Invitation to Life

3

3

D

r. Rex’s Academy

for the Sons of Gentlemen is gone now, along with many others of kindred calibre. Their passing is mourned by gouty old gentlemen with memories that work best under the influence of sherry.

It was a poor place, badly furnished and evilly mastered. The desks were carved with dirt-engrained initials, mute testimony of the years of hopeless scholars who had dinted the surface of education and passed on to a badly taught manhood.

The classrooms smelled of acidy ink. When the sun struck through the half-clean windows thousands of dust-motes swirled in silver sarabands in the rays—danced their brief dance and then passed into the oblivion of shadow.

Tregan always watched the dust-mote dance on sunny days. They whirled especially well in the early morning light while Dr. Rex read the matutinary Bible lesson. This, known to the boys as “scripsha”, was the “fine moral and spiritual atmosphere” of which Dr. Rex’s Academy boasted so highly. Dr. Rex was firmly in favor of it. It impressed parents, it cost nothing, and it gave Dr. Rex a chance to hear his own voice booming unctuously. He would read sonorously from the nicer parts of the Bible (skipping such reprehensible books as Leviticus), pronouncing his words lovingly and long. He was never conscious that few of the children understood anything of his teachings about God, who, it seemed to most of the boys, was merely a rather unsporting aide to all the teachers in general and to Dr. Rex in particular—a sort of stool-pigeon who could spy on you even in the dark.

Sometimes, while the morning lesson went on and the dust-motes whirled and spun, Tregan would wonder whether Dr. Rex really communed with God in person and whether when he, Tregan, grew up he too would converse with the same Jehovah. He would wonder vaguely and grow sleepy. The monotone of the headmaster would lull him. He never became aware that Dr. Rex was reading of stirring doings—that the Old Testament was a glorious saga of the laws, lives and battles of a hardy race that the world has never stamped to extinction; or that the New Testament contained fairly accurate and often beautifully written life accounts of a gentle teacher of philosophy who actually walked with the fishermen of Galilee. Tregan never suspected that. So he was always highly relieved when Dr. Rex droned:

“ ’Pete wimmie!”

Then Tregan, with the rest, would gabble in unison:

“Ah father—charten He’n—load be thy name—thy kingham come—thy will be done—’nearth—stizzen He’n—givvus stay ah daily bread—givvus ah trespsiz—zweefagivoses tresps again stuz—leeders notinter temtash’n—liverous f’meevil—thine skingham—paah, glor’—frevverendeavor—Amen.”

After these morning prayers had imbued the boys with an understanding and love of the Holy Trinity, the school settled down to the mystery of something called “lessons”.

In these there was never any attempt to interest the boys in the amazing amount of fascinating and palatable knowledge which a grownup can reveal to a youngster. There was history, according to which the world began with the landing of the Romans in 55 B. C. and which continued on until some unknown and misty era which would be reached, no doubt, in a higher and equally unknown classroom.

And then there were “sums”. It was sums that taught Tregan his first scorn for grownups.

Sums were puzzling things which consisted of determining how many boys got how many apples if you changed the number of boys and number of apples each time. The early and easy ones would ask how many apples each boy got if there were nine apples and three boys.

Grownups answered that question, Tregan discovered, by writing down the figure 9. Then they placed reversed parentheses about it, wrote the symbol 3 before it and a similar symbol 3 after it, placed another 9 under the first one, drew a line under it and then put a zero under the last nine. By some system of unexplained orientation, the second 3 was the “ansa”.

Tregan never quite solved this very first mathematical formula. He would close his eyes for his sums and let them solve themselves. There he would see the three boys standing in the sun. He would play with the idea. One of the boys might have red hair and a freckle on his nose—the second might be Smith Minor with his ears sticking out—the third could be young Hawkins with his blond cowlick. There they were standing in a neat row in the sunlight. There before them were the nine apples, each gleaming red (Tregan liked them red) and suspended in mid-air with no visible means of support. Three boys, nine apples, turn on the switch—and presto! You saw the apples moving of their own accord, the boys stretched out their hands. And each boy got three apples—it couldn’t be otherwise—for there were three apples resting in each boy’s hand, one on top of the other. It was all so simple.

