Part 1 (2/2)
The memories Kipps carried from that school into after life were set in an atmosphere of stuffiness and mental muddle; and included countless pictures of sitting on creaking forms bored and idle, of blot licking and the taste of ink, of torn books with covers that set one's teeth on edge, of the slimy surface of the laboured slates, of furtive marble-playing, whispered story-telling, and of pinches, blows, and a thousand such petty annoyances being perpetually ”pa.s.sed on” according to the custom of the place, of standing up in cla.s.s and being hit suddenly and unreasonably for imaginary misbehaviour, of Mr. Woodrow's raving days, when a scarcely sane injustice prevailed, of the cold vacuity of the hour of preparation before the bread-and-b.u.t.ter breakfast, and of horrible headaches and queer, unprecedented, internal feelings resulting from Mrs. Woodrow's motherly rather than intelligent cookery. There were dreary walks, when the boys marched two by two, all dressed in the mortarboard caps that so impressed the widowed mothers; there were dismal half-holidays when the weather was wet and the spirit of evil temper and evil imagination had the pent boys to work its will on; there were unfair, dishonourable fights and miserable defeats and victories, there was bullying and being bullied. A coward boy Kipps particularly afflicted, until at last he was goaded to revolt by incessant persecution, and smote Kipps to tolerance with whirling fists.
There were memories of sleeping three in a bed, of the dense leathery smell of the schoolroom when one returned thither after ten minutes'
play, of a playground of mud and incidental sharp flints. And there was much furtive foul language.
”Our Sundays are our happiest days,” was one of Woodrow's formulae with the inquiring parent, but Kipps was not called in evidence. They were to him terrible gaps of inanity--no work, no play, a drear expanse of time with the mystery of church twice and plum duff once in the middle. The afternoon was given up to furtive relaxations, among which ”Torture Chamber” games with the less agreeable, weaker boys figured. It was from the difference between this day and common days that Kipps derived his first definite conceptions of the nature of G.o.d and heaven. His instinct was to evade any closer acquaintance as long as he could.
The school work varied, according to the prevailing mood of Mr. Woodrow.
Sometimes that was a despondent lethargy; copy-books were distributed or sums were ”set,” or the great mystery of bookkeeping was declared in being, and beneath these superficial activities lengthy conversations and interminable guessing games with marbles went on while Mr. Woodrow sat inanimate at his desk heedless of school affairs, staring in front of him at unseen things. At times his face was utterly inane, at times it had an expression of stagnant amazement, as if he saw before his eyes with pitiless clearness the dishonour and mischief of his being....
At other times the F.S.Sc. roused himself to action, and would stand up a wavering cla.s.s and teach it, goading it with bitter mockery and blows through a chapter of Ann's ”First French Course,” or ”France and the French,” or a Dialogue about a traveller's was.h.i.+ng, or the parts of an opera-house. His own knowledge of French had been obtained years ago in another English private school, and he had refreshed it by occasional weeks of loafing and mean adventure in Dieppe. He would sometimes in their lessons. .h.i.t upon some reminiscence of these brighter days, and then he would laugh inexplicably and repeat French phrases of an unfamiliar type.
Among the commoner exercises he prescribed the learning of long pa.s.sages of poetry from a ”Poetry Book,” which he would delegate an elder boy to ”hear,” and there was reading aloud from the Holy Bible, verse by verse--it was none of your ”G.o.dless” schools!--so that you counted the verses up to your turn and then gave yourself to conversation--and sometimes one read from a cheap History of this land. They did, as Kipps reported, ”loads of catechism.” Also there was much learning of geographical names and lists, and sometimes Woodrow in an outbreak of energy would see these names were actually found on a map. And once, just once, there was a chemistry lesson--a lesson of indescribable excitement--gla.s.s things of the strangest shape, a smell like bad eggs, something bubbling in something, a smash and stench, and Mr. Woodrow saying quite distinctly--they thrashed it out in the dormitory afterwards--”d.a.m.n!” followed by the whole school being kept in, with extraordinary severities, for an hour....
