‘My dear,’ said Dr. Greatrex, looking up in alarm from the lunch table one morning, in the third term of Ernest Le Breton’s stay at Pilbury, ‘what an awful apparition! Do you know, I positively see Mr. Blenkinsopp, father of that odious boy Blenkinsopp major, distinctly visible to the naked eye, walking across the front lawn—on the grass too—to our doorway. The pupil’s parent is really the very greatest bane of all the banes that beset a poor harassed overdriven schoolmaster’s unfortunate existence!’
‘Blenkinsopp?’ Mrs. Greatrex said reflectively. ‘Blenkinsopp? Who is he? Oh, I remember, a tobacco-pipe manufacturer somewhere in the midland counties, isn’t he? Mr. Blenkinsopp, of Staffordshire, I always say to other parents—not Brosely—Brosely sounds decidedly commercial and unpresentable. No nice people would naturally like their sons to mix with miscellaneous boys from a place called Brosely. Now, what on earth can he be coming here for, I wonder, Joseph?’
‘Oh, I know,’ the doctor answered with a deep-drawn sigh. ‘I know, Maria, only too well. It’s the way of all parents. He’s come to inquire after Blenkinsopp major’s health and progress. They all do it. They seem to think the sole object of a head-master’s existence is to look after the comfort and morals of their own particular Tommy, or Bobby, or Dicky, or Harry. For heaven’s sake, what form is Blenkinsopp major in? For heaven’s sake, what’s his Christian name, and age last birthday, and place in French and mathematics, and general state of health for past quarter? Where’s the prompt-book, with house-master’s and form-master’s report, Maria? Oh, here it is, thank goodness! Let me see; let me see—he’s ringing at the door this very instant. “Blenkinsopp... major... Charles Warrington... fifteen... fifth form... average, twelfth boy of twelve... idle, inattentive, naturally stupid; bad disposition... health invariably excellent... second eleven... bats well.” That’ll do. Run my eye down once again, and I shall remember all about him. How about the other? “Blenkinsopp... minor... Cyril Anastasius Guy Waterbury Macfarlane”—heavens, what a name!... “thirteen... fourth form... average, seventh boy of eighteen... industrious and well-meaning, but heavy and ineffective... health good... fourth eleven... fields badly.” Ah, that’s the most important one. Now I’m primed. Blenkinsopp major I remember something about, for he’s one of the worst and most hopelessly stupid boys in the whole school—I’ve caned him frequently this term, and that keeps a boy green in one’s memory; but Blenkinsopp minor, Cyril Anastasius Guy Thingumbob Whatyoumaycallit,—I don’t remember HIM a bit. I suppose he’s one of those inoffensive, mildly mediocre sort of boys who fail to impress their individuality upon one in any way. My experience is that you can always bear in mind the three cleverest boys at the top of each form, and the three stupidest or most mischievous boys at the bottom; but the nine or a dozen meritorious nobodies in the middle of the class are all so like one another in every way that you might as well try to discriminate between every individual sheep of a flock in a pasture. And yet, such is the natural contradictiousness and vexatious disposition of the British parent, that you’ll always find him coming to inquire after just one of those very particular Tommies or Bobbies. Charles Warrington:—Cyril Anastasius Guy Whatyoumay—call it: that’ll do: I shall remember now all about them.’ And the doctor arranged his hair before the looking glass into the most professional stiffness, as a preparatory step to facing Mr. Blenkinsopp’s parental inquiries in the head-master’s study.
‘What! Mr. Blenkinsopp! Yes, it is really. My dear sir, how DO you do? This is a most unexpected pleasure. We hadn’t the least idea you were in Pilbury. When did you come here?’
‘I came last night, Dr. Greatrex,’ answered the dreaded parent respectfully: ‘we’ve come down from Staffordshire for a week at the seaside, and we thought we might as well be within hail of Guy and Charlie.’
‘Quite right, quite right, my dear sir,’ said the doctor, mentally noting that Blenkinsopp minor was familiarly known as Guy, not Cyril; ‘we’re delighted to see you. And now you want to know all about our two young friends, don’t you?’
‘Well, yes, Dr. Greatrex; I SHOULD like to know how they are getting on.’
