The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler (book club recommendations .TXT) 📖

then stood. Ernest was among those who had to be confirmed, and was deeply impressed with the solemn importance of the ceremony. When he felt the huge old bishop drawing down upon him as he knelt in chapel he could hardly breathe, and when the apparition paused before him and laid its hands upon his head he was frightened almost out of his wits. He felt that he had arrived at one of the great turning points of his life, and that the Ernest of the future could resemble only very faintly the Ernest of the past.

This happened at about noon, but by the one o’clock dinner-hour the effect of the confirmation had worn off, and he saw no reason why he should forego his annual amusement with the bonfire; so he went with the others and was very valiant till the image was actually produced and was about to be burnt; then he felt a little frightened. It was a poor thing enough, made of paper, calico and straw, but they had christened it The Rev. Theobald Pontifex, and he had a revulsion of feeling as he saw it being carried towards the bonfire. Still he held his ground, and in a few minutes when all was over felt none the worse for having assisted at a ceremony which, after all, was prompted by a boyish love of mischief rather than by rancour.

I should say that Ernest had written to his father, and told him of the unprecedented way in which he was being treated; he even ventured to suggest that Theobald should interfere for his protection and reminded him how the story had been got out of him, but Theobald had had enough of Dr. Skinner for the present; the burning of the school list had been a rebuff which did not encourage him to meddle a second time in the internal economics of Roughborough. He therefore replied that he must either remove Ernest from Roughborough altogether, which would for many reasons be undesirable, or trust to the discretion of the head master as regards the treatment he might think best for any of his pupils. Ernest said no more; he still felt that it was so discreditable to him to have allowed any confession to be wrung from him, that he could not press the promised amnesty for himself.

It was during the “Mother Cross row,” as it was long styled among the boys, that a remarkable phenomenon was witnessed at Roughborough. I mean that of the head boys under certain conditions doing errands for their juniors. The head boys had no bounds and could go to Mrs. Cross’s whenever they liked; they actually, therefore, made themselves go-betweens, and would get anything from either Mrs. Cross’s or Mrs. Jones’s for any boy, no matter how low in the school, between the hours of a quarter to nine and nine in the morning, and a quarter to six and six in the afternoon. By degrees, however, the boys grew bolder, and the shops, though not openly declared in bounds again, were tacitly allowed to be so.

XLIV

I may spare the reader more details about my hero’s school days. He rose, always in spite of himself, into the Doctor’s form, and for the last two years or so of his time was among the præpostors, though he never rose into the upper half of them. He did little, and I think the Doctor rather gave him up as a boy whom he had better leave to himself, for he rarely made him construe, and he used to send in his exercises or not, pretty much as he liked. His tacit, unconscious obstinacy had in time effected more even than a few bold sallies in the first instance would have done. To the end of his career his position inter pares was what it had been at the beginning, namely, among the upper part of the less reputable class⁠—whether of seniors or juniors⁠—rather than among the lower part of the more respectable.

Only once in the whole course of his school life did he get praise from Dr. Skinner for any exercise, and this he has treasured as the best example of guarded approval which he has ever seen. He had had to write a copy of Alcaics on “The dogs of the monks of St. Bernard,” and when the exercise was returned to him he found the Doctor had written on it: “In this copy of Alcaics⁠—which is still excessively bad⁠—I fancy that I can discern some faint symptoms of improvement.” Ernest says that if the exercise was any better than usual it must have been by a fluke, for he is sure that he always liked dogs, especially St. Bernard dogs, far too much to take any pleasure in writing Alcaics about them.

“As I look back upon it,” he said to me but the other day, with a hearty laugh, “I respect myself more for having never once got the best mark for an exercise than I should do if I had got it every time it could be got. I am glad nothing could make me do Latin and Greek verses; I am glad Skinner could never get any moral influence over me; I am glad I was idle at school, and I am glad my father overtasked me as a boy⁠—otherwise, likely enough I should have acquiesced in the swindle, and might have written as good a copy of Alcaics about the dogs of the monks of St. Bernard as my neighbours, and yet I don’t know, for I remember there was another boy, who sent in a Latin copy of some sort, but for his own pleasure he wrote the following⁠—

The dogs of the monks of St. Bernard go
To pick little children out of the snow,
And around their necks is the cordial gin
Tied with a little bit of bobbin.

I should like to have written that, and I did try, but I couldn’t. I didn’t quite like the last