Hurstwood was feeling decidedly ill-used. He was just eighteen, and his father had decided to leave him at school another six months, so that he might work for a Balliol scholarship. Hurstwood, a brilliant, restless, ambitious boy nearly at the top of his form, would not have been ill-pleased at this arrangement had events pursued their normal course, but events had not seen fit to do so. The disadvantage of making games a matter of secondary instead of primary importance in the school world is that it is exceedingly difficult, especially in the case of adolescent boys, to find anything quite to take their place.
Hurstwood, temperamentally incapable of absorbing himself in a hobby, and possessing all the instability of character common to one type of clever boy, had let his hobby of photography fall into abeyance and had occupied the whole of the previous term in falling in love. His love was sincere, painful and apparent. He had fallen in love with the Junior Music Mistress, who, in her flighty way, was touched, flattered and embarrassed. The poor youth had had to content himself, through shyness, with a kind of silent worship, but he had managed to dance with her three times at the end-of-term social, and his mental state was obvious.
His work suffered, and his end-of-term report had been sufficiently coolly worded for his father to cancel the motor tour which he had proposed to his son earlier in the year and condemn the boy to eight weeks of sea air coupled with mild exercise. Mr. Hurstwood, a mild-mannered but obstinate man, was convinced that his boy had been overworking; hence not only Bognor but also the straw hat.
To complete young Hurstwood’s irritation, whom should he encounter during the first week of the holiday but Miss Ferris. The thought that, if any member of the staff had to spend a holiday at the same place as his father had chosen, it might just as easily have been Miss Cliffordson, caused him to grind his teeth with disappointment. He used to stay out of bed for hours, far into the night, and gaze at the sea—unlike Miss Ferris, the Hurstwoods had rooms on the front, and Hurstwood’s bedroom was high up, but at the front of the house—and think long, long, agonising thoughts about Miss Cliffordson and of how utterly unattainable she was.
He was exceedingly unhappy, and looked it. His father was extremely worried, and even wrote to the school to suggest that he should be let off work at the midday until half-term, to see if that would do him any good. The letter was forwarded to Mr. Cliffordson at Aix-les-Bains, and was thrown by him jovially into the waste-paper basket. He wanted to forget school. Time enough to be bothered with parents and their peculiarities when the new term began.
Miss Cliffordson was not spending the vacation with her uncle. She was cruising in northern waters, and more evenings than not she danced with the officers, and thought how pleasant they were, and how nice it would be to marry one if only they were better paid. She had been engaged twice before in her short life, and had enjoyed the experience. She was not entirely heartless, but she had weighed life in the balance, like most of her generation, found it wanting, and was out for as easy a journey through it as was to be obtained.
There was another besides Hurstwood who thought a good deal about her, however, and that was young Mr. Browning, the Junior English Master. He was spending his holiday fishing, and had plenty of time for thought. Unlike Hurstwood, he was not unhappy; he was determined. He was twenty-seven, and had his eye on the headship of a small grammar school in the Midlands. He was also a novelist, so far unpublished, and was optimistic on the subject of his own future, both as a pedagogue and a man of letters.
He had decided views on marriage, and considered it the duty of every schoolmaster to embark upon the joys and responsibilities of matrimony as early in his career as was compatible with earning sufficient money to keep a wife and family. He spent a pleasant, restful, health-giving holiday, and in the seventh week of it wrote to the Headmaster at Aix-les-Bains for a testimonial. The Headmaster, who wanted to forget school, threw the letter into the waste-paper basket and hummed a lively tune.
Mr. Smith, the Art Master, and little Mr. Poole, the Mathematics Master, were spending the holiday on a cargo-boat which went as far eastward as the Piraeus. Mr. Smith painted and sketched and smoked and talked; Mr. Poole helped in the engine-room and won a good deal of money at poker. Neither of them thought about school. At Marseilles a French sailor knifed Mr. Smith in the arm, and Mr. Poole, displaying a side of his character which his colleagues would not have recognised, sailed into the man and laid him out. They escaped to their ship, guided by a woman of the town who had been the original cause of the dispute, and were cursed heartily by the captain, who was a quarter of an hour late in getting away.
The History Master took lodgings in London, in order to get six weeks’ reading at the British Museum for a school text-book he was writing. At the end of the six weeks he took his wife and two children to Ramsgate for the duration of the holiday.
The Junior Geography Mistress, Miss Freely, went hiking with a woman friend. They worked their way along the South coast from Hastings to Bournemouth, trekked through part of the New Forest, returned to London by way of Oxford, and stayed in the woman friend’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush for the remainder of the vacation.
There was only one member of the proposed cast for The Mikado who had no holiday at all. That was the schoolgirl, Moira Malley. She, poor child, took a job as private governess to two little children, It was the only means she had of getting to the seaside. As she was a resolutely optimistic person, she cried for the whole of the first night because her mother in Ireland could not afford to pay the fare which would have taken the girl to her home, and then cheered up and decided to enjoy the task of teaching and minding the two charming but badly spoilt young people whose parents were paying her five shillings a week for her services.
The Senior English Mistress, Mrs. Alceste Boyle, and the Senior Music Master, Mr. Frederick Hampstead, who was the producer and conductor respectively of the opera, were living in sin in Paris. They were enjoying themselves. Mr. Boyle was dead. Mrs. Hampstead was in a home for female inebriates. Both Mrs. Boyle and Mr. Hampstead, therefore, decided that they had a right to enjoy themselves, and as they had been in love with one another for longer than they could remember, they spent all their holidays together, but kept this fact a closely guarded secret.
It was their custom to choose always a very large and usually a foreign town, so that should they be unlucky enough to be seen in one another’s company by any other member of the staff, it could be assumed that they had encountered one another by accident. Thus they had lived together in London, New York, Barcelona, Vienna, Lisbon, Rome, Oslo, and other European and American cities, for more than a dozen summer holidays. Christmas they always spent together in London, and Easter in Seville or Rome. Their wants, except for the continual need of one another’s companionship both of body and mind, were infinitesimal.
They had managed to keep their secret so carefully that only one person on the staff guessed it. That was Calma Ferris, who, having no friends, had the more opportunity for observing the friendships of others. Neither Mrs. Boyle nor Mr. Hampstead had the slightest notion that Miss Ferris knew their secret. They were usually very careful at school, and, so far as they knew, had never betrayed themselves to a soul. They would have been horrified and amazed had they been permitted to read a certain page of Miss Ferris’s diary, which referred to Mr. Hampstead as “Mr. Rochester.” The knowledge that Hampstead’s wife was in some sort of mental institution had leaked out and was a subject of staff-room gossip when the senior members of the common-room were not present.