“A friend of mine sent me some pictures of Athens
this morning,” he said casually. “Look
here, there’s the Akropolis.”
He began explaining to Philip what he saw. The
ruin grew vivid with his words. He showed him
the theatre of Dionysus and explained in what order
the people sat, and how beyond they could see the blue
Aegean. And then suddenly he said:
“I remember Mr. Gordon used to call me a gipsy
counter-jumper when I was in his form.”
And before Philip, his mind fixed on the photographs,
had time to gather the meaning of the remark, Mr.
Perkins was showing him a picture of Salamis, and
with his finger, a finger of which the nail had a little
black edge to it, was pointing out how the Greek ships
were placed and how the Persian.
Philip passed the next two years with comfortable
monotony. He was not bullied more than other
boys of his size; and his deformity, withdrawing him
from games, acquired for him an insignificance for
which he was grateful. He was not popular, and
he was very lonely. He spent a couple of terms
with Winks in the Upper Third. Winks, with his
weary manner and his drooping eyelids, looked infinitely
bored. He did his duty, but he did it with an
abstracted mind. He was kind, gentle, and foolish.
He had a great belief in the honour of boys; he felt
that the first thing to make them truthful was not
to let it enter your head for a moment that it was
possible for them to lie. “Ask much,”
he quoted, “and much shall be given to you.”
Life was easy in the Upper Third. You knew exactly
what lines would come to your turn to construe, and
with the crib that passed from hand to hand you could
find out all you wanted in two minutes; you could
hold a Latin Grammar open on your knees while questions
were passing round; and Winks never noticed anything
odd in the fact that the same incredible mistake was
to be found in a dozen different exercises. He
had no great faith in examinations, for he noticed
that boys never did so well in them as in form:
it was disappointing, but not significant. In
due course they were moved up, having learned little
but a cheerful effrontery in the distortion of truth,
which was possibly of greater service to them in after
life than an ability to read Latin at sight.
Then they fell into the hands of Tar. His name
was Turner; he was the most vivacious of the old masters,
a short man with an immense belly, a black beard turning
now to gray, and a swarthy skin. In his clerical
dress there was indeed something in him to suggest
the tar-barrel; and though on principle he gave five
hundred lines to any boy on whose lips he overheard
his nickname, at dinner-parties in the precincts he
often made little jokes about it. He was the
most worldly of the masters; he dined out more frequently
than any of the others, and the society he kept was
not so exclusively clerical. The boys looked
upon him as rather a dog. He left off his clerical
attire during the holidays and had been seen in Switzerland
in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine and a
good dinner, and having once been seen at the Cafe
Royal with a lady who was very probably a near relation,
was thenceforward supposed by generations of schoolboys
to indulge in orgies the circumstantial details of
which pointed to an unbounded belief in human depravity.
