Escape, and Other Essays - Arthur Christopher Benson (free novel reading sites .txt) 📗

was incredibly good; not one word or hint of moral evil did I ever hear there during the whole two years I spent there, so that I left the school as innocent as I had entered it.

But it was a place of terrors and solitude. There were rules which one did not know, and might unawares break. I did not, I believe, make a single real friend there. I liked a few of the boys, but was wholly bent on guarding my inner life from everyone. The work was always easy to me, the masters were good-natured and efficient. But I lived entirely in dreams of the holidays--home had become a distant heavenly place; and I recollect waking early in the summer mornings, hearing the scream of peacocks in a neighbouring pleasaunce, and thinking with a sickening disgust of the strict, ordered routine of the place, no one to care about, dull work to be done, nothing to enjoy or to be interested in. There were games, but they were not much organised, and I seldom played them. I wandered about in free times in the grounds, and the only times of delight that I recollect were when one buried oneself in a book in the library, and dived into imaginations.

The place was well managed; we were wholesomely fed; but there had grown up a strange kind of taboo about many of the things we were supposed to eat. I had a healthy appetite, but the tradition was that all the food was unutterably bad, adulterated, hocussed. The theory was that one must just eat enough to sustain life. There was, for instance, an excellent tapioca pudding served on certain days; but no one was allowed to eat it. The law was that it had to be shovelled into envelopes and afterwards cast away in the playground. I do not know if the masters saw this--it was never adverted upon--and I did it ruefully enough. The consequence was that one lived hungrily in the midst of plenty, and food became the one prepossession of life.

I was a delicate boy in those days, and used often to be sent off to the sanatorium with bad throats and other ailments. It was a little, old-fashioned house in Mortlake, and the matron of it had been an old servant of our own. She was the only person there whom I regarded with real affection, and to go to the sanatorium was like heaven. One had a comfortable room, and dear Louisa used to embrace and kiss me stealthily, provide little treats for me, take me out walks. I have spent many hours happily in the little walled garden there, with its big box trees, or gazing from a window into the street, watching the grocer over the way set out his shop- window.

Of incidents, tragic or comic, I remember but few. I saw a stupid boy vigorously caned with a sickening extremity of horror. I recollect a "school licking" being given to an ill-conditioned boy for a nasty piece of bullying. The boys ranged themselves down the big schoolroom, and the culprit had to run the gauntlet. I can see his ugly, tear-stained face coming slowly along among a shower of blows. I joined in with a will, I remember, though I hardly knew what he had done. I remember a few afternoons spent at the houses of friendly masters; but otherwise it was all a drab starved sort of level, a life lived by a rule, with no friendships, no adventures; I marked off the days before the holidays on a little calendar, simply bent on hiding what I was or thought or felt from everyone, with a fortitude that was not in the least stoical. What I was afraid of I hardly know; my aim was to be absolutely inoffensive and ordinary, to do what everyone else did, to avoid any sort of notice. I was a strange mixture of indifference and sensitiveness. I did not in the least care how I was regarded, I had no ambitions of any kind, did not want to be liked, or to succeed, or to make an impression; while I was very sensitive to the slightest comment or ridicule. It seems strange to me now that I should have hated the life with such an intensity of repugnance, for no harm or ill-usage ever befell me; but if that was life, well, I did not like it! I trusted no one; I neither wanted nor gave confidences. The term was just a dreary interlude in home life, to be lived through with such indifference as one could muster.

I spent two years there; and remember my final departure with my brother. I never wanted to see or hear of anyone there again-- masters, servants, or boys. It was a case of good-bye for ever, and thank God! And I remember with what savage glee and delicious anticipation I saw the last of the high-walled house, with its roofs and wings, its great gate-posts and splendid cedars. I could laugh at its dim terrors on regaining my freedom; but I had not the least spark of gratitude or loyalty; such kindnesses as I received I had taken dumbly, never thinking that they arose out of any affection or interest, but treating them as the unaccountable choice of my elders;--we stopped for an instant at the little sanatorium--that had been a happy place at least--and I was tearfully hugged to Louisa's ample bosom, Louisa alone being a little sorry that I should be so glad to get away.