But interspersed with the memories of this grey routine were certain patches of brilliant colour--the holidays, his holidays, which in spite of the feud between their seniors, he spent as much as possible with Sid p.o.r.nick, the son of the irascible black-bearded haberdasher next door. They seemed to be memories of a different world. There were glorious days of ”mucking about” along the beach, the siege of unresisting Martello towers, the incessant interest of the mystery and motion of windmills, the windy excursions with boarded feet over the yielding s.h.i.+ngle to Dungeness lighthouse--Sid p.o.r.nick and he far adrift from reality, smugglers and armed men from the moment they left Great Stone behind them--wanderings in the hedgeless reedy marsh, long excursions reaching even to Hythe, where the machine guns of the Empire are forever whirling and tapping, and to Rye and Winchelsea, perched like dream-cities on their little hills. The sky in these memories was the blazing hemisphere of the marsh heavens in summer, or its wintry tumult of sky and sea; and there were wrecks, real wrecks, in it (near Dymchurch pitched high and blackened and rotting were the ribs of a fis.h.i.+ng smack flung aside like an empty basket when the sea had devoured its crew); and there was bathing all naked in the sea, bathing to one's armpits and even trying to swim in the warm sea-water (spite of his aunt's prohibition), and (with her indulgence) the rare eating of dinner from a paper parcel miles away from home. Toke and cold ground rice pudding with plums it used to be--there is no better food at all. And for the background, in the place of Woodrow's mean, fretting rule, were his aunt's spare but frequently quite amiable figure--for though she insisted on his repeating the English Church Catechism every Sunday, she had an easy way over dinners that one wanted to take abroad--and his uncle, corpulent and irascible, but sedentary and easily escaped. And freedom!
The holidays were indeed very different from school. They were free, they were s.p.a.cious, and though he never knew it in these words--they had an element of beauty. In his memory of his boyhood they shone like strips of stained gla.s.s window in a dreary waste of scholastic wall, they grew brighter and brighter as they grew remoter. There came a time at last and moods when he could look back to them with a feeling akin to tears.
The last of these windows was the brightest, and instead of the kaleidoscopic effects of its predecessors its glory was a single figure.
For in the last of his holidays, before the Moloch of Retail Trade got hold of him, Kipps made his first tentative essays at the mysterious shrine of Love. Very tentative they were, for he had become a boy of subdued pa.s.sions, and potential rather than actual affectionateness.
And the objects of these first stirrings of the great desire was no other than Ann p.o.r.nick, the head of whose doll he and Sid had broken long ago, and rejoiced over long ago, in the days when he had yet to learn the meaning of a heart.
--3
Negotiations were already on foot to make Kipps into a draper before he discovered the lights that lurked in Ann p.o.r.nick's eyes. School was over, absolutely over, and it was chiefly present to him that he was never to go to school again. It was high summer. The ”breaking up” of school had been hilarious; and the excellent maxim, ”Last Day's Pay Day,” had been observed by him with a scrupulous attention to his honour. He had punched the heads of all his enemies, wrung wrists and kicked s.h.i.+ns; he had distributed all his unfinished copybooks, all his school books, his collection of marbles and his mortarboard cap among such as loved him; and he had secretly written in obscure pages of their books, ”remember Art Kipps.” He had also split the anaemic Woodrow's cane, carved his own name deeply in several places about the premises, and broken the scullery window. He had told everybody so often that he was to learn to be a sea captain that he had come almost to believe the thing himself. And now he was home, and school was at an end for him for evermore.
He was up before six on the day of his return, and out in the hot sunlight of the yard. He set himself to whistle a peculiarly penetrating arrangement of three notes supposed by the boys of the Hastings Academy and himself and Sid p.o.r.nick, for no earthly reason whatever, to be the original Huron war-cry. As he did this he feigned not to be doing it, because of the hatred between his uncle and the p.o.r.nicks, but to be examining with respect and admiration a new wing of the dustbin recently erected by his uncle--a pretence that would not have deceived a nestling tomt.i.t.
Presently there came a familiar echo from the p.o.r.nick hunting-ground.
Then Kipps began to sing, ”Ar pars eight tra-la, in the lane be'ind the church.” To which an unseen person answered, ”Ar pars eight it is, in the lane be'ind the church.” The ”tra-la” was considered to render this sentence incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In order to conceal their operations still more securely, both parties to this duet then gave vent to a vocalisation of the Huron war-cry again, and after a lingering repet.i.tion of the last and shrillest note, dispersed severally, as became boys in the enjoyment of holidays, to light the house fires for the day.
Half-past eight found Kipps sitting on the sunlit gate at the top of the long lane that runs towards the sea, clas.h.i.+ng his boots in a slow rhythm, and whistling with great violence all that he knew of an excruciatingly pathetic air. There appeared along by the churchyard wall a girl in a short frock, brown-haired, quick-coloured, and with dark blue eyes. She had grown so that she was a little taller than Kipps, and her colour had improved. He scarcely remembered her, so changed was she since last holidays--if indeed he had seen her last holidays, a thing he could not clearly remember. Some vague emotion arose at the sight of her. He stopped whistling and regarded her, oddly tongue-tied.
”He can't come,” said Ann, advancing boldly. ”Not yet.”
”What--not Sid?”
”No. Father's made him dust all his boxes again.”
”What for?”
”I dunno. Father's in a stew 'smorning.”
”Oh!”
Pause. Kipps looked at her, and then was unable to look at her again.
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