The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works

by Arthur Machen

  Some philosophers have affirmed that lunatic doctors (or mental specialists) grow in time to a certain resemblance to their patients, or, in more direct language, become half mad themselves. There seems a good deal to be said for the position; indeed, it is probably a more noxious madness to swear a man into perpetual imprisonment in the company of maniacs and imbeciles because he sings in his bath and will wear a purple dressing-gown at dinner than to fancy oneself Emperor of China. However this may be, it is very certain that in many cases the schoolmaster is nothing more or less than a bloated schoolboy: the beasts are, radically, the same, but morbid conditions have increased the venom of the former’s sting. Indeed, it is not uncommon for well-wishers to the great Public School System to praise their favourite masters in terms which admit, nay, glory in, this identity. Read the memorial tributes to departed Heads in a well-known and most respectable Church paper. “To the last he was a big boy at heart,” writes Canon Diver of his friend, that illiterate old sycophant who brought up the numbers of the school to such a pitch by means of his conciliator policy to Jews, Turks, heretics and infidels that there was nothing for it but to make him a bishop. “I always thought he seemed more at home in the playing fields than in the sixth-form room.… He had all the English boy’s healthy horror of anything approaching pose or eccentricity.… He could be a severe disciplinarian when severity seemed necessary, but everybody in the school knew that a well-placed ‘boundary,’ a difficult catch or a goal well won or well averted would atone for all but the most serious offences.” There are many other points of resemblance between the average master and the average boy: each, for example, is intensely cruel, and experiences a quite abnormal joy in the infliction of pain. The baser boy tortures those animals which are not méchants. Tales have been told (they are hushed up by all true friends of the “System”) of wonderful and exquisite orgies in lonely hollows of the moors, in obscure and hidden thickets: tales of a boy or two, a lizard or a toad, and the slow simmering heat of a bonfire. But these are the exceptional pleasures of the virtuosi; for the average lad there is plenty of fun to be got out of his feebler fellows, of whom there are generally a few even in the healthiest community. After all, the weakest must go to the wall, and if the bones of the weakest are ground in the process, that is their fault. When some miserable little wretch, after a year or two of prolonged and exquisite torture of body and mind, seeks the last escape of suicide, one knows how the Old Boys will come forward, how gallantly they will declare that the days at the “dear old school” were the happiest in their lives; how “the Doctor” was their father and the Sixth their nursing-mother; how the delights of the Mahomedans’ fabled Paradise are but grey and weary sport compared with the joys of the happy fag, whose heart, as the inspired bard of Harrow tells us, will thrill in future years at the thought of the Hill. They write from all quarters, these brave Old Boys: from the hard-won Deanery, result of many years of indefatigable attack on the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith; from the comfortable villa, the reward of commercial activity and acuteness on the Stock Exchange; from the courts and from the camps; from all the high seats of the successful; and common to them all is the convincing argument of praise. And we all agree, and say there is nothing like our great Public Schools, and perhaps the only dissentient voices are those of the father and mother who bury the body of a little child about whose neck is the black sign of the rope. But let them be comforted: the boy was no good at games, though his torments were not bad sport while he lasted.

  Mr. Horbury was an old Luptonian; he was, in the words of Canon Diver, but “a big boy at heart,” and so he gave orders that Meyrick was to be sent in the study directly he came in, and he looked at the clock on the desk before him with satisfaction and yet with impatience. A hungry man may long for his delayed dinner almost with a sense of fury, and yet at the back of his mind he cannot help being consoled by the thought of how wonderfully he will enjoy the soup when it appears at last. When seven struck, Mr. Horbury moistened his lips slightly. He got up and felt cautiously behind one of the bookshelves. The object was there, and he sat down again. He listened; there were footfalls on the drive. Ah! There was the expected ring. There was a brief interval, and then a knock. The fire was glowing with red flashes, and the wretched toad was secured.

