Married | Page 7

meaning.
He finished his cigarette, blew out the lamp and said the Lord's Prayer
in an undertone, but he got no farther than the fifth petition. Then he
fell asleep.
He awoke from a dream in the middle of the night. He had dreamt that
he held the gardener's daughter in his arms. He could not remember the
circumstances, for he was quite dazed, and fell asleep again directly.
On the following morning he was depressed and had a headache. He
brooded over the future which loomed before him threateningly and
filled him with dread. He realised with a pang how quickly the summer
was passing, for the end of the summer meant the degradation of
school-life. Every thought of his own would be stifled by the thoughts
of others; there was no advantage in being able to think independently;
it required a fixed number of years before one could reach one's goal. It
was like a journey on a good's train; the engine was bound to remain
for a certain time in the stations, and when the pressure of the steam
became too strong, from want of consumption of energy, a waste-pipe
had to be opened. The Board had drawn up the time-table and the train
was not permitted to arrive at the stations before its appointed time.
That was the principal thing which mattered.

The father noticed the boy's pallor, but he put it down to grief over his
mother's death.
Autumn came and with it the return to school. Theodore, by dint of
much novel-reading during the summer, and coming in this way, as it
were, in constant contact with grown-up people and their problems and
struggles, had come to look upon himself as a grown-up member of
society. Now the masters treated him with familiarity, the boys took
liberties which compelled him to repay them in kind. And this
educational institution, which was to ennoble him and make him fit to
take his place in the community, what did it teach him? How did it
ennoble him? The compendiums, one and all, were written under the
control of the upper classes, for the sole purpose of forcing the lower
classes to look up to their betters. The schoolmasters frequently
reproached their pupils with ingratitude and impressed on them their
utter inability to realise, even faintly, the advantage they enjoyed in
receiving an education which so many of their poorer fellow-creatures
would always lack. No, indeed, the boys were not sophisticated enough
to see through the gigantic fraud and its advantages.
But did they ever find true joy, real pleasure in the subjects of their
studies for their own sakes? Never! Therefore the teachers had to
appeal incessantly to the lower passions of their pupils, to ambition,
self-interest, material advantages.
What a miserable make-believe school was! Not one of the boys
believed that he would reap any benefit from repeating the names and
dates of hated kings in their proper sequence, from learning dead
languages, proving axioms, defining "a matter of course," and counting
the anthers of plants and the joints on the hindlegs of insects, to
knowing the end no more about them than their Latin names. How
many long hours were wasted in the vain attempt to divide an angle
into three equal sections, a thing which can be done so easily in a
minute in an unscientific (that is to say practical) way by using a
graduator.
How they scorned everything practical! His sisters, who were taught
French from Ollendorf's grammar, were able to speak the language

after two years' study; but the college boys could not say a single
sentence after six. Ollendorf was a name which they pronounced with
pity and contempt. It was the essence of all that was stupid.
But when his sister asked for an explanation and enquired whether the
purpose of spoken language was not the expression of human thought,
the young sophist replied with a phrase picked up from one of the
masters who in his turn had borrowed it from Talleyrand. Language
was invented to hide one's thoughts. This, of course, was beyond the
horizon of a young girl (how well men know how to hide their
shortcomings), but henceforth she believed her brother to be
tremendously learned, and stopped arguing with him.
And was there not even a worse stumbling-block in aesthetics, delusive
and deceptive, casting a veil of borrowed splendour and sham beauty
over everything? They sang of "The Knights' Vigil of Light." What
knights' vigil? With patents of nobility and students' certificates; false
testimonials, as they might have told themselves. Of light? That was to
say of the upper classes who had the greatest interest in keeping the
lower classes in darkness, a task in which they were ably assisted by
church and school. "And