THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

6

These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little

distant and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they

wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and

gowns, a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the

world of actual men. Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man,

rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into

contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to be liberal-

minded. He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a

grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a

Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled

but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made a

tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me

only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a

wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not

one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the

Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation

after generation. I recall him most vividly against the background

of faded brown book-backs in the old library in which we less

destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the

stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his face. It

gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own. He had a

habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used

to come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said.

That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the

school."

He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a

man captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans

had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.

Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a

Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a

disposition towards developments. City Merchants had no modern

side, and utilitarian spirits were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE

and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly

at our want of German. Moreover, four classes still worked

together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big Hall that had

once held in a common tumult the entire school. Gates used to come

and talk to us older fellows about these things.

"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. But we ought to

get in some German, you know,-for those who like it. The army men

will be wanting it some of these days."

He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for

the lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he

achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked

wooden tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by

sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable

seats, "with grave misgivings." And though he never birched a boy

in his life, and was, Iam convinced, morally incapable of such a

scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all

his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in

temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear

soul! to the power of the sword…

I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the

effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that

is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to

complete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days,

his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way

through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped

redundant prepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so

finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole

best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and

even with short arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to

stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern,

unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular,

which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.