  “Now, Ambrose, you must understand quite definitely that this sort of thing isn’t going to be tolerated any longer. This is the third time during this term that you have been late for lockup. You know the rules: six o’clock at latest. It is now twenty minutes past seven. What excuse have you to make? What have you been doing with yourself? Have you been in the Fields?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Why not? You must have seen the Resolution of the Sixth on the notice-board of the High School? You know what it promised any boy who shirked rocker? ‘A good sound thrashing with tuds before the First Thirty.’ I am afraid you will have a very bad time of it on Monday, after Graham has sent up your name to the Room.”

  There was a pause. Mr. Horbury looked quietly and lengthily at the boy, who stood white and sick before him. He was a rather sallow, ugly lad of fifteen. There was something of intelligence in his expression, and it was this glance that Chesson, the Headmaster, had resented. His heart beat against his breast, his breath came in gasps and the sweat of terror poured down his body. The master gazed at him, and at last spoke again.

  “But what have you been doing? Where have you been all this time?”

  “If you please, Sir, I walked over to Selden Abbey.”

  “To Selden Abbey? Why, it’s at least six miles away! What on earth did you want to go to Selden Abbey for? Are you fond of old stones?”

  “If you please, Sir, I wanted to see the Norman arches. There is a picture of them in Parker’s Glossary.”

  “Oh, I see! You are a budding antiquarian, are you, Ambrose, with an interest in Norman arches—eh? I suppose we are to look forward to the time when your researches will have made Lupton famous? Perhaps you would like to lecture to the school on St. Paul’s Cathedral? Pray, what are your views as to the age of Stonehenge?”

  The wit was heavy enough, but the speaker’s position gave a bitter sting to his lash. Mr. Horbury saw that every cut had told, and, without prejudice to more immediate and acuter pleasures, he resolved that such biting satire must have a larger audience. Indeed, it was a long time before Ambrose Meyrick heard the last of those wretched Norman arches. The method was absurdly easy. “Openings” presented themselves every day. For example, if the boy made a mistake in construing, the retort was obvious:

  “Thank you, Meyrick, for your most original ideas on the force of the aorist. Perhaps if you studied your Greek Grammar a little more and your favourite Glossary of Architecture a little less, it would be the better. Write out ‘Aorist means indefinite’ five hundred times.”

  Or, again, perhaps the Classic Orders were referred to. Mr. Horbury would begin to instruct the form as to the difference between Ionic and Doric. The form listened with poor imitation of interest. Suddenly the master would break off:

  “I beg your pardon. I was forgetting that we have a great architectural authority amongst us. Be so kind as to instruct us, Meyrick. What does Parker say? Or perhaps you have excogitated some theories of your own? I know you have an original mind, from the extraordinary quantities of your last copy of verse. By the way, I must ask you to write out ‘The e in venio is short’ five hundred times. I am sorry to interfere with your more important architectural studies, but I am afraid there is no help for it.”

  And so on; while the form howled with amusement.

  But Mr. Horbury kept these gems for future and public use. For the moment he had more exciting work on hand. He burst out suddenly:

  “The fact is, Ambrose Meyrick, you’re a miserable little humbug! You haven’t the honesty to say, fair and square, that you funked rocker and went loafing about the country, looking for any mischief you could lay your hands on. Instead of that you make up this co
ck-and-bull story of Selden Abbey and Norman arches—as if any boy in his senses ever knew or cared twopence about such things! I hope you haven’t been spending the afternoon in some low public-house? There, don’t speak! I don’t want to hear any more lies. But, whatever you have been doing, you have broken the rules, and you must be taught that the rules have to be kept. Stand still!”

  Mr. Horbury went to the bookshelf and drew out the object. He stood at a little distance behind Meyrick and opened proceedings with a savage cut at his right arm, well above the elbow. Then it was the turn of the left arm, and the master felt the cane bite so pleasantly into the flesh that he distributed some dozen cuts between the two arms. Then he turned his attention to the lad’s thighs and finished up in the orthodox manner, Meyrick bending over a chair.