I do not think that the life there, sensible, healthy, and well- ordered as it was, did me much good. I was a happy enough boy in home life, but had little animal spirits, and none of the boisterous, rough-and-tumble ebullience of boyhood. I was shy and sensitive; but I doubt if it was well that interest, enjoyment, emotion, should all have been so utterly starved as they were. It made me suspicious of life, and incurious about it; I did not like its loud sounds, its combative merriment, its coarse flavours; the real life, that of observation, imagination, dreams, fancies, had been hunted into a corner; and the sense that one might incur ridicule, enmity, severity, dislike, harshness, had filled the air with uneasy terrors. I came away selfish, able--I had won a scholarship at Eton with entire ease--innocent, childish, bewildered, wholly unambitious. The world seemed to me a big, noisy, stupid place, in which there was no place for me. The little inner sense of which I have spoken was hardly awake; it had had its first sight of humanity, and it disliked it; it was still solitary and silent, finding its own way, and quite unaware that it need have any relation with other human beings.


3


Then came Eton. Into which big place I drifted again in a state of mild bewilderment. But big as Eton is--it was close on a thousand boys, when I went there--at no time was I in the least degree conscious of its size as an uncomfortable element. The truth is that Eton runs itself on lines far more like a university than a school: each house is like a college, with its own traditions and its own authority. There is very little intercourse between the younger boys at different houses, and there is an instinctive disapproval among the boys themselves of external relations. The younger boys of a house play together, to a large extent work together, and live a common life. It is tacitly understood that a boy throws in his lot with his own house, and if he makes many friends outside he is generally unpopular, on the ground that he is thought to find his natural companions not good enough for him. Neither have boys of different ages much to do with each other; each house is divided by parallel lines of cleavage, so that it is not a weltering mass of boyhood, but a collection of very clearly defined groups and circles.

Moreover, in my own time there was no building at Eton which could hold the whole school, so that on no occasion did I ever see the school assembled. There were two chapels, the schoolrooms were considerably scattered; even on the occasions when the headmaster made a speech to the school, he did not even invite the lower boys to attend, while there was no compulsion on the upper boys to be present, so that it was not necessary to go, unless one thought it likely to be amusing.

I was myself on the foundation, one of the seventy King's Scholars, as we were called; we lived in the old buildings; we dined together in the college hall, a stately Gothic place, over four centuries old, with a timbered roof, open fireplaces, and portraits of notable Etonians. We wore cloth gowns in public, and surplices in the chapel. It was all very grand and dignified, but we were in those days badly fed, and very little looked after. There were many ancient and curious customs, which one picked up naturally, and never thought them either old or curious. For instance, when I first went there, the small boys, three at a time, waited on the sixth form at their dinner, being called servitors, handing plates, pouring out beer, or holding back the long sleeves of the big boys' gowns, as they carved for themselves at the end of the table. This was abolished shortly after my arrival as being degrading. But it never occurred to us that it was anything but amusing; we had the fun of watching the great men at their meal, and hearing them gossip. I remember well being kindly but firmly told by the present Dean of Westminster, then in sixth form, that I must make my appearance for the future with cleaner hands and better brushed hair!

We were kindly and paternally treated by the older boys; I was assigned as a fag to Reginald Smith, now my publisher. I had to fill and empty his bath for him, make his tea and toast, call him in the morning, and run errands. In return for which I was allowed to do my work peacefully in his room, in the evenings, when the fags' quarters were noisy, and if I had difficulties about my work, he was always ready to help me. So normal a thing was it, that I remember saying indignantly to my tutor, when he marked a false quantity in one of my verses, "Why, sir, my fagmaster did that!" He laughed, and said, "Take my compliments to your fagmaster, and tell him that the first syllable of senator is short!"

We lived as lower boys in a big room with cubicles, which abutted on the passage where the sixth form rooms were. It was a noisy place, with its great open fireplace and huge oak table. If the noise was excessive, the sixth form intervened; and I remember being very gently caned, in the company of the present Dean of St. Paul's, for making a small bonfire of old blotting-paper, which filled the place with smoke.

The liberty, after the private school, was astonishing. We had to appear in school at certain hours, not very numerous; and some extra work was done with the private tutor; but there was no supervision, and we were supposed to prepare our work and do our exercises, when and as we could. There were a few compulsory games, but otherwise we were allowed to do exactly as we liked. The side streets of Windsor were out of bounds, but we were allowed to go up the High Street; we had free access to the castle and park and all the surrounding country. On half holidays--three a week--our names were