I had rather behold this Offering than kiss the twin lips of dark Gwenllian.
Dear my land of Gwent, O quam dilecta tabernacula!
Thy rivers are like precious golden streams of Paradise,
Thy hills are as the Mount Syon—
Better a grave on Twyn Barlwm than a throne in the palace of the Saxons at Caer-Ludd.”
And then, by the face of contrast, he thought of the first verse of the great school song, “Rocker,” one of the earliest of the many poems which his uncle had consecrated to the praise of the dear old school:
“Once on a time, in the books that bore me,
I read that in olden days before me
Lupton town had a wonderful game,
It was a game with a noble story
(Lupton town was then in its glory,
Kings and Bishops had brought it fame).
It was a game that you all must know,
And ‘rocker’ they called it, long ago.Chorus.
“Look out for ‘brooks,’ or you’re sure to drown,
Look out for ‘quarries,’ or else you’re down—
That was the way
‘Rocker’ to play—
Once on a day
That was the way,
Once on a day,
That was the way that they used to play in Lupton town.”
Thinking of the two songs, he put out his light and, wearied, fell into a deep sleep.
IV
The British schoolboy, considered in a genial light by those who have made him their special study, has not been found to be either observant or imaginative. Or, rather, it would be well to say that his powers of observation, having been highly specialised within a certain limited tract of thought and experience (bounded mainly by cricket and football), are but faint without these bounds; while it is one of the chiefest works of the System to kill, destroy, smash and bring to nothing any powers of imagination he may have originally possessed. For if this were not done thoroughly, neither a Conservative nor a Liberal administration would be possible, the House of Commons itself would cease to exist, the Episcopus (var. Anglicanus) would go the way of the Great Bustard; a “muddling through somehow” (which must have been the brightest jewel in the British crown, wrung from King John by the barons) would become a lost art. And, since all these consequences would be clearly intolerable, the great Public Schools have perfected a very thorough system of destroying the imaginative toxin, and few cases of failure have been so far reported.
Still, there are facts which not even the densest dullards, the most complete boobies, can help seeing; and a good many of the boys found themselves wondering “what was the matter with Meyrick” when they saw him at Chapel on the Sunday morning. The news of his astounding violences both of act and word on the night before had not yet circulated generally. Bates was attending to that department, but hadn’t had time to do much so far; and the replies of Pelly and Rawson to enquiries after black eyes and a potato-like nose were surly and misleading. Afterwards, when the tale was told, when Bates, having enlarged the incidents to folklore size, showed Pelly lying in a pool of his own blood, Rawson screaming as with the torments of the lost and Meyrick rolling out oaths—all original and all terrible—for the space of a quarter of an hour, then indeed the school was satisfied; it was no wonder if Meyrick did look a bit queer after the achievement of such an adventure. The funk of aforetime had found courage; the air of rapture was easily understood. It is probable that if, in the nature of things, it had been possible for an English schoolboy to meet St. Francis of Assisi, the boy would have concluded that the saint must have just made 200 not out in first-class cricket.
But Ambrose walked in a strange light; he had been admitted into worlds undreamed of, and from the first brightness of the sun, when he awoke in the morning in his room at the Grange, it was the material world about him, the walls of stone and brick, the solid earth, the sky itself, and the people who talked and moved and seemed alive—these were things of vision, unsubstantial shapes, odd and broken illusions of the mind. At half-past seven old Toby, the man-of-all-work at the old Grange banged at his door and let his clean boots fall with a crash on the boards after the usual fashion. He awoke, sat up in bed, staring about him. But what was this? The four walls covered with a foolish speckled paper, pale blue and pale brown, the white ceiling, the bare boards with the strip of carpet by the bedside: he knew nothing of all this. He was not horrified, because he knew that it was all nonexistent, some plastic fantasy that happened to be presented for the moment to his brain. Even the big black wooden chest that held his books (Parker, despised by Horbury, among them) failed to appeal to him with any sense of reality; and the bird’s-eye washstand and chest of drawers, the white water-jug with the blue band, were all frankly phantasmal. It reminded him of a trick he had sometimes played: one chose one’s position carefully, shut an eye and, behold, a mean shed could be made to obscure the view of a mountain! So these walls and appurtenances made an illusory sort of intrusion into the true vision on which he gazed. That yellow washstand rising out of the shining wells of the undying, the speckled walls in the place of the great mysteries, a chest of drawers in the magic garden of roses—it had the air of a queer joke, and he laughed aloud to himself as he realised that he alone knew, that everybody else would say, “That is a white jug with a blue band,” while he, and he
