IT was the last lesson on Friday afternoon, and this, with Standard VI, was Nature Study from half-past three till half-past four. The last lesson of the week is a weariness to teachers and scholars. It is the end; there is no need to keep up the tension of discipline and effort any longer, and, yielding to weariness, a teacher is spent.
But Nature Study is a pleasant lesson. I had got a big old tortoise, who had not yet gone to sleep, though November was darkening the early afternoon, and I knew the boys would enjoy sketching him. I put him under the radiator to warm while I went for a large empty shell that I had sawn in two to show the ribs of some ancient tortoise absorbed in his bony coat. When I came back I found Joe, the old reptile, stretching slowly his skinny neck, and looking with indifferent eyes at the two intruding boys who were kneeling beside him. I was too good-tempered to send them out again into the playground, too slack with the great relief of Friday afternoon. So I bade them put out the Nature books ready. I crouched to look at Joey, and stroked his horny, blunt head with my finger. He was quite lively. He spread out his legs and gripped the floor with his flat hand-like paws, then he slackened again as if from a yawn, dropping his head meditatively.
I felt pleased with myself, knowing that the boys would be delighted with the lesson. ‘He will not want to walk,’ I said to myself, ‘and if he takes a sleepy stride, they’ll be just in ecstasy, and I can easily calm him down to his old position.’ So I anticipated their entry. At the end of playtime I went to bring them in. They were a small class of about thirty — my own boys. A difficult, mixed class, they were, consisting of six London Home boys, five boys from a fairly well-to-do Home for the children of actors, and a set of commoners varying from poor lads who hobbled to school, crippled by broken enormous boots, to boys who brought soft, light shoes to wear in school on snowy days. The Gordons were a difficult set; you could pick them out: crop haired, coarsely dressed lads, distrustful, always ready to assume the defensive. They would lie till it made my heart sick, if they were charged with offence, but they were willing, and would respond beautifully to an appeal. The actors were of different fibre: some gentle, a pleasure even to look at; others polite and obedient, but indifferent, covertly insolent and vulgar; all of them more or less gentlemanly.
The boys crowded round the table noisily as soon as they discovered Joe. ‘Is he alive? — Look, his head’s coming out! He’ll bite you? — He won’t!’ — with much scorn — ‘Please Sir, do tortoises bite?’ I hurried them off to their seats in a little group in front, and pulled the table up to the desks. Joe kept fairly still. The boys nudged each other excitedly, making half audible remarks concerning the poor reptile, looking quickly from me to Joe and then to their neighbours. I set them sketching, but in their pleasure at the novelty they could not be still:
‘Please Sir — shall we draw the marks on the shell? Please Sir, has he only got four toes?’ — ‘Toes!’ echoes somebody, covertly delighted at the absurdity of calling the grains of claws ‘toes’. ‘Please Sir, he’s moving — Please Sir!’
I stroked his neck and calmed him down:
‘Now don’t make me wish I hadn’t brought him. That’s enough. Miles — you shall go to the back and draw twigs if I hear you again! Enough now — be still, get on with the drawing, it’s hard!’
I wanted peace for myself. They began to sketch diligently. I stood and looked across at the sunset, which I could see facing me through my window, a great gold sunset, very large and magnificent, rising up in immense gold beauty beyond the town, that was become a low dark strip of nothingness under the wonderful up-building of the western sky. The light, the thick, heavy golden sunlight which is only seen in its full dripping splendour in town, spread on the desks and the floor like gold lacquer. I lifted my hands, to take the sunlight on them, smiling faintly to myself, trying to shut my fingers over its tangible richness.
‘Please Sir!’ — I was interrupted — ‘Please Sir, can we have rubbers?’
The question was rather plaintive. I had said they should have rubbers no more. I could not keep my stock, I could not detect the thief among them, and I was weary of the continual degradation of bullying them to try to recover what was lost among them. But it was Friday afternoon, very peaceful and happy. Like a bad teacher, I went back on my word:
‘Well — !’ I said, indulgently.
My monitor, a pale, bright, erratic boy, went to the cupboard and took out a red box.
‘Please Sir!’ he cried, then he stopped and counted again in the box. ‘Eleven! There’s only eleven, Sir, and there were fifteen when I put them away on Wednesday—!’
The class stopped, every face upturned. Joe sunk, and lay flat on his shell, his legs limp. Another of the hateful moments had come. The sunset was smeared out, the charm of the afternoon was smashed like a fair glass that falls to the floor. My nerves seemed to tighten, and to vibrate with sudden tension.
‘Again!’ I cried, turning to the class in passion, to the upturned faces, and the sixty watchful eyes.
‘Again! I am sick of it, sick of it I am! A thieving, wretched set! — a skulking, mean lot!’ I was quivering with anger and distress.