  The boy’s whole body was one mass of burning, stinging torture; and, though he had not uttered a sound during the process, the tears were streaming down his cheeks. It was not the bodily anguish, though that was extreme enough, so much as a far-off recollection. He was quite a little boy, and his father, dead long since, was showing him the western doorway of a grey church on a high hill and carefully instructing him in the difference between “billetty” and “chevronny.”

  “It’s no good snivelling, you know, Ambrose. I daresay you think me severe, but, though you won’t believe me now, the day will come when you will thank me from your heart for what I have just done. Let this day be a turning-point in your life. Now go to your work.”

  II

  It was strange, but Meyrick never came in the after days and thanked his uncle for that sharp dose of physical and mental pain. Even when he was a man he dreamed of Mr. Horbury and woke up in a cold sweat, and then would fall asleep again with a great sigh of relief and gladness as he realised that he was no longer in the power of that “infernal old swine,” “that filthy, canting, cruel brute,” as he roughly called his old master.

  The fact was, as some old Luptonians remarked, the two had never understood one another. With the majority of the boys the High Usher passed for a popular master enough. He had been a distinguished athlete in his time, and up to his last days at the school was a football enthusiast. Indeed, he organised a variety of the Lupton game which met with immense popularity till the Head was reluctantly compelled to stop it; some said because he always liked to drop bitter into Horbury’s cup when possible; others—and with more probability on their side—maintained that it was in consequence of a report received from the school doctor to the effect that this new species of football was rapidly setting up an old species of heart disease in the weaker players.

  However that might be, there could be no doubt as to Horbury’s intense and deep-rooted devotion to the school. His father had been a Luptonian before him. He himself had gone from the school to the University, and within a year or two of taking his degree he had returned to Lupton to serve it as a master. It was the general opinion in Public School circles that the High Usher had counted for as much as Chesson, the Headmaster, if not for more, in the immense advance in prestige and popularity that the school had made; and everybody thought that when Chesson received the episcopal order Horbury’s succession was a certainty. Unfortunately, however, there were wheels within wheels, and a total stranger was appointed, a man who knew nothing of the famous Lupton traditions, who (it was whispered) had been heard to say that “this athletic business” was getting a bit overdone. Mr. Horbury’s friends were furious, and Horbury himself, it was supposed, was bitterly disappointed. He retreated to one of the few decent canonries which have survived the wave of agricultural depression; but those who knew him best doubted whether his ecclesiastical duties were an adequate consolation for the loss of that coveted Headmastership of Lupton.

  To quote the memoir which appeared in the Guardian soon after his death, over some well-known initials:

  “His friends were shocked when they saw him at the Residence. He seemed no longer the same man, he had aged more in six months, as some of them expressed themselves, than in the dozen years before. The old joyous Horbury, full of mirth, an apt master of word-play and logic-fence, was somehow ‘dimmed,’ to use the happy phrase of a former colleague, the Dean of Dorchester. Old Boys who remembered the sparkle of his wit, the zest which he threw into everything, making the most ordinary form-work better fun than the games at other schools, as one of them observed, missed something indefinable from the man whom they had loved so long and so well. One of them, who had perhaps penetrated as closely as any into the arcana of Horbury’s friendship (a privilege which he will ever esteem as one of the greatest blessings of his life), tried to rouse him with an extravagant rumour which was then going the round of the popular Press, to the effect that considerable modifications were about to be introduced into the compulsory system of games at X., one of the greatest of our great Public Schools. Horbury flushed; the old light came into his eyes; his friend was reminded of the ancient war-horse who hears once more the inspiring notes of the trumpet. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, and there was a tremor in his voice. ‘They wouldn’t dare. Not even Y. (the Headmaster of X.) would do such a scoundrelly thing as that. I won’t believe it.’ But the flush soon faded and his apathy returned. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it were so. Our day is past, I suppose, and for all I know they may be construing the Breviary and playing dominoes at X. in a few years’ time.’