‘Ah, of course, of course. Very right. It’s such a pleasure to us when parents give us their active and hearty co-operation! You’d hardly believe, Mr. Blenkinsopp, how little interest some parents seem to feel in their boys’ progress. To us, you know, who devote our whole time and energy assiduously to their ultimate welfare, it’s sometimes quite discouraging to see how very little the parents themselves seem to care about it. But your boys are both doing capitally. The eldest—Blenkinsopp major, we call him; Charles Warrington, isn’t it? (His home name’s Charlie, if I recollect right. Ah, quite so.) Well, Charlie’s the very picture of perfect health, as usual.’ (‘Health is his only strong point, it seems to me,’ the doctor thought to himself instinctively. ‘We must put that first and foremost.’) ‘In excellent health and very good spirits. He’s in the second eleven now, and a capital batter: I’ve no doubt he’ll go into the first eleven next term, if we lose Biddlecomb Tertius to the university. In work, as you know, he’s not very great; doesn’t do his abilities full justice, Mr. Blenkinsopp, through his dreadful inattention. He’s generally near the bottom of the form, I’m sorry to say; generally near the bottom of the form.’
‘Well, I dare say there’s no harm in that, sir,’ said Mr. Blenkinsopp, senior, warmly. ‘I was always at the bottom of the form at school myself, Doctor, but I’ve picked it up in after life; I’ve picked it up, sir, as you see, and I’m fully equal with most other people nowadays, as you’ll find if you inquire of any town councilman or man of position down our way, at Brosely.’
‘Ah, I dare say you were, Mr. Blenkinsopp,’ the doctor answered blandly, with just the faintest tinge of unconscious satire, peering at his square unintelligent features as a fancier peers at the face of a bull-dog; ‘I dare say you were now. After all, however clever a set of boys may be, one of them MUST be at the bottom of the form, in the nature of things, mustn’t he? And your Charlie, I think, is only fifteen. Ah, yes; well, well; he’ll do better, no doubt, if we keep him here a year or two longer. So then there’s the second: Guy, you call him, if I remember right—Cyril Anastasius Guy—our Blenkinsopp minor. Guy’s a good boy; an excellent boy: to tell you the plain truth, Mr. Blenkinsopp, I don’t know much of him personally myself, which is a fact that tells greatly in his favour. Charlie I must admit I have to call up some times for reproof: Guy, never. Charlie’s in the fifth form: Guy’s seventh in the fourth. A capital place for a boy of his age! He’s very industrious, you know—what we call a plodder. They call it a plodder, you see, at thirteen, Mr. Blenkinsopp, but a man of ability at forty.’ Dr. Greatrex delivered that last effective shot point-blank at the eyes of the inquiring parent, and felt in a moment that its delicate generalised flattery had gone home straight to the parent’s susceptible heart.
‘But there’s one thing, Doctor,’ Mr. Blenkinsopp began, after a few minutes’ further conversation on the merits and failings of Guy and Charlie, ‘there’s one other thing I feel I should like to speak to you about, and that’s the teaching of your fifth form master, Mr. Le Breton. From what Charlie tells me, I don’t quite like that young man’s political ideas and opinions. It’s said things to his form sometimes that are quite horrifying, I assure you; things about Property, and about our duty to the poor, and so on, that are positively enough to appal you. Now, for example, he told them—I don’t quite like to repeat it, for it’s sheer blasphemy I call it—but he told them in a Greek Testament lesson that the Apostles themselves were a sort of Republicans—Socialists, I think Charlie said, or else Chartists, or dynamiters. I’m not sure he didn’t say St. Peter himself was a regular communist!’
Dr. Greatrex drew a long breath. ‘I should think, Mr. Blenkinsopp,’ he suggested blandly, ‘Charlie must really have misunderstood Mr. Le Breton. You see, they’ve been reading the Acts of the Apostles in their Greek Testament this term. Now, of course, you remember that, during the first days of the infant Church, while its necessities were yet so great, as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. You see, here’s the passage, Mr. Blenkinsopp, in the authorised version. I won’t trouble you with the original. You’ve forgotten most of your Greek, I dare say: ah, I thought go. It doesn’t stick to us like the Latin, does it? Now, perhaps, in expounding that passage, Mr. Le Breton may have referred in passing—as an illustration merely—to the unhappily prevalent modern doctrines of socialism and communism. He may have warned his boys, for example, against confounding a Christian communism like this, if I may so style it, with the rapacious, aggressive, immoral forms of communism now proposed to us, which are based upon the forcible disregard of all Property and all vested interests of every sort. I don’t say he did, you know, for I haven’t conferred with him upon the subject: but he may have done so; and he may even have used, as I have used, the phrase “Christian communism,” to define the temporary attitude of the apostles and the early Church in this matter. That, perhaps, my dear sir, may be the origin of the misapprehension.’
