes a member of the first fifteen would speak to
Michael on a matter of athletic business.

“What’s your name?”

“Fane,” Michael would answer, hoping the while that his contemporaries might be passing and see this colloquy between a man and a god.

“Oh, yes,” the hero would carelessly continue, “I’ve got you down already. Mind you turn up to Little Side at 1.45 sharp.”

Little Side was the football division that included the smallest third of the school. Sometimes the hero would ask another question, as:

“Do you know a kid called Smith P.L.?”

And Michael with happy blushes would be able to point out Smith P.L. to the great figure.

Michael played football on Little Side with great regularity,
rushing home to dinner and rushing off again to change and be
in the field by a quarter to two. He could run very fast and
for that reason the lords of Little Side made him play forward,
a position for which the slightness of his body made him
particularly unsuited. One day, however, he managed to
intercept a pass, to outwit a three-quarter, to dodge the
full-back and to score a try, plumb between the posts. Luckily
one of the heroes had strolled down from Pelion that afternoon
to criticize Little Side

and Michael was promoted from the scrum to play three-quarter
back on the left wing, in which position he really enjoyed
football very much indeed.

It fell out that year that the St. James’ fifteen was the most invincible ever known in the school’s history, and every Saturday afternoon, when there was a home match, Michael in rain or wind or pale autumnal sunlight would take up his position in the crowd of spectators to cheer and shout and urge St. James’ to another glorious victory. Match after match that year earned immortal fame in the school records, sending the patriotic Jacobeans of every size and age home to a happy tea in the rainy twilight. Those were indeed afternoons of thunderous excitement. How everybody used to shout—School—Schoo-oo-ol—Schoo-ol! Play up—Schoo-oo-ool! James! Ja-a-a-mes! Oh, go low. Kick! Touch! Forward! Held! Off-side! Go in yourself! Schoo-ool!

How Michael’s heart beat at the thud of the Dulford forwards in
their last desperate rush towards the School ‘twenty-five.’
Down went the School halves, and over them like a torrent swept
the Dulford pack. Down went the three-quarters in a plucky
attempt to sit on the ball. Ah! There was an unanimous cry of
agony, as everybody pressed against the boundary rope and
craned towards the touch-line until the posts creaked before
the strain. Not in vain had those gallant three-quarters been
smeared with mud and bruised by the boots of the surging
Dulford pack; for the ball had been kicked on too far and Cutty
Jackson, the School back, had fielded it miraculously. He was
going to punt. ‘Kick!’ yelled the despairing spectators. And
Jackson, right under the disappointed groans of the Dulford
forwards whose muscles cracked with the effort to fetch him
down, kicked the ball high, high into the silvery November air.
Up with that spinning greasy oval travelled the hopes of the
onlookers, and, as it fell safely into touch,
from all round the field rose like a rocket a huge sigh of
relief that presently broke into volleys and pæans of
exultation, as half-time sounded with St. James’ a goal to the
good. How Michael admired the exhausted players when they
sucked the sliced lemons and lay about in the mud; how he
envied Cutty Jackson, when the lithe and noble fellow leaned
against the goalpost and surveyed his audience. ‘Sidiness’
could be easily forgiven after that never-to-be-forgotten kick
into touch. Why, thought Michael, should not he himself be one
day ranked as the peer of Cutty Jackson? Why should not he,
six or seven years hence, penetrate the serried forces of
Dulford and score a winning try, even as the referee’s whistle
was lifted to sound ‘time’? Ambition woke in Michael, while he
surveyed upon that muddy field the prostrate forms of the
fifteen, like statues in a museum. Then play began and
personal desires were merged in the great hope of victory for
the School. Hardly now could the spectators shout, so tense
was the struggle, so long was each full minute of action.
Michael’s brain swam with excitement. He saw the Dulford team
as giants bull-necked and invulnerable. He saw the School
halves shrinking, the School three-quarters shiver like grass
and the School forwards crumple before the Dulford charges.
They were beaten: the untarnished record was broken: Michael
could have sobbed for his side. Swifter than swallows, the
Dulford three-quarters flew down the now all too short field
of play. They were in! Look! they were dancing in triumph. A
try to Dulford! Disconsolately the School team lined up behind
their disgraced goal. Jauntily the Dulford half walked away
with the shapely leather. The onlookers held their breath, as
the ball, evilly accurate, dangerously direct, was poised in
position for the kick at goal. The signal was given: the
School team made their rush: the ball rose in the air: hung
for a moment motionless, hit a goalpost, quivered and fell
back. One goal to a
try—five points to three—and St. James’ was leading. Then
indeed did the School play up. Then indeed did every man in
the team ‘go low’: and for the rest of the game to neither
side did any advantage incline. Grunts and muttered oaths, the
thud of feet, the smack of wet leather lasted continually. In
the long line-ups for the throw in from touch, each man marked
his man viciously: the sweat poured down from hanging jaws:
vests were torn, knees were grimed with mud and elbows were
blackened. The scrimmages were the tightest and neatest ever
watched, and neither scrum could screw the other a foot. At
last the shrill whistle of the referee proclaimed the end of
an immortal contest. There were cheers for the victors by the
vanquished, by the vanquished for their conquerors. The
spectators melted away into the gathering mist and rain, a
flotsam of black umbrellas. In a few moments the school-ground
was desolate and silent. Michael, as he looked at the grass
ploughed into mud by the severe struggle, thought what superb
heroes were in his School team; and just as he was going home,
content, he saw a blazer left on a post. It was Jackson’s, and
Michael, palpitating with the honour, ran as fast as he could
to the changing-room through the echoing cloister beneath the
school.

