Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [35]
“It’s against all our traditions,” said Sighs, when Mr. Perkins made the suggestion to him. “We’ve rather gone out of our way to avoid the contamination of boys from London. ”
“Oh, what nonsense!” said Mr. Perkins.
No one had ever told the form-master before that he talked nonsense, and he was meditating an acid reply, in which perhaps he might insert a veiled reference to hosiery, when Mr. Perkins in his impetuous way attacked him outrageously.
“That house in the Precincts—if you’d only marry I’d get the Chapter to put another couple of storeys on, and we’d make dormitories and studies, and your wife could help you.”
The elderly clergyman gasped. Why should he marry? He was fifty-seven, a man couldn’t marry at fifty-seven. He couldn’t start looking after a house at his time of life. He didn’t want to marry. If the choice lay between that and the country living he would much sooner resign. All he wanted now was peace and quietness.
“I’m not thinking of marrying,” he said.
Mr. Perkins looked at him with his dark, bright eyes, and if there was a twinkle in them poor Sighs never saw it.
“What a pity! Couldn’t you marry to oblige me? It would help me a great deal with the Dean and Chapter when I suggest rebuilding your house.”
But Mr. Perkins’s most unpopular innovation was his system of taking occasionally another man’s form. He asked it as a favor, but after all it was a favor which could not be refused, and as Tar, otherwise Mr. Turner, said, it was undignified for all parties. He gave no warning, but after morning prayers would say to one of the masters:
“I wonder if you’d mind taking the Sixth today at eleven. We’ll change over, shall we?”
They did not know whether this was usual at other schools, but certainly it had never been done at Tercanbury. The results were curious. Mr. Turner, who was the first victim, broke the news to his form that the headmaster would take them for Latin that day, and on the pretense that they might like to ask him a question or two so that they should not make perfect fools of themselves, spent the last quarter of an hour of the history lesson in construing for them the passage of Livy which had been set for the day; but when he rejoined his class and looked at the paper on which Mr. Perkins had written the marks, a surprise awaited him; for the two boys at the top of the form seemed to have done very ill, while others who had never distinguished themselves before were given full marks. When he asked Eldridge, his cleverest boy, what was the meaning of this the answer came sullenly:
“Mr. Perkins never gave us any construing to do. He asked me what I knew about General Gordon.”
Mr. Turner looked at him in astonishment. The boys evidently felt they had been hardly used, and he could not help agreeing with their silent dissatisfaction. He could not see either what General Gordon had to do with Livy. He hazarded an inquiry afterward.
“Eldridge was dreadfully put out because you asked him what he knew about General Gordon,” he said to the headmaster, with an attempt at a chuckle.
Mr. Perkins laughed.
“I saw they’d got to the agrarian laws of Caius Gracchus, and I wondered if they knew anything about the agrarian troubles in Ireland. But all they knew about Ireland was that Dublin was on the Liffey. So I wondered if they’d ever heard of General Gordon.”
Then the horrid fact was disclosed that the new head had a mania for general information. He had doubts about the utility of examinations on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense.
Sighs grew more worried every month; he could not get the thought out of his head that Mr. Perkins would ask him to fix