‘Who is it? You must know! You are all as bad as one another, you hide it — a miserable—!’ I looked round the class in great agitation. The ‘Gordons’ with their distrustful faces, were noticeable:
‘Marples!’ I cried to one of them, ‘where are those rubbers?’
‘I don’t know where they are — I’ve never ’ad no rubbers’ — he almost shouted back, with the usual insolence of his set. I was more angry:
‘You must know! They’re gone — they don’t melt into air, they don’t fly — who took them then? Rawson, do you know anything of them?’
‘No Sir!’ he cried, with impudent indignation.
‘No, you intend to know nothing! Wood, have you any knowledge of these four rubbers?’
‘No!’ he shouted, with absolute insolence.
‘Come here!’ I cried, ‘come here! Fetch the cane, Burton. We’ll make an end, insolence and thieving and all.’
The boy dragged himself to the front of the class, and stood slackly, almost crouching, glaring at me. The rest of the ‘Gordons’ sat upright in their desks, like animals of a pack ready to spring. There was tense silence for a moment. Burton handed me the cane, and I turned from the class to Wood. I liked him best among the Gordons.
‘Now my lad!’ I said. ‘I’ll cane you for impudence first.’
He turned swiftly to me; tears sprang to his eyes.
‘Well,’ he shouted at me, ‘you always pick on the Gordons— you’re always on to us —!’ This was so manifestly untrue that my anger fell like a bird shot in a midflight.
‘Why!’ I exclaimed, ‘what a disgraceful untruth! I am always excusing you, letting you off—!’
‘But you pick on us — you start on us — you pick on Marples, an’ Rawson, an’ on me. You always begin with the Gordons.’
‘Well,’ I answered, justifying myself, ‘isn’t it natural? Haven’t you boys stolen — haven’t these boys stolen —several times — and been caught?’
‘That doesn’t say as we do now,’ he replied.
‘How am I to know? You don’t help me. How do I know? Isn’t it natural to suspect you—?’
‘Well, it’s not us. We know who it is. Everybody knows who it is — only they won’t tell.’
‘Who know?’ I asked.
‘Why Rawson, and Maddock, and Newling, and all of ‘em.’
I asked these boys if they could tell me. Each one shook his head, and said ‘No Sir.’ I went round the class. It was the same. They lied to me every one.
‘You see,’ I said to Wood.
‘Well — they won’t own up,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t ’a done if you hadn’t ’a been goin’ to cane me.’
This frankness was painful, but I preferred it. I made them all sit down. I asked Wood to write his knowledge on a piece of paper, and I promised not to divulge. He would not. I asked the boys he had named, all of them. They refused. I asked them again — I appealed to them.
‘Let them all do it then!’ said Wood. I tore up scraps of paper, and gave each boy one.
‘Write on it the name of the boy you suspect. He is a thief and a sneak. He gives endless pain and trouble to us all. It is your duty.’
They wrote furtively, and quickly doubled up the papers. I collected them in the lid of the rubber box, and sat at the table to examine them. There was dead silence, they all watched me. Joe had withdrawn into his shell, forgotten.
A few papers were blank; several had ‘I suspect nobody’ — these I threw in the paper basket; two had the name of an old thief, and these I tore up; eleven bore the name of my assistant monitor a splendid, handsome boy, one of the oldest of the actors. I remembered how deferential and polite he had been when I had asked him, how ready to make barren suggestions; I remembered his shifty, anxious look during the questioning; I remembered how eager he had been to do things for me before the monitor came in the room. I knew it was he — without remembering.
‘Well!’ I said, feeling very wretched when I was convinced that the papers were right. ‘Go on with the drawing.’
They were very uneasy and restless, but quiet. From time to time they watched me. Very shortly, the bell rang. I told the two monitors to collect up the things, and I sent the class home. We did not go into prayers. I, and they, were in no mood for hymns and the evening prayer of gratitude.
When the monitors had finished, and I had turned out all the lights but one, I sent home Curwen, and kept my assistant-monitor a moment.
‘Ségar, do you know anything of my rubbers?’
‘No Sir’ — he had a deep, manly voice, and he spoke with earnest protestation — flushing.
‘No? Nor my pencils — nor my two books?’
‘No Sir! I know nothing about the books.’
‘No? The pencils then —?’
‘No Sir! Nothing! I don’t know anything about them.’
‘Nothing, Ségar?’
‘No Sir.’
He hung his head, and looked so humiliated, a fine, handsome lad, that I gave it up. Yet I knew he would be dishonest again, when the opportunity arrived.
‘Very well! You will not help as monitor any more. You will not come into the classroom until the class comes in — any more. You understand?’
‘Yes Sir’ — he was very quiet.
‘Go along then.’
He went out, and silently closed the door. I turned out the last light, tried the cupboards, and went home.
I felt very tired, and very sick. The night had come up, the clouds were moving darkly, and the sordid streets near the school felt like disease in the lamplight.