Thus Tregan, seeing this picture in a few seconds, was always able to get the answers to his sums almost as soon as they were stated; but he always failed miserably in the examinations because he couldn’t remember (or wouldn’t learn) how to draw the lines and curlycues and boxes that were demanded. In examinations all he could do was to write down the answers. And it seems that the sole virtue of “sums” was the procedure.

By thus missing the first principles of arithmetic Tregan went through life forced to do his mathematics by visualization—a mishap which later allowed him to do intricate mental problems before most men could have set them down on paper.

Another item in the curriculum which thwarted Tregan’s best endeavor to unravel was “Handy nigh work”. This resolved itself in later years to “Hand and Eye Work”. It consisted solely of filling in printed designs with water colors and was the nearest approach to the finer arts that Dr. Rex’s Academy attained. The paramount virtue of the game was placing the colors exactly within the printed lines. If you could make the finished product look as if it were one of a million impressions that had been run off a printing press, you were a classic Handy-nighist.

The colors were divided into two groups: three primary colors and three secondary. These were used with monotonous regularity and searing proximity. No one ever tried to instill into the boys an understanding love for color. No one ever explained color and light.

And this time Tregan found no short cut; so he went through life with half his visual senses stunted. This fact, however, he was not to know until later years when he heard people talking of colors that he could not see and which he knew he never would see.

In music Tregan fared a little better. The classic educational system of England looked upon music as a sort of decadent Italian effeminacy—something that wasn’t quite the thing for the sturdy young sons of British Gentlemen. True, there was a half-hour period of tonic sol-fa, a system which Tregan never bothered to understand. He went through his entire schooling without ever hearing of the delicacies of Chopin, the grandeur of Beethoven or the gigantic emotional lithographs of Wagner. It is doubtful whether, during his school years, he ever heard the names mentioned, and most certainly he never learned to read a note of music. Fortunately he had a good soprano voice and a superlatively accurate ear which defied the worst efforts of his masters. In the morning chapel he sang, joyfully and irresponsibly, altos of his own improvisation and soon worked out a weird and complex system of arrangements, based partly on mathematical sequences and partly upon his accurate ear, which enabled him to play on the organ. In his last term he would climb to the organ loft and improvise for as long as he was allowed. However, the “competent staff” of the Rex Academy never had the slightest inkling of this unusual aptitude and facility. So no report on musical leanings was ever made to his aunt and uncle. For his own part, Tregan went through his schooling considering it just another of those queer earmarks which are best hidden from the so-public gaze of the public school.

In his reading Tregan was much more fortunate; but this was not a direct result of Dr. Rex and his school or of his home life. In his strict Quaker home the literary fare had been limited to Pilgrim’s Progress, a teetotalist propaganda book entitled Buy Your Own Cherries, and a Sunday School weekly.

It remained for the penny dreadfuls of the era to reveal to Tregan the intoxication of the printed word. Although they were verboten the boys managed to smuggle into the Academy those admirable literary concoctions, product of fecund minds, whose characters dashed weekly through series of picturesque and hair-raising exploits. With the principals of one weekly output, an American, Englishman and n***o known as Jack, Sam and Pete, Tregan roamed round the world, into the steaming jungles of India, over the South African veldt and into the fastnesses of the Australian bush. With Deadwood d**k and a valiant of an earlier day, who rejoiced in the title of Silvershot, he thundered after herds of bison on the western plains and shot redskins from the saddle at full gallop. Under the spell of still another paper-backed narcotic, he stole over Hounslow with Tom King and Blueskin, while d**k Turpin, mounted on the pirouetting Black Bess, called in his ringing voice: “Stand and deliver!”

It is safe to say that Tregan learned more history and geography in the stolen hours with these illegal serials than in all the rest of his schooling combined. At least, at the age of ten he could have given you a fairly complete account of the western portion of the United States, the navigability of the Athabaska River, the topographical characteristics of Uganda, the methods used in washing and mining gold, the dress and habits of the men who blazed the Chisholm Trail, the speech and manners of the inhabitants of London during the century when Turpin reigned over the roads, the life and customs of the natives of India and Tasmania, the military system of the Zulus under Chaka and the proper procedure to be followed in erecting an Eskimo igloo—and these facts, most undoubtedly, were never taught in Dr. Rex’s Academy for the Sons of British Gentlemen. Dr. Rex’s men specialized on dates, not knowledge.