had only one experiment. It was a split football which was made to revolve by turning a handle, and proved, but hardly to our satisfaction, the centrifugal tendency of the earth. Mr. Porter’s science lectures, on the other hand, were fraught with excitement. Apparatus after apparatus was brought in, and experiment after experiment was attempted, sometimes involving explosions. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes, just at the critical moment we would laugh. Mr. Porter would say: “I have been three days trying to get this experiment ready, and now you have spoilt it all.” “Please, sir, we were not laughing,” we would say. “You were looking as if you were laughing, and that disturbs me just as much,” Mr. Porter would answer. It was no use accusing us of laughing, because we always denied it at once, and after a time he would always say: “Write out the verbs in mi for looking as if you were laughing.” At the end of the half, Mr. Porter gave what was called a “Good Boys’ Lecture,” at which the first nine boys of all the various sets he taught attended, if their work had been satisfactory throughout the term. I went to three of these or more. They were lectures with coloured magic-lantern slides, showing views of places all over the world, from Indus to the Pole. Never have I enjoyed anything more. There was a slide of Vesuvius in eruption, and slides of Venice and New Zealand, which were entrancingly beautiful. But one half, the Good Boy Lecture was confined to Mr. Porter’s holiday trip to the Isle of Skye, and the slides were not coloured. This lecture was a disappointment, and I am afraid, from the boys’ point of view, a failure. Another remarkable lecture Mr. Porter gave was on soap-bubbles. Films of soap bubble were projected by some device on to a screen, so that you saw the prismatic colours enlarged and as vivid as rainbows. While this was going on, a boy called Harben, who had a fruity alto voice, sang a sentimental song into a tube; the vibrations of the sound had a strange effect on the soap-bubble films, and made them change rapidly into a multitude of kaleidoscopic shapes and gyrations and symmetrical patterns. So Mr. Porter was the precursor of Skriabin’s Symphony, in which the music is assisted by visible colour.
Mr. Porter gave a series of lectures on electricity out of school. I and a boy in my house, Francis Egerton, applied to go to these. Mr. Porter somewhat reluctantly and suspiciously allowed us to come. They were rather stiff and advanced lectures, involving a good deal of formula writing on the blackboard with pi and other mysterious signs, but there were also experiments. We did not understand one word of it, but soon a difficult experiment was begun, which Mr. Porter said had taken him days to prepare. He was doubtful whether it would succeed. This was a rash remark. Egerton and I rocked with laughter. We laughed till we cried. There was no question of looking as if we were laughing. We were not allowed to go to any more lectures on electricity. There was an assistant masters’ prize given for science, and it was either that or the following year that the subject was physiography. I went in for this prize, staying out the whole Sunday before so as to have time to read the book on which we were to be examined, a short book by Huxley. I competed and won the prize. When it came to choosing a book for my prize, I chose The Epic of Hades, by Lewis Morris. I had to go to Mr. Cornish, who was not yet Vice-Provost, to have my name written in it. He was disgusted with my choice, and he advised me to change the book. But I was obdurate. I had chosen the book for its nice smooth binding, and nothing would make me reconsider my decision. “It’s poor stuff,” said Mr. Cornish; “it’s like boys’ Latin verses when they’re very good.”
There were two other French masters besides M. Hua—M. Roublot and M. Banck. M. Banck was sublimely strict, but M. Roublot was easygoing, good-natured, but lacking in authority. During his lesson we used to read the newspapers and write our letters, but we liked him too much to rag. We used to bring in all our occupations for the week, and stacks of writing-paper. One day when this was happening, and every boy was pleasantly but busily engaged in some occupation of his own, who should walk in but the Headmaster, Dr. Warre. The newspapers and the writing-paper and envelopes disappeared as by magic, and M. Roublot at once put on the safest boy to construe. Dr. Warre, who had grasped the situation, told us that our conduct was disgraceful.
He often made sudden visits to divisions, and stood up by the master’s desk while the work went on. These visits were always alarming, and one day, when he had just gone out of the room, one of the boys said: “Lord, how that man makes me sweat!” But there was one other French master who was not French, but far more formidable than all the rest, and this was Mr. Frank Tarver. Mr. Tarver was a perfect French scholar, and when he explained what the word bock meant, and said: “When you go to a café in Paris you sit down and say, ‘Garçon, un bock,’ ” one felt that one had before one a perfect man of the world. But sometimes there were no bounds to his anger, especially if he found that one had not looked out words in the dictionary, or if one translated encore by again. One day I remember his being in such a passion that he took a drawer from his desk and flung it on the ground. It is a great thing to be able to do this effectually. The boys quaked. Most of us liked him very much all the same; but to some he was a terror.
Mathematical lessons were always a difficulty in my case. I should never have passed Trials in mathematics had it not been for Euclid, which counted together with arithmetic and algebra. Fortunately I could do Euclid without difficulty, so I always got enough marks in that subject to make up for getting none at all in the two other branches of the science.
Every week we had a task called an extra-work to do out of school, which was meant to represent an hour’s work of mathematics, and consisted of sums in arithmetic and algebra. It generally took me more than an hour, and I never managed to get a sum right. When we used to get into hopeless arrears with our work, and everything was in an inextricable tangle, there was always one solution, and that was to stay out; but to be excused lessons one had to go to bed, and for that it was necessary to catch cold. But just an ordinary attack of Friday fever was enough to stay out. We complained of a bad headache and incipient insomnia, and Miss Copeman let us stay out at once, thinking it might be the beginning of measles, and we sat in her sitting-room reading a novel till the crisis was over.
At the slightest sign of a real streaming cold my tutor used to pack us off to bed and keep us there till it was gone, and we were allowed bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the boys’ library, and my tutor would lend us books from his own library.
Each boy in a division had to be prepostor for the division for a week at a time in turn. With the prepostor’s book one marked in the boys who were absent, either from school or chapel. One had a list of the boys’ names at the end of the book and ticked them off as they walked into chapel. This sounds a simple thing to do, but as the boys used to come in at the last minute and all together, and one had to take up the book to a master before chapel began, I found it flustering to a degree, and never knew if I had marked everyone in or not. I had to go to the Headmaster once for losing the prepostor’s book, and he said I had played fast and loose with a position of grave responsibility, and gave me three exercises of Bradley’s Prose to write out.
After the summer half I was in Arthur Benson’s division. We read passages from the Odyssey, Virgil, and Horace’s Odes, the Second Book, and for the first time I enjoyed some Latin. I thought Horace’s Odes delightful. Arthur Benson used to make us draw pictures illustrating episodes in Greek history, and he would stick them up on the wall if they were good. One of the subjects suggested was the bridge of boats that Xerxes threw across the sea, and I remember drawing a magnificent picture, with the hills of the Chersonese in the background, copied from some illustrations of the Crimean War, and a realistic flat bridge made of planks placed on broad punts. He was delighted with the picture and put it up at once, and sometimes he used to take older boys to see it.
There was not much religious instruction at Eton. We construed the Greek Testament on Monday mornings, but this was a Greek lesson like any other; and Sunday was made hideous by an exercise called Sunday Questions, which had to be done on that day, and which we always put off doing to the last possible moment. These were questions on historical points in the Old Testament, and entailed finding out the answers from some such book as Maclear’s Old Testament History, and