  “I am afraid that those last years at Wareham were far from happy. He felt, I think, out of tune with his surroundings, and, pace the readers of the Guardian, I doubt whether he was ever quite at home in his stall. He confessed to one of his old associates that he doubted the wisdom of the whole Cathedral system. ‘What,’ he said, in his old characteristic manner, ‘would St. Peter say if he could enter this building and see that gorgeous window in which he is represented with mitre, cope and keys?’ And I do not think that he was ever quite reconciled to the daily recitation of the Liturgy, accompanied as it is in such establishments by elaborate music and all the pomp of the surpliced choir. ‘Rome and water, Rome and water!’ he has been heard to mutter under his breath as the procession swept up the nave, and before he died I think that he had the satisfaction of feeling that many in high places were coming round to his views.

  “But to the very last he never forgot Lupton. A year or two before he died he wrote the great school song, ‘Follow, follow, follow!’ He was pleased, I know, when it appeared in the Luptonian, and a famous Old Boy informs me that he will never forget Horbury’s delight when he was told that the song was already a great favourite in ‘Chantry.’ To many of your readers the words will be familiar; but I cannot resist quoting the first verse:

  “I am getting old and grey and the hills seem far away,

  And I cannot hear the horn that once proclaimed the morn

  When we sallied forth upon the chase together;

  For the years are gone—alack!—when we hastened on the track,

  And the huntsman’s whip went crack! As a signal to our pack

  Riding in the sunshine and fair weather.

  And yet across the ground

  I seem to hear a sound,

  A sound that comes up floating from the hollow;

  And its note is very clear

  As it echoes in my ear,

  And the words are: ‘Lupton, follow, follow, follow!’

  Chorus.

  “Lupton, follow away!

  The darkness lies behind us, and before us is the day.

  Follow, follow the sun,

  The whole world’s to be won,

  So, Lupton, follow, follow, follow, follow away!

  “An old pupil sang this verse to him on his death-bed, and I think, perhaps, that some at least of the readers of the Guardian will allow that George Horbury died ‘fortified,’ in the truest sense, ‘with the rites of the Church’—the Church of a Great Aspiration.”

  Such was the impression that Mr. Horbury had evidently made upon some of his oldest friends; but
Meyrick was, to the last, an infidel. He read the verses in the Guardian (he would never subscribe to the Luptonian) and jeered savagely at the whole sentiment of the memoir, and at the poetry, too.

  “Isn’t it incredible?” he would say. “Let’s allow that the main purpose of the great Public Schools is to breed brave average boobies by means of rocker, sticker and mucker and the rest of it. Still, they do acknowledge that they have a sort of parergon—the teaching of two great literatures, two literatures that have moulded the whole of Western thought for more than two thousand years. And they pay an animal like this to teach these literatures—a swine that has not enough literature of any kind in him to save the soul of a louse! Look at those verses! Why, a decent fourth form boy would be ashamed to put his name to them!”

  He was foolish to talk in this fashion. People merely said that it was evident he was one of the failures of the great Public School system; and the song was much admired in the right circles. A very well-turned idem Latine appeared in the Guardian shortly after the publication of the memoir, and the initials at the foot of the version were recognised as those of a literary dean.

  And on that autumn evening, far away in the ’seventies, Meyrick, the boy, left Mr. Horbury’s study in a white fury of grief and pain and rage. He would have murdered his master without the faintest compunction, nay, with huge delight. Psychologically, his frame of mind was quite interesting, though he was only a schoolboy who had just had a sound thrashing for breaking rules.

  For the fact, of course, was that Horbury, the irritating influence of the Head’s conversation and sherry apart, was by no means a bad fellow. He was for the moment savagely cruel, but then, most men are apt to be savagely cruel when they suffer from an inflamed liver and offensive superiors, more especially when there is an inferior, warranted defenceless, in their power. But, in the main, Horbury was a very decent specimen of his class—English schoolmaster—and Meyrick would never allow that. In all his reasoning about schools and schoolmasters there was a fatal flaw—he blamed both for not being what they never pretended to be. To use a figure that would have appealed to him, it was if one quarrelled with a plain, old-fashioned meeting-house because it was not in the least like Lincoln Cathedral. A chimney may not be a decorative object, but then it does not profess to be a spire or a pinnacle far in the spiritual city.