“I say, Jackson, you left this on the ground,” he said shyly.

Jackson looked up from a conversation with the Dulford full-back.

“Oh, thanks very much,” he murmured, and went on with his talk.

Michael would not have missed that small sentence for any dignity in the world.

During his first term at St. James’, Michael went on with his
study of the art of dancing, begun during the previous winter
without much personal satisfaction and with a good deal of
self-consciousness. These dancing lessons
took place in the hall at Randell’s, and Michael revisited his
old school with a new confidence. He found himself promoted to
stay beyond the hour of pupilage in order pleasantly to pass
away a second hour by dancing formally with the sisters and
cousins of other boys. He had often admired last year those
select Jacobeans who, buttoning white gloves, stood in a
supercilious group, while their juniors clumped through the
Ladies’ Chain uninspired by the swish of a single petticoat.
Now he was of their sacred number. It was not surprizing that
under the influence of the waltz and the Circassian circle and
the schottische and the quadrille and the mazurka that Michael
should fall in love. He was not anxious to fall in love: many
times to other boys he had mocked at woman and dilated upon
the folly of matrimony. He had often declared on his way to
and from school that celibacy should be the ideal of every
man. He used to say how little he could understand the habit
of sitting in dark corners and kissing. Even Miss Carthew he
grew accustomed to treat almost with rudeness, lest some
lynx-eyed friend of his should detect in his relation with her
a tendency towards the sentimental. However, Muriel in her
salmon-coloured, accordion-pleated frock bowled Michael off
his superior pedestal. He persuaded himself that this was
indeed one of those unchangeable passions of which he read or
rather did read now. This great new emotion was certainly
Love, for Michael could honestly affirm that as soon as he saw
Muriel sitting on a chair with long black legs outstretched
before her, he loved her. No other girl existed, and when he
moved towards her for the pleasure of the next dance, he felt
his heart beating, his cheeks on fire. Muriel seemed to like
him after a fashion. At any rate, she cordially supported him
in a project of long-deferred revenge upon Mr. Macrae of the
Upper Fourth at Randell’s, and she kept ‘cavé’ while Michael
tried the door of his empty class-room off the top gallery
of the hall. It was unlocked, and Michael crept in and quickly
threw the contents of Mr. Macrae’s desk out of the window and
wrote on the blackboard: ‘Mr. Macrae is the silliest ass in
England.’ Then he and Muriel walked demurely back to join the
tinkling mazurka down below and, though many enquiries were
set on foot as to the perpetrator of the outrage, Michael was
never found out.

Michael’s passion for Muriel increased with every evening of
her company, and he went so far as to make friends with a very
unpopular boy who lived in her road, for the sake of holding
this unpopular boy in close conversation by his threshold on
the chance of seeing Muriel’s grey muff in the twilight. Muriel
was strangely cold for the heroine of such a romance, and
indeed Michael only once saw her really vivacious, which was
when he gave her a catapult. Yet sometimes she would make a
clandestine appointment and talk to him for twenty minutes in a
secluded terrace, so that he consoled himself with a belief in
her untold affection. Michael read Don Quixote again on account
of Dulcinea del Toboso, and he was greatly moved by the
knight’s apostrophes and declamations. He longed for a
confidant and was half inclined to tell Stella about Muriel;
but when he came to the point Stella was engrossed in a new
number of Little Folks and Michael feared she was unworthy of
such a trust. The zenith of his passion was attained at the
Boarders’ dance to which he and Muriel and even Stella were
invited. Michael had been particularly told by Miss Carthew
that he was to dance four times at least with Stella and never
to allow her to be without a partner. He was in despair and
felt, as he encountered the slippery floor with Stella hanging
nervously on his arm, that round his neck had been tied a
millstone of responsibility. There in a corner was Muriel
exquisite in yellow silk, and in her hair a yellow bow. Boys
flitted round her, like bees before a hive, and here was he
powerless with this wretched sister.

