________________________________________________
_ With the masters Ernest was ere long in absolute disgrace. He had
more liberty now than he had known heretofore. The heavy hand and
watchful eye of Theobald were no longer about his path and about his
bed and spying out all his ways; and punishment by way of copying
out lines of Virgil was a very different thing from the savage
beatings of his father. The copying out in fact was often less
trouble than the lesson. Latin and Greek had nothing in them which
commended them to his instinct as likely to bring him peace even at
the last; still less did they hold out any hope of doing so within
some more reasonable time. The deadness inherent in these defunct
languages themselves had never been artificially counteracted by a
system of bona fide rewards for application. There had been any
amount of punishments for want of application, but no good
comfortable bribes had baited the hook which was to allure him to
his good.
Indeed, the more pleasant side of learning to do this or that had
always been treated as something with which Ernest had no concern.
We had no business with pleasant things at all, at any rate very
little business, at any rate not he, Ernest. We were put into this
world not for pleasure but duty, and pleasure had in it something
more or less sinful in its very essence. If we were doing anything
we liked, we, or at any rate he, Ernest, should apologise and think
he was being very mercifully dealt with, if not at once told to go
and do something else. With what he did not like, however, it was
different; the more he disliked a thing the greater the presumption
that it was right. It never occurred to him that the presumption
was in favour of the rightness of what was most pleasant, and that
the onus of proving that it was not right lay with those who
disputed its being so. I have said more than once that he believed
in his own depravity; never was there a little mortal more ready to
accept without cavil whatever he was told by those who were in
authority over him: he thought, at least, that he believed it, for
as yet he knew nothing of that other Ernest that dwelt within him,
and was so much stronger and more real than the Ernest of which he
was conscious. The dumb Ernest persuaded with inarticulate feelings
too swift and sure to be translated into such debateable things as
words, but practically insisted as follows -
"Growing is not the easy plain sailing business that it is commonly
supposed to be: it is hard work--harder than any but a growing boy
can understand; it requires attention, and you are not strong enough
to attend to your bodily growth, and to your lessons too. Besides,
Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the
more odious they generally are; the nice people whom you delight in
either never knew any at all or forgot what they had learned as soon
as they could; they never turned to the classics after they were no
longer forced to read them; therefore they are nonsense, all very
well in their own time and country, but out of place here. Never
learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a
good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you have
occasion for this or that knowledge, or foresee that you will have
occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better, but
till then spend your time in growing bone and muscle; these will be
much more useful to you than Latin and Greek, nor will you ever be
able to make them if you do not do so now, whereas Latin and Greek
can be acquired at any time by those who want them.
"You are surrounded on every side by lies which would deceive even
the elect, if the elect were not generally so uncommonly wide awake;
the self of which you are conscious, your reasoning and reflecting
self, will believe these lies and bid you act in accordance with
them. This conscious self of yours, Ernest, is a prig begotten of
prigs and trained in priggishness; I will not allow it to shape your
actions, though it will doubtless shape your words for many a year
to come. Your papa is not here to beat you now; this is a change in
the conditions of your existence, and should be followed by changed
actions. Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well
with you, but only listen to that outward and visible old husk of
yours which is called your father, and I will rend you in pieces
even unto the third and fourth generation as one who has hated God;
for I, Ernest, am the God who made you."
How shocked Ernest would have been if he could have heard the advice
he was receiving; what consternation too there would have been at
Battersby; but the matter did not end here, for this same wicked
inner self gave him bad advice about his pocket money, the choice of
his companions and on the whole Ernest was attentive and obedient to
its behests, more so than Theobald had been. The consequence was
that he learned little, his mind growing more slowly and his body
rather faster than heretofore: and when by and by his inner self
urged him in directions where he met obstacles beyond his strength
to combat, he took--though with passionate compunctions of
conscience--the nearest course to the one from which he was debarred
which circumstances would allow.
It may be guessed that Ernest was not the chosen friend of the more
sedate and well-conducted youths then studying at Roughborough.
Some of the less desirable boys used to go to public-houses and
drink more beer than was good for them; Ernest's inner self can
hardly have told him to ally himself to these young gentlemen, but
he did so at an early age, and was sometimes made pitiably sick by
an amount of beer which would have produced no effect upon a
stronger boy. Ernest's inner self must have interposed at this
point and told him that there was not much fun in this, for he
dropped the habit ere it had taken firm hold of him, and never
resumed it; but he contracted another at the disgracefully early age
of between thirteen and fourteen which he did not relinquish, though
to the present day his conscious self keeps dinging it into him that
the less he smokes the better.
And so matters went on till my hero was nearly fourteen years old.
If by that time he was not actually a young blackguard, he belonged
to a debateable class between the sub-reputable and the upper
disreputable, with perhaps rather more leaning to the latter except
so far as vices of meanness were concerned, from which he was fairly
free. I gather this partly from what Ernest has told me, and partly
from his school bills which I remember Theobald showed me with much
complaining. There was an institution at Roughborough called the
monthly merit money; the maximum sum which a boy of Ernest's age
could get was four shillings and sixpence; several boys got four
shillings and few less than sixpence, but Ernest never got more than
half-a-crown and seldom more than eighteen pence; his average would,
I should think, be about one and nine pence, which was just too much
for him to rank among the downright bad boys, but too little to put
him among the good ones. _
Read next: CHAPTER XXXII
Read previous: CHAPTER XXX
Table of content of Way of All Flesh
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
