by Unknown
(Odd little beggar, he has a great sense of fairness.)
June 11.
It is rather a swot keeping a Diary but I like the lark of it and it makes me no end reflective, but sometimes it is impossible to think of a way to get round Old Hyphen because he takes things in the wrong spirit. So he took his birthday in the wrong spirit. It was Cotton who found out that yesterday was Old Hyphen’s birthday, and so we kept it dark from the seniors in fear of them butting in, and we presented him with an illuminated address done by little Russell who has a gift of painting in three colours though he makes an awful mess of his fingers and is good for nothing else. I was the one chosen to make up the phraseology and his age being fifty I called it his jubilee year and said he ruled by love and not by fear, and we thought he did not need any more self-improvement. I also said we disagreed with the newspaper which called his translations from Catullus a slovenly work, and the way I ended was what took me most time and you would have thought it would have pleased him best, being about in the course of nature he would soon be taken from us but we would keep his memory green. It was Cotton who put the Address on his desk but as soon as Old Hyphen saw that last bit it was at me he glared and I soon got it in the neck. None of us can make out why he did not like that last bit for it was the bit we were surest of.
(Yes, I believe I completely puzzled, the well-intentioned miscreants that day.)
June 16.
Not many persons could keep up a Diary as long as I am doing it. There has been a heap of bother this week about using cribs, and Old Hyphen is so crusty about it that you dare not tell him things would be all right if he trusted to our honour. When we were doing Horace, Turkey translated ignis ‘devouring element,’ and down comes Old Hyphen upon him, wanting to know why he didn’t say ‘fire,’ and what he meant by putting ignis in the dative. There is not a better intended youth at mi’tutor’s than Turkey, and he was willing to say ‘fire’ if preferred and to put it in whatever case Old Hyphen liked. Old Hyphen pounded away at him saying he could only have got ‘devouring element’ out of a crib, and it was just to keep the peace that I did not get up and tell that Turkey had got the words from me. In Puppy Hole the long desks have holes in them for ink-bottles, and beneath the holes are ledges, and some persons found out that if you took away your ink-bottle you could put a crib on the ledge and read it through the hole. Instead of trusting to our honour not to do this Old Hyphen finds out about it and if you translate with feelings for beautiful expressions he goes straight and looks at the holes. So yesterday I made a plan to do him and at the same time to charm him. I translated Caesar in the noblest words I could think of and at once he rushes at my ink-hole and peers down it and sees a book on the ledge and shouts out ‘I warned you I would make an example of the next one,’ and he seizes me by the neck with one hand and draws out the book with the other, and it was not a crib but a copy of his own translation of Catullus I had put there to surprise him, but he took it all in the wrong spirit, not seeing it was a charming thing to do.
(I made an example of him all right.)
June 20.
A remarkable phenomenon has been found out about Old Hyphen, and this is that he has a guttapercha tooth. He makes it himself by softening it near the fire and then he puts it in the place and shapes it and when it hardens it would deceive any people except my form. Once when he sneezed it flew out and hit Cotton in the face and so Cotton preserves it as a relic, and we think Old Hyphen keeps another one in his waistcoat pocket for emergencies, and guttapercha is now the centre of interest in our community. Some persons say Old Hyphen does not put a thermometer in his mouth to see how bad his cold is but knows how bad it is by the distance the tooth flies out when he sneezes and a shilling has been offered to any person who will ask him if he can lend them a piece of guttapercha to rub out pencil marks with, but no one has been such an ass as to take it on. Now the wily bird has done us again by going to the dentist, and Cotton is talking rot saying it cut his eye open when it hit him, and some persons think he can get a heap of money out of guarantee companies if his father is insured for accidents and think Old Hyphen would have to be a witness and show the court how he makes them.
(Oh for a guttapercha cane.)
June 26.
