The fact was, as some old Luptonians remarked, the two had never understood one another. With the majority of the boys the High Usher2 passed for a popular master enough. He had been a distinguished3 athlete in his time, and up to his last days at the school was a football enthusiast4. 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 athletic6 business” was getting a bit overdone7. 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 consolation8 for the loss of that coveted9 Headmastership of Lupton.
To quote the memoir10 which appeared in the Guardian11 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 aged12 more in six months, as some of them expressed themselves, than in the dozen years before. The old joyous13 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 zest14 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 penetrated15 as closely as any into the arcana of Horbury’s friendship (a privilege which he will ever esteem16 as one of the greatest blessings17 of his life), tried to rouse him with an extravagant18 rumour19 which was then going the round of the popular Press, to the effect that considerable modifications20 were about to be introduced into the compulsory21 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 trumpet22. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, and there was a tremor23 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 apathy24 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 construing25 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 tune26 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 Liturgy27, accompanied as it is in such establishments by elaborate music and all the pomp of the surpliced choir28. ‘Rome and water, Rome and water!’ he has been heard to mutter under his breath as the procession swept up the nave29, 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 forth30 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 rites31 of the Church’— the Church of a Great Aspiration32.”
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 subscribe33 to the Luptonian) and jeered34 savagely36 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, nay38, 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 inflamed39 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 specimen40 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 decorative41 object, but then it does not profess42 to be a spire43 or a pinnacle44 far in the spiritual city.
But Meyrick was always scolding meeting-houses because they were not cathedrals. He has been heard to rave37 for hours against useful, unpretentious chimney-pots because they bore no resemblance to celestial45 spires46. Somehow or other, possibly by inheritance, possibly by the influence of his father’s companionship, he had unconsciously acquired a theory of life which bore no relation whatever to the facts of it. The theory was manifest in his later years; but it must have been stubbornly, if vaguely47, present in him all through his boyhood. Take, for instance, his comment on poor Canon Horbury’s verses. He judged those, as we have seen, by the rules of the fine art of literature, and found them rubbish. Yet any old Luptonian would have told him that to hear the whole six hundred boys join in the chorus, “Lupton, follow away!” was one of the great experiences of life; from which it appears that the song, whatever its demerits from a literary point of view, fully48 satisfied the purpose for which is was written. In other words, it was an excellent chimney, but Meyrick still persisted in his easy and futile49 task of proving that it was not a bit like a spire. Then, again, one finds a fallacy of still huger extent in that major premiss of his: that the great Public Schools purpose to themselves as a secondary and minor50 object the imparting of the spirit and beauty of the Greek and Latin literatures. Now, it is very possible that at some distant period in the past this was an object, or even, perhaps, the object of the institutions in question. The Humanists, it may be conjectured51, thought of school and University as places where Latin and Greek were to be learned, and to be learned with the object of enjoying the great thought and the great style of an antique world. One sees the spirit of this in Rabelais, for example. The Classics are a wonderful adventure; to learn to understand them is to be a spiritual Columbus, a discoverer of new seas and unknown continents, a drinker of new-old wine in a new-old land. To the student of those days a mysterious drowned Atlantis again rose splendid from the waves of the great deep. It was these things that Meyrick (unconsciously, doubtless) expected to find in his school life; it was for the absence of these things that he continued to scold the system in his later years; wherein, like Jim in Huckleberry Finn, he missed the point by a thousand miles.
The Latin and Greek of modern instruction are, of course, most curious and interesting survivals; no longer taught with any view of enabling students to enjoy and understand either the thought or beauty of the originals; taught rather in such a manner as to nauseate52 the learner for the rest of his days with the very notion of these lessons. Still, the study of the Classics survives, a curious and elaborate ritual, from which all sense and spirit have departed. One has only to recollect53 the form master’s lessons in the Odyssey54 or the Bacch?, and then to view modern Free-masons celebrating the Mystic Death and Resurrection of Hiram Abiff; the analogy is complete, for neither the master nor the Masons have the remotest notion of what they are doing. Both persevere55 in strange and mysterious actions from inveterate56 conservatism.
Meyrick was a lover of antiquity57 and a special lover of survivals, but he could never see that the round of Greek syntax, and Latin prose, of Elegiacs and verbs in [Greek: mi], with the mystery of the Oratio obliqua and the Optative, was one of the most strange and picturesque58 survivals of modern life. It is to be noted59, by the way, that the very meaning of the word “scholar” has been radically60 changed. Thus a well-known authority points out that “Melancholy” Burton had no “scholarship” in the real sense of the word; he merely used his vast knowledge of ancient and modern literature to make one of the most entertaining and curious books that the world possesses. True “scholarship,” in the modern sense, is to be sought for not in the Jacobean translators of the Bible, but in the Victorian revisers. The former made the greatest of English books out of their Hebrew and Greek originals; but the latter understood the force of the aorist. It is curious to reflect that “scholar” once meant a man of literary taste and knowledge.
