School Stories quotes

Work is supposed to be the centre round which school life revolves⁠—the hub of the school wheel, the lodestar of the schoolboy’s existence, and a great many other things.

“You come to school to work,” is the formula used by masters when sentencing a victim to the wailing and gnashing of teeth provided by two hours’ extra tuition on a hot afternoon.

In the dear, dead days (beyond recall), I used often to long to put the case to my form-master in its only fair aspect, but always refrained from motives of policy.

Masters are so apt to take offence at the well-meant endeavours of their form to instruct them in the way they should go.

What I should have liked to have done would have been something after this fashion. Entering the sanctum of the Headmaster, I should have motioned him to his seat—if he were seated already, have assured him that to rise was unnecessary.

… but chiefly, I think, because he had reduced cribbing in form to such an exact science that he loved it for its own sake, and would no sooner have come tamely into school with a prepared lesson than a sportsman would shoot a sitting bird.

It was not the marks that he cared for. He despised them. What he enjoyed was the refined pleasure of swindling under a master’s very eye.

At the trial the judge, who had, so ran report, been himself rather badly bitten by the Ham Sandwich Company, put the case briefly and neatly in the words, “You appear to revel in villainy for villainy’s sake,” and I am almost certain that I …

“He’s gone with the team to Windybury, sir,” said Parker, struggling to conceal a large size in grins. “He’s going to score.”

“No,” said Mr. Mellish sadly to himself, “he has scored.”

Afterwards it might possibly come out that he, Harrison, had been not altogether unconnected with the business, and then, he was fain to admit, there might be trouble. But he was a youth who never took overmuch heed for the morrow.

Sufficient unto the day was his motto.

And, besides, it was distinctly worth risking.

If it had been a shilling now—. So I set my teeth and turned once more to my Thucydides. Bradshaw, having picked up the thread of his story again, emitted hoarse chuckles like minute guns, until I very nearly rose and fell upon him.

It is maddening to listen to a person laughing and not to know the joke.

“You will be allowed two hours for this paper,” said Mellish on the following afternoon, as he returned to his desk after distributing the Thucydides questions.

The room has a staircase all to itself, and this was the reason why, directly I heard shouts proceeding from that staircase, I deduced that they came from the Museum.

I am like Sherlock Holmes, I don’t mind explaining my methods.

“Help!” shouted the voice. “Help!”

At this point he made an attempt, a very spirited attempt, to lower the world’s record for the standing high jump. I have spoken above of the pleasure it gave me to see a French master run.

But for good, square enjoyment, warranted free from all injurious chemicals, give me a French master jumping.

“My dear Gerard,” said the amazed Mellish.

“Put it over your hand, and then shoot back the bolt.”

The scientific mind is always intolerant of lay ignorance.

“Pooh, boy, paper is a nonconductor. You won’t get hurt.”

The address was not long, but it covered a great deal of ground. The section of it which chiefly rankled in Charteris’s mind, and which had continued to rankle ever since, was that in which the use of the word “buffoon” had occurred.

Everybody who has a gift of humour and (very naturally) enjoys exercising it, hates to be called a buffoon.

It was Charteris’s one weak spot. Every other abusive epithet in the language slid off him without penetrating or causing him the least discomfort. The word “buffoon” went home, right up to the hilt. And, to borrow from Mr.

Jabberjee for positively the very last time, he had observed (mentally): “Henceforward I will perpetrate heaps of the lowest dregs of vice.” He had, in fact, started a perfect bout of breaking rules, simply because they were rules. The injustice of the thing rankled.

No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.

To a certain extent, Charteris ran amok. He broke bounds and did little work, and—he was beginning gradually to find this out—got thoroughly tired of it all.

“Ho!” said the man, “Ho indeed!”

There is something very clinching about the word “Ho.” It seems definitely to apply the closure to any argument.

At least, I have never yet met anyone who could tell me the suitable repartee.

Reynolds attacked the tea without attempting to retrieve his vanished work.

Poetry is good, but tea is better.

Besides, he argued within himself, he remembered all he had written, and could easily write it out again. So, as far as he was concerned, those three sheets of paper were a closed book.

Of all the useless and irritating things in this world, lines are probably the most useless and the most irritating.

In fact, I only know of two people who ever got any good out of them. Dunstable, of Day’s, was one, Linton, of Seymour’s, the other. For a portion of one winter term they flourished on lines.

There was a time-honoured answer to this question.

Public-school ethics do not demand that you should reply truthfully to the spirit of a question. The letter of it is all that requires attention.

Dunstable had looked at the lesson. He was looking at it then. Masters should practise exactness of speech. A certain form at Harrow were in the habit of walking across a copy of a Latin author before morning-school.

And as for the risk of detection when customers came to show up the goods supplied to them, that was very slight. As has been pointed out before, there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines.

It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an inkpot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.

Then, again, the attitude of the master to whom the lines were shown was not likely to be critical. So that everything seemed in favour of Dunstable’s scheme.

Oliver Ring of New York, changing cars, as he called it, at Wrykyn on his way to London, had to wait an hour for his train. He put in that hour by strolling about the town and seeing the sights, which were not numerous.

Wrykyn, except on Market Day, was wont to be wrapped in a primeval calm which very nearly brought tears to the strenuous eyes of the man from Manhattan.

He had always been told that England was a slow country, and his visit, now in its third week, had confirmed this opinion: but even in England he had not looked to find such a lotus-eating place as Wrykyn. He looked at the shop windows.

Not so Chapple. He liked his meals. He wanted a good deal here below, and wanted it hot and fresh.

Conscience had but a poor time when it tried to bully Chapple. He had it weak in the first round.

But there was one more powerful than Conscience—Mr. Seymour. He had marked the constant lateness of our hero, and disapproved of it.

Chapple pulled himself together. This must stop. He had said that several times previously, but now he meant it.

Nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world should make him oversleep himself again.

This time he would try a combination of schemes.

Milton is the head of the house, and stands alone among the house prefects for the strenuousness of his methods in dealing with his dormitory.

Nothing in this world is certain, but it is highly improbable that Chapple will be late again. There are swagger-sticks.

Spencer thought he might want some muffins cooked for tea, did he? Kennedy earnestly advised Spencer to give up thinking, as Nature had not equipped him for the strain.

Thinking necessitated mental effort, and Spencer, in Kennedy’s opinion, had no mind, but rubbed along on a cheap substitute of mud and putty.

More chatty remarks were exchanged, and then Spencer tore himself away from the pleasant interview, and went downstairs to the junior study, where he remarked to his friend Phipps that Life was getting a bit thick.

Spencer finished his sandwich and brushed the crumbs off his trousers.

Thomas continued operations on the bun with the concentrated expression of a lunching python.

“I believe your people know my people,” said Spencer.

Gorrick blinked severely at the speaker.

A headwaiter at a fashionable restaurant is cordial in his manner compared with a boy who has been at a public school a year, when addressed familiarly by a new boy.

After reflecting on the outrage for a moment, he dived in again.

The enclosed was yet another postal order for five shillings.

As somebody wisely observed, a woman’s P.S. is always the most important part of her letter.

“That kid,” murmured Spencer between swollen lips, “has got cheek enough for eighteen! ‘Awfully decent chap!’ ”