‘Even as it was in the days of Imperial Caesar when Rome towered proudly on her seven hills sending forth his Cohorts to bend the knee of Cosmos the while yellow Tiber meandered to hoary Ocean when Athens cradle of Miltiades smiled through centuries of antiquity smilings that never were by sea or shore, so in this whirligig will one generation succeed another.’
This is from the prospectus I made about our junior Parliamentary Debating Society and there were other bits as good and we had our own society because the seniors would not let us join theirs and we had to make Old Hyphen Prime Minister so as to be able to have a society of our own, so he never asked me to take office, so I became leader of the Opposition and it has been a most awfully ripping time and calling him the Right Hon. Gentleman and him having to call me my Rt. Hon. Friend when he was really wanting to lam into me. The best day was when I waggled my finger at him same as my father does in the House of Commons and I said I was more in sorrow than in anger because the Right Hon. Gentleman was giving his support to a national scandal. The thing that made him get it so hot from me was his moving the adjournment of the House for Derby Day and I waggled at him warningly and exclaimed as follows, ‘Consider the thousands plunged into the vice of mourning when they might have had happy hours if the Rt. Hon. Gentleman had set a better example’ and what made this the nippier was that Old Hyphen had said things like that to me and Cotton a month before when he sent us up to the Lower Beak for taking 6 to i on a dead cert, namely ‘Cousin Bella.’ Another time I had to draw him into calling me a jackanapes so as I could compel him to withdraw but he just wriggled out of that and so he resigned and wouldn’t let us go to the country.
(Not a bit of it, Retrousy; you were suffering from a determination of words to the mouth and began (unconsciously I think though I cannot always be quite sure of you) to use Parliamentary language in ‘Puppy Hole’ I asked you one day if you were ready to construe, and when you replied ‘The answer, sir, is in the negative,’ I thought it high time to wind up the Junior Parliamentary Debating Society.)
June 30.
It is sickening the way Old Hyphen pokes about to see what we are up to instead of trusting to our honour. All the persons think he will catch me out about the Diary and I only keep the thing going now to prove I can do him. I can see he has found out I have a work called Quadrilateral Triangles, and he has been rummaging my desk and found it but the title diddled him just like I meant it to do, and so I shall catch it hotter if he bags it in the end. Now he has found out that it really is my Diary and he comes back to bag it and behold it is not there. This is because I suspected his crafty design and so I changed its hiding place and slipped it down between the glass of my mirror and the wood behind the glass. I was just in the nick of time for by the way my pictures were hanging crooked I saw he had been examining the backs of them. You would have thought no honourable preceptor would have thought of the lookingglass as a likely place but yesterday he was examining that also and it was a very peculiar thing that saved me. To get the Diary up out of the lookingglass is an awful swot because you have to do it with scissors and just as you are getting your fingers on it back it slips, so I shoved it under the carpet meaning to put it back in the mirror when Father Time was favourable, this being the summer half. So when he sneaked in to open the back of the mirror there was nothing there, owing to the Diary being under the carpet and I think I will keep it there now and so Old Hyphen is foiled and I am again his defeater.
(Found beneath the carpet, July I. Now, my lad, look out for squalls.)
Here (writes Retrousy’s father) the Diary of Quadrilateral Triangles comes to an abrupt end; for, as I have said, the long-suffering Hyphen afterwards passed it on to me. The story is not, however, complete w
ithout some extracts from Retrousy’s letters to me on the subject.
Letter I. — I hope you are quite well. There has been a shindy about my diary. I have kept a diary this half to make me improve my mind and it is mostly about mi’tutor, and I called it ‘Quadrilateral Triangles’ on the cover so as to keep him from fingering it, him being a whale at classics but well known to have come a howler in Maths, but he is always regrettably prowling around to see what his hand can find to do, and doing it with all his might, so he went wandering beneath my carpet and found my diary and so he confiscated it and so he looks triumphing at me, and he little knows how jolly glad I am it is confiscated, me being tired of the wearisome thing and having to fill up every day, though good fun at the first go off. I used to read the bits about him to persons in the Fourth for a penny a go paid in advance, and they liked it fearfully at first but only two came to the last reading and so they are all glad to be done with it same as I am and so we have scored off our deceived tutor all along the line and I will now conclude.