“You wait here,” said Michael. “I’ll be back in half a jiffy.”

“Oh, no,” pouted Stella. “You’re not to leave me alone, Michael. Miss Carthew said you were to look after me.”

Michael groaned.

“Do you like ices?” he asked desperately. “You do, don’t you?”

“No,” said Stella. “They make my tooth ache.”

Michael almost wept with chagrin. He had planned to swap with Stella for unlimited ices all her dances with him. Then he saw a friend whom he caught hold of, and with whom he whispered fiercely for a moment.

“I say, you might dance with my kiddy sister for a bit. She’s awfully fond of ices, so you needn’t really dance.”

The friend said he preferred to remain independent at a dance.

“No, I say, do be a decent chap,” begged Michael. “Just dance with her once and get another chap to dance with her after you’ve had your shot. Oh, do. Look here. What’ll you swap for the whole of her programme?”

The friend considered the proposition in its commercial side.

“Look here,” Michael began, and then, as he nervously half turned his head, he saw the crowd thickening about Muriel. He waved his arm violently in the hope that she would realize his plight and keep the rivals at arm’s length. “Look here,” he went on, “you know my bat with the whalebone splice?” This bat was Michael’s most precious possession, and even as he bartered it for love, he smelt the fragrant linseed-oil of the steeped bandages which now preserved it for summer suns.

The friend’s eyes twinkled greedily.

“I’ll swap that bat,” said Michael, “if you’ll make sure my kiddy sister hasn’t got a single empty place on her programme all the dance.”

“All right,” said the friend. And as he was led up to Stella, Michael whispered hurriedly, when the introduction had been decorously made:

“This chap’s frightfully keen on you, Stella. He simply begged me to introduce him to you.”

Then from the depths of Michael’s soul a deep-seated cunning inspired him to add:

“I wouldn’t at first, because he was awfully in love with another girl and I thought it hard cheese on her, because she’s here to-night. But he said he’d go home if he didn’t dance with you. So I had to.”

Michael looked enquiringly at Stella, marked the smirk of satisfaction on her lips, then recklessly, almost sliding over the polished floor, he plunged through Muriel’s suitors and proffered his programme. They danced together nearly all the evening, and alas, Muriel told him that she was going to boarding-school next term. It was a blow to Michael, and the dance programme with Muriel’s name fourteen times repeated was many times looked at with sentimental pangs each night of next term before Michael went to bed a hundred miles away from Muriel at her boarding-school.

However, Muriel and her porcelain-blue eyes and the full bow of
her lips and the slimness and girlishness of her were forgotten
in the complexities of life at a great public school. Michael
often looked back to that first term in the Lower Third as a
period of Arcadian simplicity, a golden age. In his second term
Michael after an inconspicuous position in the honest heart of
the list was not moved up, for which he was very glad, as the
man who took the Upper Third was by reputation a dull driver
without any of the amenities by which Foxy Braxted seasoned
scholastic life.

One morning, when the Lower Third had been pleasantly dissolved in laughter by Foxy’s caustic jokes at the expense of a boy who had pronounced the Hebrides as a dissyllable, following a hazardous guess that the capital of New South Wales was New York, the door of the class-room opened abruptly and Dr. Brownjohn the Headmaster sailed in.

“Is there a boy called Fane in this class?” he demanded deeply.

The laughter had died away when the tip of Dr. Brownjohn’s nose glistened round the edge of the door, and in the deadly silence Michael felt himself withering away.

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Braxted, cheerfully indicating Michael with his long forefinger.

“Tell him to pack up his books and go to Mr. Spivey in the Hall. I’ll see him there,” rumbled Dr. Brownjohn as, after transfixing the Lower Third with a glance of the most intense ferocity, he swung round and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

“You’d better take what you’re doing to Mr. Spivey,” said Mr. Braxted in his throatiest voice, “and tell him with my compliments you’re an idle young rascal. You can get your books at one o’clock.”

