Autobiographical fiction; England -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
“Rickie, can I give these sandwiches to the boot boy?” said the one.
“He would love them.”
“The gong! Be quick! The gong!”
“Are you smoking before lunch?” said the other.
But they had got into heaven, and nothing could get them out of it.
Others might think them surly or prosaic. He knew. He could remember
every word they spoke. He would treasure every motion, every glance of
either, and so in time to come, when the gates of heaven had shut, some
faint radiance, some echo of wisdom might remain with him outside.
As a matter of fact, he saw them very little during his visit. He
checked himself because he was unworthy. What right had he to pry, even
in the spirit, upon their bliss? It was no crime to have seen them
on the lawn. It would be a crime to go to it again. He tried to keep
himself and his thoughts away, not because he was ascetic, but because
they would not like it if they knew. This behaviour of his suited them
admirably. And when any gracious little thing occurred to them—any
little thing that his sympathy had contrived and allowed—they put it
down to chance or to each other.
So the lovers fall into the background. They are part of the distant
sunrise, and only the mountains speak to them. Rickie talks to Mr.
Pembroke, amidst the unlit valleys of our over-habitable world.
IV
Sawston School had been founded by a tradesman in the seventeenth
century. It was then a tiny grammar-school in a tiny town, and the
City Company who governed it had to drive half a day through the woods
and heath on the occasion of their annual visit. In the twentieth
century they still drove, but only from the railway station; and
found themselves not in a tiny town, nor yet in a large one, but
amongst innumerable residences, detached and semi-detached, which
had gathered round the school. For the intentions of the founder had
been altered, or at all events amplified, instead of educating the
“poore of my home,” he now educated the upper classes of England.
The change had taken place not so very far back. Till the nineteenth
century the grammar-school was still composed of day scholars from the
neighbourhood. Then two things happened. Firstly, the school’s property
rose in value, and it became rich. Secondly, for no obvious reason, it
suddenly emitted a quantity of bishops. The bishops, like the stars
from a Roman candle, were all colours, and flew in all directions,
some high, some low, some to distant colonies, one into the Church
of Rome. But many a father traced their course in the papers; many a
mother wondered whether her son, if properly ignited, might not burn
as bright; many a family moved to the place where living and education
were so cheap, where day-boys were not looked down upon, and where
the orthodox and the up-to-date were said to be combined. The school
doubled its numbers. It built new class-rooms, laboratories and a
gymnasium. It dropped the prefix “Grammar.” It coaxed the sons of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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