Return of the Native
By JAMES ASTON.
WELL, so now they are off. You remember that essay of Max Beerbohm's—the one in which he is going out to dinner in a cab (dressed, one imagines him, in a pair of those rather tight trousers, and a tie like a white bootlace, and—yes—a black waistcoat with tails : what a 'cello sweep the shirt front had, as it ended in that boot- jack of a waistcoat !). He is going out to dinner with, perhaps, a cattleya in his buttonhole ; and it is going to be the sort of dinner that even poetry can't describe ; something that culminates in fruitful peace. with brandy and cigars, something—well, something Max Beerbohm. He is sitting in the cab, washed, buttoned; exquisitely anticipatory and contented in the evening air ; he is sitting there taking a smug interest in the surrounding traffic : when another cab goes by. It is a cab in which a small boy crouches on a playbox. He sees it, the pale face, betrayed, captive, being taken back to school ; he gets a momentary glimpse of Tartarus and bondage ; and ah ! he exclaims, leaning back among the pre- prandial cushions : " How right ! How proper !—The child is going back to school, and I am not."
They are off again. The Black Marias are rolling across London, converging upon the termini with their grisly burdens. The parents have turned Judas again before the little pleading faces. So many thousand innocents are being packed away to Herod.
It is true that we can get much pleasure by con- templating their horrid fortune, by reflecting on the tor; meats which we have ourselves miraculously outlived, escaped. Nor is it unnatural that we should. be anxious to inflict the torture on our children, for there is no other way of getting -back our own. Too few of us, however, remember .another class whose oblation takes place at the same -moment, who are lifted up before the altar by the same series of trains : a class from whom we can wreak an almost equal satisfaction in the contented mind. They are the schoolmasters. All over London the taxis have been dragging their unfortunate victims to the pogrom, but here and there, in every score or so of taxis, there has been a slightly superior vehicle.. The pale faces are there, but older ; and the playbox has given place to a bag of golf clubs or a wireless set. They are allowed to take a few comforts with them, a little extra latitude in consideration of their age.
A curious class ; we think about them too little. The guinea-pig is independent of its mother in three days. We ourselves, if we are lucky, finally ,escape the. Alma Mater after twenty years. But the schoolmaster is doomed to suckle till lie dies.
Recruited, as he must be, from the criminal classes and from the ranks of those who can find no other em- ployment, yet we have scarcely any right to treat him with the general misprision. We cannot in equity allow ourselves to hoot him, or to wish him a worse ill than he has achieved already. He is not odious, but far more curious and -pitiable. For eight months of the year, since he can remember, he has never seen his home. He does not know what a show of daffodils there always is in the orchard, and has never seen the may-fly hatch. Nor can we be quite certain that he enjoys his degradation. It is true that he can relish the situation of the small boys, of the less favoured inmates (who can still be caned), with a greater since more consistent detail than is possible to us. It is true that he has in a sense embraced his bondage voluntarily, or rather acquiesced in it for lack of any other employment ; but we cannot be sure that he is really happy. He sits there in his taxi, with the portable radio, after two months' freedom on parole, and Iris face is pale.
Perhap%he is thinking about the Common room, about Mr. Baggledromc who dries his handkerchiefs in front of the fire, and Mr. Suaginbrod whose hair grows out of his nose. .Then there is the new man, Hibblebang„ who wears grey flannel trousers, with a belt, and a pull-over tucked down inside them. He plays dance records on a very loud gramophone all day, and pretends to talk Russian by ending all his words with " ski." Mr. Hibblebang has a motor-car whose internals he keeps on the Masters' billiard table ; but that makes no difference, for the cues were all taken away. long ago to make a rose trellis in the school play. Then there is the matron, whose proboscis plunges forward into intrigue ; the eyes on either side well out in a contiguous emulation. The Matron will be receiving the duchess as his taxi grates upon the gravel drive.
He sits in his taxi, the wage-slave, the pale face, the grown-up betrayed, and imagines his arrival. The par- lourman will carry his box upstairs to the bedroom which is his only privacy. He will follow the man in, and there will be the red wall-paper (coming off) and the mustard coloured washhand-stand and the iron bed. The mould crawls gently over the cracked ceiling- from which the gas depends. Little boys are so destructive that repairing bills are high, and the Headmaster cannot afford to keep his assistants' rooms in order. (No matter : the Doctor consoles himself by thinking that masters should be men, They cannot be so effeminate as to expect a boudoir.) Paleface will follow the man in ; will lay his hat upon the bed. He will exchange some dismal pleasantry with the fellow, taking up again as if it had never snapped the thread of last term's. local gossip. He will hear Mr. Hibblebang playing the gramophone already, playing " Good Night, Vienna," stamping and crooning. Mr. Baggledrome is blowing his nose. .Mr. Snaginbrod is telling his humorous story about the boy who, when asked to define . . . .
But oh, he will say, not .yet, 0 Lord, not yet ! It will. not be absolutely necessary to face Mr. Baggledrome_ before dinner. So he will go out and wander desolately about the desolate playing fields : fields in which the cricket nets have given place to the goal posts, a dreary. change. He will skirt the monkey puzzler. He will find himself at last inside a classroom which has been con- verted into a kind of warehouse, where several of the maids will be unpacking and chalking mystic numbers on the soles of shoes. Small boys, bilious from their last debauch in freedom, will be playing Yo-Yo two seconds after their instruments have been unpacked. Others will be directing eXpensive models of Sir Malcolm Campbell's latest motor-ear into head-on collisions, amid a babel of yells. The four, new boys, not yet brutalized or resigned, will be biting the under-matron in a last desperate effort to regain their lost felicity.
Paleface must fill in the time till dinner. He will bend all the faculties of his immortal soul to the task of sepa- rating Piggin from Snigger—an ignoble task. They will have been attempting very sensibly to take each other's lives. He will file with Piggin and Snigger, and all the others, into the school chapel, where they will all together recite their lugubrious verses about the Devil. He will join Mr. Baggledrome in the Private Side, where he and the other masters are compelled to celebrate with the Doctor and his wife the opening dinner of every term: the meal of boiled mutton and fruit salad, with one glass of port. The Doctor, once triple blue but now a martyr to gout, will come upon them before his wife. They will stand uneasily in a circle, discussing the county championship. The Doctor's wife, dashing and discon- tented with the scholastic life (she would like to live at Claridge's), will make. a dramatic entry in her ermine cloak. They will go into the dining room and they will say Grace.
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