Letter 2. — I hope you are quite well. I regret to announce mi’tutor has done an awful shabby thing. I told you about my diary being confiscate and how glad I was to see the last of it, but I have not seen the last of it by a long chalk and so I will explain, so it was this way. I have seen the last of that diary all right him having doubtless thrown it into the devouring element but he has made me buy a bigger exercise book, careless about my having spent the two bob you sent me so long ago that I have nearly forgotten it and so he has ordered me to keep the diary going every day and not less than two hundred words and to show it to him daily after lock up, and I can’t think of things to say in it with him reading them and all the persons I used to read it to are jeering at me and saying it serves me right and that it is priceless of him, and so I hate him, because it lets them crow over me, and so I am your sorrowful son and I will now conclude.
Letter 3. — I hope you are quite well. Do you remember saying to me when I came here that mi’tutor was one of the best, and I have not always agreed with your dictum but I think you were jolly well right and he is the cleverest man in the school. Those persons who liked me to read my diary to them and then grinned heartlessly at the way he punished me have now got it in the neck themselves. He found out in the quiet way I have always admired in him who they were and so now he does not make them write hundreds of lines from Caesar when they have been young asses but instead of that he makes them copy out all my old diary which I thought he had burned and so they get sicker and sicker of it and Cotton has had to do it three times already and I am so unpopular among my whilom friends that some of the seniors know my name now and a blue kicked me and mi’tutor caught him at it and made him turn my bit in the diary about cribs into Latin verse, and so I am rather celebrated at last and I will now conclude.
Final letter. — I hope you are quite well. There is a thing you will like to know and so I will tell you, and so it is this, you always asked me what I was going to be when I am man’s estate and I have fixed up to be a tutor at this school and to be as much like mi’tutor as I can, and I like him awfully and so I am friends with the persons again because I want them to send their sons to my house when I have one, and so Cotton has promised to send me his two oldest boys and I have promises in writing of one each from Dinkson Mi and Anstruther and Pivot and Crackly, and I have changed my mind about the baby I didn’t like at that new house near ours and I would like you to ask his people if I can have him, and also any others of first class character you know of who would be about the right age when I have a house. Mi’tutor has promised to give me his youngest as the other one will be too old. If I catch any of my pupils calling me Old Retrousy when I have a house I will make them keep a beastly diary and I will now conclude.”
Old Hyphen and his young friends in an English public school were wild fowl unknown to Anon in the days in which he wrote of them, but they pop up frequently in the ‘St. James’s’ in his first two years, and were a stand-by when the larder was at its lowest. Greenwood could be got with a schoolboy paper when he would not rise to any other fly. In the painter Haydon’s memoirs, which is surely one of the half-dozen best in the English tongue, he tells how when all else failed him he could always get a meal or a respite from confinement by painting Napoleon looking at the setting sun or the rising sun, hands behind his back, hands in front, in hat, without hat, holding hat, on foot, on horseback, ascending horse, descending horse, sitting, rising up, about to sit, till the grim time came when there are such entries in his imperishable work as ‘Nothing in the house but the last six silver spoons — oh, my God, must paint another Napoleon.’ When the public became sated of Napoleons almost as much as he was himself, he turned (having the right to live) to Wellington at Waterloo, Wellington before Waterloo, Wellington after Waterloo, Wellington standing, Wellington sitting, Wellington with spyglass, Wellington without spyglass, Wellington about to raise spyglass, and the Duke was very furious indeed. I suppose a time came when Greenwood hastily returned my schoolboys and my dissertations on tobacco and even my Scottish papers, but for a time they were Anon’s leading-strings.