Meyrick never mastered these distinctions, or, if he did so in later years, he never confessed to his enlightment, but went on railing at the meeting-house, which, he still maintained, did pretend to be a cathedral. He has been heard to wonder why a certain Dean, who had pointed5 out the vast improvements that had been effected by the Revisers, did not employ a few young art students from Kensington to correct the infamous61 drawing of the fourteenth-century glass in his cathedral. He was incorrigible62; he was always incorrigible, and thus, in his boyhood, on the dark November evening, he meditated63 the murder of his good master and uncle — for at least a quarter of an hour.
His father, he remembered, had always spoken of Gothic architecture as the most wonderful and beautiful thing in the world: a thing to be studied and loved and reverenced64. His father had never so much as mentioned rocker, much less had he preached it as the one way by which an English boy must be saved. Hence, Ambrose maintained inwardly that his visit to Selden Abbey was deserving of reward rather than punishment, and he resented bitterly, the savage35 injustice65 (as he thought it) of his caning66.
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1
filthy
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| adj.卑劣的；恶劣的，肮脏的 | |
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2
usher
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| n.带位员，招待员；vt.引导，护送；vi.做招待，担任引座员 | |
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3
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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4
enthusiast
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| n.热心人，热衷者 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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athletic
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| adj.擅长运动的，强健的；活跃的，体格健壮的 | |
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7
overdone
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| v.做得过分( overdo的过去分词 )；太夸张；把…煮得太久；（工作等）过度 | |
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8
consolation
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| n.安慰，慰问 | |
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9
coveted
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| adj.令人垂涎的；垂涎的，梦寐以求的v.贪求，觊觎(covet的过去分词)；垂涎；贪图 | |
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10
memoir
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| n.[pl.]回忆录，自传；记事录 | |
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guardian
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| n.监护人；守卫者，保护者 | |
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12
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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13
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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14
zest
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| n.乐趣；滋味，风味；兴趣 | |
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15
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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16
esteem
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| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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17
blessings
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| n.（上帝的）祝福( blessing的名词复数 )；好事；福分；因祸得福 | |
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18
extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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19
rumour
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| n.谣言，谣传，传闻 | |
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20
modifications
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| n.缓和( modification的名词复数 )；限制；更改；改变 | |
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21
compulsory
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| n.强制的，必修的；规定的，义务的 | |
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22
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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23
tremor
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| n.震动，颤动，战栗，兴奋，地震 | |
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24
apathy
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| n.漠不关心，无动于衷；冷淡 | |
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25
construing
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| v.解释（陈述、行为等）( construe的现在分词 )；翻译，作句法分析 | |
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26
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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27
liturgy
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| n.礼拜仪式 | |
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28
choir
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| n.唱诗班，唱诗班的席位，合唱团，舞蹈团；v.合唱 | |
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29
nave
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| n.教堂的中部；本堂 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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31
rites
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| 仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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32
aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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33
subscribe
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| vi.(to)订阅，订购；同意；vt.捐助，赞助 | |
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34
jeered
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| v.嘲笑( jeer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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35
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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36
savagely
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| adv. 野蛮地，残酷地 | |
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37
rave
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| vi.胡言乱语；热衷谈论；n.热情赞扬 | |
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38
nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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39
inflamed
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| adj.发炎的，红肿的v.（使）变红，发怒，过热( inflame的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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40
specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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41
decorative
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| adj.装饰的，可作装饰的 | |
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42
profess
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| v.声称，冒称，以...为业，正式接受入教，表明信仰 | |
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43
spire
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| n.(教堂)尖顶，尖塔，高点 | |
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44
pinnacle
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| n.尖塔，尖顶，山峰；(喻)顶峰 | |
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45
celestial
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| adj.天体的；天上的 | |
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spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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47
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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48
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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49
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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50
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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51
conjectured
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| 推测，猜测，猜想( conjecture的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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52
nauseate
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| v.使作呕；使感到恶心；使厌恶 | |
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53
recollect
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| v.回忆，想起，记起，忆起，记得 | |
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54
odyssey
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| n.长途冒险旅行；一连串的冒险 | |
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55
persevere
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| v.坚持，坚忍，不屈不挠 | |
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56
inveterate
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| adj.积习已深的，根深蒂固的 | |
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57
antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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58
picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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59
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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60
radically
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| ad.根本地，本质地 | |
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61
infamous
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| adj.声名狼藉的，臭名昭著的，邪恶的 | |
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incorrigible
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| adj.难以纠正的，屡教不改的 | |
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63
meditated
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| 深思，沉思，冥想( meditate的过去式和过去分词 )； 内心策划，考虑 | |
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64
reverenced
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| v.尊敬，崇敬( reverence的过去式和过去分词 )；敬礼 | |
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injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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66
caning
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| n.鞭打 | |
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