Michael gathered together pens and paper, and left his desk in the Lower Third.

“Good-bye, sir,” he said as he went away, for he knew Foxy Braxted really rather liked him.

“Good-bye,” cackled his late form-master.

The Lower Third followed his exit from their midst with an
united grin of farewell, and Michael was presently interviewing
Mr. Spivey in the Hall. He realized that he was now a member of
that assorted Purgatory, the Special, doomed to work there for
a term of days or weeks and after this period of intensive
culture to be planted out in a higher form beyond the ordinary
mechanics of promotion. Mostly in the Special class Michael
worshipped the two gods εἱ and ἑἁν ,

and his whole life was devoted to the mastery of Greek
conditional sentences in their honour.

The Special form at St. James’ never consisted of more than
fourteen or fifteen boys, all of whom were taught individually,
and none of whom knew when they would be called away. The
Special was well called Purgatory. Every morning and every
afternoon the inmates toiled away at their monotonous work,
sitting far removed from one another in the great echoing hall,
concentrated for the most part on εἱ and ἑἁν . Every morning
and every afternoon at a fatal moment the swinging doors of the
lower end of the Hall would clash together, and the heavy tread
of Dr. Brownjohn would be heard as he rolled up one of the two
aisles between the long desks. Every morning and every
afternoon Dr. Brownjohn would sit beside some boy to inspect
his work; and every morning and every afternoon hearts would
beat the faster, until Dr. Brownjohn had seized his victim,
when the other boys would simultaneously work with an almost
lustful concentration.

Dr. Brownjohn was to Michael the personification of majesty,
dominion, ferocity and awe. He was huge of build, with a long
grey beard to which adhered stale morsels of food and the acrid
scent of strong cigars. His face was ploughed and fretted with
indentations volcanic: scoriac torrents flowed from his eyes,
his forehead was seared and cleft with frowning crevasses and
wrinkled with chasms. His ordinary clothes were stained with
soup and rank with tobacco smoke, but over them he wore a full
and swishing gown of silk. When he spoke his voice rumbled in
the titanic deeps of his body, or if he were angry, it burst
forth in an appalling roar that shook the great hall. His
method of approach was enough to frighten anyone, for he would
swing along up the aisle and suddenly plunge into a seat beside
the chosen boy, pushing him along the form with his black bulk.
He would seize the boy’s pen and after scratching
his own head with the end of the holder would follow word by
word the liturgy of εἱ and ἑἁν , tapping the paper between the
lines as he read each sentence, so that at the end of his
examination the page was peppered with dots of ink. Dr.
Brownjohn, although he had a voice like ten bulls, was himself
very deaf and after bellowing in a paralyzing bass he would
always finish a remark with an intoned ‘um?’ of tenor
interrogation to exact assent or answer from his terrified
pupil. When due reverence was absent from Michael’s worship of
εἱ and ἑἁν Dr. Brownjohn would frown at him and roar and
bellow and rumble and thunder and peal his execration and
contempt. Then suddenly his fury would be relieved by this
eruption, and he would affix his initials to the bottom of the
page—S. C. B. standing for Samuel Constantine Brownjohn—after
which endorsement he would pat Michael’s head, rumble an
unintelligible joke and plunge down beside another victim.

One of Michael’s greatest trials was his inability to convince Miss Carthew how unutterably terrific Dr. Brownjohn really was. She insisted that Michael exaggerated his appearance and manners, and simply would not believe the stories Michael told of parents and guardians who had trembled with fear when confronted by the Old Man. In many ways Michael found Miss Carthew was very contentious nowadays, and very seldom did an evening pass without a hot argument between him and her. To be sure, she used to say it was Michael who had grown contradictory and self-assertive, but Michael could not see that he had radically altered since the first moment he saw Miss Carthew, now nearly four years ago.

Michael’s purgatory in the Special continued for several weeks,
and he grew bored by the monotony of his work that was only
interrupted by the suspense of the Headmaster’s invasions.
Sometimes Dr. Brownjohn would make his dreadful descent early
in the ‘hour,’ and then relieved
from the necessity to work with such ardour, Michael would
gaze up to the raftered roof of the hall and stare at the long
lancet windows filled with the coats of arms in stained glass
of famous bygone Jacobeans. He would wonder whether in those
windows still unfilled a place would one day be found for his
name and whether years and years hence, boys doing Greek
conditional sentences would speculate upon the boyhood of
Charles Michael Saxby Fane. Then Mr. Spivey would break into
his dreams with some rather dismal joke, and Michael would
make blushing amends to εἱ and ἑἁν by writing as quickly as he
could three complete conditional sentences in honour and
praise of the twin gods. Mr. Spivey, the master in charge of
the Special, was mild and good-humoured. No one could fail to
like him, but he was not exhilarating; and Michael was greatly
pleased when one morning Mr. Spivey informed him that he was
to move into the Shell. Michael was glad to dodge the Upper
Third, for he knew that life in the Shell under Mr. Neech
would be an experience.