Mr. Blenkinsopp looked hard at the three verses in the big Bible the doctor had handed him, with a somewhat suspicious glare. He was a self-made man, with land and houses of his own in plenty, and he didn’t quite like this suggestive talk about selling them and laying the prices at the apostles’ feet. It savoured to him both of communism and priestcraft. ‘That’s an awkward text, you know,’ he said, looking up curiously from the Bible in his hand into the doctor’s face, ‘a very awkward text; and I should say it was rather a dangerous one to set too fully before young people. It seems to me to make too little altogether of Property. You know, Dr. Greatrex, at first sight it DOES look just a little like communism.’
‘Precisely what Mr. Le Breton probably said,’ the doctor answered, following up his advantage quickly. ‘At first sight, no doubt, but at first sight only, I assure you, Mr. Blenkinsopp. If you look on to the fourth verse of the next chapter, you’ll see that St. Peter, at least, was no communist,—which is perhaps what Mr. Le Breton really said. St. Peter there argues in favour of purely voluntary beneficence, you observe; as when you, Mr. Blenkinsopp, contribute a guinea to our chapel window:—you see, we’re grateful to our kind benefactors: we don’t forget them. And if you’ll look at the Thirty-eighth Article of the Church of England, my dear sir, you’ll find that the riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same as certain Anabaptists—(Gracious heavens, is he a Baptist, I wonder?—if so, I’ve put my foot in it)—certain Anabaptists do falsely boast—referring, of course, to sundry German fanatics of the time—followers of one Kniperdoling, a crazy enthusiast, not to the respectable English Baptist denomination; but that nevertheless every man ought, of such things as he possesseth, liberally to give alms to the poor. That, you see, is the doctrine of the Church of England, and that, I’ve no doubt, is the doctrine that Mr. Le Breton pointed out to your boys as the true Christian communism of St. Peter and the apostles.’
‘Well, I hope so, Dr. Greatrex,’ Mr. Blenkinsopp answered resignedly. ‘I’m sure I hope so, for his own sake, as well as for his pupils’. Still, in these days, you know, when infidelity and Radicalism are so rife, one ought to be on one’s guard against atheism and revolution, and attacks on Property in every form; oughtn’t one, Doctor? These opinions are getting so rampant all around us, Property itself isn’t safe. One really hardly knows what people are coming to nowadays. Why, last night I came down here and stopped at the Royal Marine, on the Parade, and having nothing else to do, while my wife was looking after the little ones, I turned into a hall down in Combe Street, where I saw a lot of placards up about a Grand National Social Democratic meeting. Well, I turned in, Dr. Greatrex, and there I heard a German refugee fellow from London—a white-haired man of the name of Schurts, or something of the sort’—Mr. Blenkinsopp pronounced it to rhyme with ‘hurts’—‘who was declaiming away in a fashion to make your hair stand on end, and frighten you half out of your wits with his dreadful communistic notions. I assure you, he positively took my breath away. I ran out of the hall at last, while he was still speaking, for fear the roof should fall in upon our heads and crush us to pieces. I declare to you, sir, I quite expected a visible judgment!’
‘Did you really now?’ said Dr. Greatrex, languidly. ‘Well, I dare say, for I know there’s a sad prevalence of revolutionary feeling among our workmen here, Mr. Blenkinsopp. Now, what was this man Schurz talking about?’
‘Why, sheer communism, sir,’ said Mr. Blenkinsopp, severely: ‘sheer communism, I can tell you. Co-operation of workmen to rob their employers of profits; gross denunciation of capital and capitalists; and regular inciting of them against the Property of the landlords, by quoting Scripture, too, Doctor, by quoting the very words of Scripture. They say the devil can quote Scripture to his own destruction, don’t they, Doctor? Well, he quoted something out of the Bible about woe unto them that join field to field, or words to that effect, to make themselves a solitude in the midst of the earth. Do you know, it strikes me that it’s a very dangerous book, the Bible—in the hands of these socialistic demagogues, I mean. Look now, at that passage, and at what Mr. Le Breton said about Christian communism!’
‘But, my dear Mr. Blenkinsopp,’ the doctor cried, in a tone of gentle deprecation, ‘I hope you don’t confound a person like this man Schurz, a German refugee of the worst type, with our Mr. Le Breton, an Oxford graduate and an English gentleman of excellent family. I know Schurz by name through the papers: he’s the author of a dreadful book called “Gold and the Proletariate,” or something of that sort—a revolutionary work like Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason,” I believe—and he goes about the country now and then, lecturing and agitating, to make money, no doubt, out of the poor, misguided, credulous workmen. You quite pain me when you mention him in the same breath with a hard-working, conscientious, ab............