In my early youth I delighted in tales of English school-life, my favourite among the writers of them being Ascott R. Hope. He was the first author to whom I ever wrote a letter, and I remember carefully misspelling many of the words in it because the boys in his books spelt so badly. Ballantyne was another of my gods, and I wrote long afterwards an introduction to one of them in which I stoutly held that men and women should marry young so as to have many children who could read ‘The Coral Island.’ Marryat is best read for his scenes afloat, but I felt myself ill-treated when his heroes did not get a few chapters at school. Scotland is a land of day schools where you come seldom into social contact with your preceptors, and never, so far as my memory serves, do you try to blow them up with gunpowder. This was the favourite relaxation of Percival Keene and other heroes of the sea-dog, and it was what bewitched me. It costs as much to educate one English boy as scores of Scottish boys, but there was a time when I longed to go, with gunpowder in my box, to an English school. I had a friend of a like mind to whom, after I had gone to school in distant Dumfries, I sent a present of a box of chalks, and he took for granted that they must be apparatus for blowing masters up and put them in the fire and excitedly awaited the explosion.
Anon never seems to have sent any papers on Scottish school life to the ‘St. James’s,’ and I wonder why. Perhaps he did and Greenwood was cold to them. The nearest he came to it was in several articles about his experiences as a Scottish school inspector. I have been re-reading these and find them very informative. Again I wish I knew as much as Anon knew.
He had no particular school in his mind when he wrote these schoolboy papers, probably did not know the names of the English public schools, certainly was ignorant that each of them bristles with a phraseology of its own, which is the derision of the others. In revising them and making many alterations I have dared to identify the school, not by name but by some of their little tricks of words. I got to know these long after Old Hyphen must have retired and Retrousy taken his place, if he ever did so. It is a school I revere. If it is allowable to dedicate a few pages of a book I dedicate ‘Old Hyphen’ to an English schoolmaster who was one of the finest souls I have known, Hugh Macnaghten.
CHAPTER VIII
“LADIES AT CRICKET” — THE ALLAHAKBARRIE C.C.
“I LAY beneath a cherry tree, the idle spectator of a cricket match between a ladies’ school and eleven young women of the neighbourhood. Not long before, I had seen two teams of the softer sex scrimmaging over a football, hardly an edifying spectacle; but here they made a pretty picture, those happy girls, flitting and darting in print and flannel, and the field was vocal with them. The elevens wore at their waists a rose, a red rose for the school girls, for the others a Maréchal Niel; and the victorious side were to leave the field with the rose of the vanquished at their belts.
The captains t
ossed for first innings in a professional manner: but, owing to a little peculiarity in one of them, who could not toss the coin without throwing up the other arm also, the penny was lost and a postage stamp had to be used; it answered all requirements and was slow in coming down, thus adding to the suspense. Then the Maréchal Niels went to the wickets, of course padless, carrying their bats beneath their arms, while the tail of the ‘out’ side gathered round the crease to hem in the ball and have a little chat until it came their way. The first representatives of the yellow rose were Miss Rawlins and Miss Thoms, who both played at least as well as a junior boys’ team and with fairly straight bats, Miss Thoms getting the first cheer for going out and patting the ground with her bat. The attack was entrusted to Miss Mitchell (swift daisy-cutters) and a tall girl familiarly addressed as ‘Georgie’ (overhand). The first over was a maiden, but off Georgie’s second ball Miss Rawlins scored I; following it up shortly afterwards by lifting Miss Mitchell heftily to the on for 2. The running between wickets was much faster than that of boys, once the batswomen started, but they lost time in watching the flight of the ball. Miss Thoms gave point a chance off a hard one, which was not taken, and then skied Georgie straight above short mid-on, who shouted ‘Mary dear.’ I found that ‘Mary dear,’ at present cover point, was their great catcher, and that wherever the ball was lofted the fieldswomen usually shouted for her. Several singles and a bye followed, and then Miss Mitchell found her way to Miss Rawlins’s wicket (one for II).