Chaps had often said to Michael, “Ah, wait till you get into old Neech’s form.”

“Is he decent?” Michael would enquire.

“Some chaps like him,” the chaps in question would ambiguously reply.

When Mr. Spivey introduced Michael to the Shell, Mr. Neech was sitting in his chair with his feet on the desk and a bandana handkerchief over his face, apparently fast asleep. The inmates of the Shell were sitting, vigorously learning something that seemed to cause them great hardship; for every face was puzzled and from time to time sighs floated upon the class-room air.

Mr. Spivey coughed nervously to attract Mr. Neech’s attention,
and when Mr. Neech took no notice, he tapped nervously on the
desk with Mr. Neech’s ruler. Somewhere in the back row of desks
a titter of mirth was faintly audible.
Mr. Neech was presumably aroused with great suddenness by Mr.
Spivey’s tapping and swung his legs off the desk and, sitting
bolt upright in his chair, glared at the intruders.

“Oh, the Headmaster has sent Fane from the Special,” Mr. Spivey nervously explained.

Mr. Neech threw his eyes up to the ceiling and looked as if Michael’s arrival were indeed the last straw.

“Twenty-six miserable boys are already having a detestable and stultifying education in this wretched class,” lamented Mr. Neech. “And now comes a twenty-seventh. Very well. Very well. I’ll stuff him with the abominable jargon and filthy humbug. I’ll cram him with the undigested balderdash. Oh, you unhappy boy,” Mr. Neech went on, directly addressing Michael. “You unfortunate imp and atom. Sit down, if you can find a desk. Sit down and fill your mind with the ditchwater I’m paid to teach you.”

Mr. Spivey had by this time reached the door and with a nervous nod he abruptly vanished.

“Now then everybody,” said Mr. Neech, closing his lips very tightly in a moment’s pause and then breaking forth loudly. “You have had one quarter of an hour to learn the repetition you should all have learned last night. Begin, that mooncalf with a dirty collar, the boy Wilberforce, and if any stupid stoat or stockfish boggles over one word, I’ll flay him. Begin! The boy Fane can sit still. The others stand up!” shouted Mr. Neech. “Now the boy Wilberforce!

_Tityre tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi_——
Go on, you bladder of idiocy.”

Michael watched the boy Wilberforce concentrate all his
faculties upon not making a single mistake, and hoped that he
would satisfy this alarming master. While Wilberforce spoke the
lines of the Eclogue, panting between each hexameter, Mr. Neech
strode up and down the room with
his arms crossed behind him, wagging the tail of his gown.
Sometimes he would strike his chin and, looking upwards,
murmur to himself the lines with an expression of profound
emotion. Wilberforce managed to get through, and another boy
called Verney took up the Eclogue successfully, and so on
through the class it was successfully sustained.

“You pockpuddings, you abysmal apes,” Mr. Neech groaned at his class. “Why couldn’t you have learned those lines at home? You idle young blackguards, you pestilent oafs, you fools of the first water, write them out. Write them out five times.”

“Oh, sir,” the Shell protested in unison.

“Oh, sir!” Mr. Neech mimicked. “Oh, sir! Well, I’ll let you off this time, but next time, next time, my stars and garters, I’ll flog any boy that makes a single mistake.”

Mr. Neech was a dried-up, snuff-coloured man, with a long thin
nose and stringy neck and dark piercing eyes. He always wore a
frock-coat green with age and a very old top-hat and very shiny
trousers. He read Spanish newspapers and second-hand-book
catalogues all the way to school and was never seen to walk
with either a master or a boy. His principal hatreds were
Puseyism and actors; but as two legends were extant, in one of
which he had been seen to get into a first-class railway
carriage with a copy of the Church Times and in the other of
which he had been seen smoking a big cigar in the stalls of the
Alhambra Theatre, it was rather doubtful whether his two
hatreds were as deeply felt as they were fervently expressed.
He was reputed to have the largest library in England outside
the British Museum and also to own seven dachshunds. He was a
man who fell into ungovernable rages, when he would flog a boy
savagely and, the flogging done, fling his cane out of the
window in a fit of remorse. He would set impositions of
unprecedented length, and revile himself for ruining the
victim’s handwriting. He would
keep his class in for an hour and mutter at himself for a fool
to keep himself in as well. Once, he locked a boy in at one
o’clock, and the boy’s mother wrote a long letter to complain
that her son had been forced to go without his dinner. Legend
said that Mr. Neech had been reprimanded by Dr. Brownjohn on
account of this, which explained Mr. Neech’s jibes at the four
pages of complaint from the parents that were supposed
inevitably to follow his mildest rebuke of the most malignant
boy.

Michael enjoyed Mr. Neech’s eccentricities after the drabness
of the Special. He was lucky enough to be in Mr. Neech’s good
graces, because he was almost the only boy who could say in
what novel of Dickens or Scott some famous character occurred.
Mr. Neech had a conception of education quite apart from the
mere instilling of declensions and genders and ‘num’ and
‘nonne’ and ‘quin’ and εἱ and ἑἁν . He taught Geography and
English History and English Literature, so far as the school
curriculum allowed him. Divinity and English meant more to Mr.
Neech than a mere hour of Greek Testament and a pedant’s
fiddling with the text of Lycidas. Michael had a dim
appreciation of his excellence, even in the Shell: he
identified him in some way with Tom Brown’s Schooldays, with
prints of Eton and Westminster, with Miss Carthew’s tales of
her brother on the Britannia. Michael recognized him as a
character in those old calf-bound books he loved to read at
home. Once Mr. Neech called a boy a dog-eared Rosinante, and
Michael laughed aloud and when fiercely Mr. Neech challenged
him, denying he had ever heard of Rosinante, Michael soon
showed that he had read Don Quixote with some absorption. After
that Mr. Neech put Michael in one of the favoured desks by the
window and would talk to him, while he warmed his
parchment-covered hands upon the hot-water pipes. Mr. Neech was
probably the first person to impress Michael with the beauty
of the past or rather to give him an impetus to arrange his
own opinions. Mr. Neech, lamenting the old days long gone,
thundering against modernity and denouncing the whole system
of education that St. James’ fostered, was almost the only
schoolmaster with a positive personality whom Michael ever
encountered. Michael had scarcely realized, until he reached
the Shell, in what shadowy dates of history St. James’ was
already a famous school. Now in the vulgarity of its crimson
brick, in the servility with which it truckled to bourgeois
ideals, in the unimaginative utility it worshipped, Michael
vaguely apprehended the loss of a soul. He would linger in the
corridors, reading the lists of distinguished Jacobeans, and
during Prayers he would with new interest speculate upon the
lancet windows and their stained-glass heraldry, until vaguely
in his heart grew a patriotism more profound than the mere joy
of a football victory, a patriotism that submerged Hammersmith
and Kensington and made him proud that he himself was
veritably a Jacobean. He was still just as eager to see St.
James’ defeat Dulford at cricket, just as proud to read that
St. James’ had won more open scholarships at the Universities
than some North-country grammar school; but at the same time
he was consoled in the event of defeat by pride in the
endurance of his school through so many years of English
History.

It was about this time that Michael saw in a second-hand shop a
print of the tower of St. Mary’s College, Oxford. It was an old
print and the people small as emmets, who thronged the base of
that slim and lovely tower, were dressed in a bygone fashion
that very much appealed to Michael. This print gave him the
same thrill he experienced in listening to Mr. Neech’s
reminiscences or in reading Don Quixote or in poring over the
inscriptions of famous Jacobeans. Michael had already taken it
as an axiom that one day he would go to Oxford, and now he made
up his mind he would go to St. Mary’s College. At this moment
people were hurrying past that tower, even as they hurried in
this grey print and even as Michael himself would one day
hurry. Meanwhile, he was enjoying the Shell and Mr. Neech’s
eccentricities and the prospect of winning the Junior Form
Cricket Shield, a victory in which Michael would participate
as scorer for the Shell.

Summer suns shone down upon the green playground of St. James’
rippling with flannelled forms. The radiant air was filled with
merry cries, with the sounds of bat and ball, with boyhood in
action. In the great red mass of the school buildings the
golden clock moved on through each day’s breathless hour of
cricket. The Junior Shield was won by the Shell, and the proud
victors, after a desperate argument with Mr. Neech, actually
persuaded him to take his place in the commemorative
photograph. School broke up and the summer holidays began.